Outstanding Biography
Brian Boyd - much like his subject - is a genius. His 2-volume 1000+ page biography reads like a novel yet is filled with so much detail and insight into the enigmatic mind of Nabokov that in content, it must rate as highly as a scholarly work as it is a literary one. Boyd's ability to balance the needs of a proper academic biography with that of a narrative biography is seemless. The reader is drawn into Nabokov's world without ever feeling in the least that he is being smothered in arcana. And yet every perfect detail, like the colors and patterns on the wings of Nabokov's beloved butterflies, is there. A masterpiece of biography and a masterpiece of storytelling.
