Brain Snacks: Tasty Tidbits of Knowledge
Weirdly, the popular late-'80s/early-'90s sitcom "Perfect Strangers" had an episode called "Speak, Memory," when one character gets amnesia and must be re-taught everything in time for a visit from his mother-in-law. Was there a Nabokov fan in the writers' room?
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"Speak, Memory" may be full of bikes, cars, and trains, but Vladimir Nabokov, it turns out, hated flying.
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Vladimir and his mother aren't the only people with synesthesia in the family. It turns out that his wife Vera also has it, though the colors her brain associated with different letters are completely different than those of her husband.
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Gary Shteyngart, a contemporary memoirist and novelist, counts "Speak, Memory" as one of his influences. Since he's another Russian émigré writer who's also found plenty of material in the leaving of the motherland, we're not surprised one bit.
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