Stacy Schiff is the author of Saint-Exupéry: A Biography. Do you think this tells you anything about the woman who would become Mrs. Schiff, with this book, has most persuasively met. Schiff describes the Russia of Vera Slonim’s childhood as one in which Jewish families obligatorily engaged in 'what must have seemed like a colossal, rigged game of Simon Says' (p. Schiff points out, of making this 'shy, overworked, morbidly private, highly principled woman' appear 'prickly, humorless, aloof and intransigent.' It also made her a formidable challenge for a biographer-a challenge that Ms. Vera's tenacious negotiation of her husband's publishing contracts and her imperious manner with strangers, had the effect, Ms. Schiff discusses specific novels in detail is when she wants to point out autobiographical motifs or demonstrate the palpable consequences that a book (most notably Lolita) had on the couple's lives. The one large flaw of this book is its reluctance to grapple with Nabokov's literary achievement, depriving the lay reader of even a cursory appreciation of his books and the Nabokov fan of a serious appraisal of his work. She effortlessly conjures up the disparate worlds the couple inhabited. Vera Hailed by critics as both monumental (The Boston Globe) and utterly romantic (New York magazine), Stacy Schiffs Vra (Mrs. Schiff has succeeded in creating an elegantly nuanced portrait of the artist's wife, showing us just how pivotal Nabokov's marriage was to his hermetic existence and how it indelibly shaped his work. Vladimir Nabokov) is almost unavoidably indebted to Brian Boyd's masterful two-volume biography of Nabokov.Ms.
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