Desde que te vi morir

In this book, Javier Marías pays tribute to one of the contemporary novelists he most admired: Vladimir Nabokov. His aim was to honor a writer to whom he felt a literary debt and to encourage readers to seek out his work more often. Marías recounts, for instance, how one day in 1950 Nabokov’s wife, Véra, managed to stop him just as he was about to burn the opening chapters of "Lolita", overwhelmed by doubt and difficulty. He also notes how much it annoyed Nabokov to have influences attributed to him—whether from Joyce, Kafka, Proust, or Dostoevsky—and that he experienced his greatest moments of ecstasy in solitude: while hunting butterflies, composing chess problems, translating Pushkin, and writing. A portrait titled "Vladimir Nabokov in Ecstasy," translations of eighteen poems, a selection of chess problems with solutions by Félix de Azúa, the essays "The Nabokov Canon" and "Read Ghosts," the piece "The Most Melancholic Novel ("Lolita" Retold)," and a curated collection of photographs make up this moving tribute.