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Loading... The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (original 1941; edition 1992)by Vladimir Nabokov
Work InformationThe Real Life of Sebastian Knight by Vladimir Nabokov (1941)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. This is my first Nabokov. It was one of those books (if you are, like me) that you know is clever and well written, but due to shortcomings of concentration, unfamiliarity with the author's style or general knowledge which surrounds the text, you can't quite get the gold out of it. It's a frustrating feeling and one that I struggle to break through. It's normally succeeded with the reading of others' reviews promptly illuminating the brilliance of the work and defogging the confusion I had whilst reading it. I think in this case it was mainly due to my lack of knowledge as to the style and themes of Nabokov's work; the surnames of chess pieces, the game he plays with the reader, the mirroring of characters - all intriguing stuff but sadly, more often than not, it passed me by! It is the tale of a half-brother, our narrator, who attempts to write a biography of his deceased brother, a more prestigious novelist named Sebastian Knight who died young and was somewhat estranged to his sibling. In the writing of the biography, the narrator traces his brother's steps in an attempt to fill the missing gaps in his knowledge he has of him, namely their childhood together, several brief acquaintances in Europe and the published pages of his brothers' novels that he reads obsessively. Yet the information we are given is by no means a plain telling of a story but more a diverging and drawn out course of events, filled with the thoughts and musings of the amateur biographer as he flits between sources in an attempt to understand his brother's life and at the same time questioning and compromising his own. Again, I rue my lack of connection with a layered and skilful novel, but at the very least it has given me good standing for when I read another Nabokov, which I definitely intend to do. 5. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight by Vladimir Nabokov Introduction: Michael Dirda, 2008 published: 1941 (written January 1939) format: 215-page paperback acquired: October read: Jan 24-30 time reading: 7 hr 44 min, 2.2 min/page rating: 4½ locations: pre-Soviet St. Petersburg, 1920’s & 1930’s Cambridge, London, Paris, Berlin and other places throughout France, Germany and England about the author: 1899 – 1977. Russia born, educated at Trinity College in Cambridge, 1922. Lived in Berlin (1922-1937), Paris, the US (1941-1961) and Montreux, Switzerland (1961-1977). I'm reading through Nabokov's novels, and this was his first English language novel. My copy comes with an excellent introduction by [[Michael Dirda]], who explained that Nabokov wrote this novel in Paris, on a desk laid on a bidet, for a competition in England with a January 31, 1939 deadline. He got the manuscript sent off just in time and later regarded as a tour de force. But it didn't win, and didn't get him a position in England. It was later published in the, then, pre-war US in 1941, and may have been lost to history if Nabokov did not later become famous. [[Thomas Pynchon]] fans should take note. Dirda also describes the book this way: "V. travels from England to Switzerland to Germany to France in his quest for the identity of the elusive femme fatale who wrecked his brother‘s life.” Fans of [V.] might be quite struck by that sentence. A little googling will show that Pynchon took classes from Nabokov at Cornell, and highly regarded this novel, which influenced all his work. So, I knew all that before I had read the first word. And I knew this was a complex novel, an unreliable narrator writing a biography of his older half-brother, a Russian born English-language novelist who died young of a heart attack, and who has a few parallels to and a few key opposites from the life of Nabokov. And, Dirda emphasizes, it's a novel to reread. I reread only chapter one. I did this when I was about half way through the novel and struggling to get in tune with a flow. (It did help) It's a difficult book to read, but also fascinating on many levels. Nabokov is playful and clown-y with language, structure, story, purpose, everything. Paragraphs end on topics completely different from where they began, routinely. Grammar is stretched, and playfully inconsistent. And nothing is as it seems. As readers we know our narrator, V., is unreliable. We aren't even sure he likes his older half-brother, his subject. We might doubt he is even actually who he says he is. So we aren't wondering whether to trust him, we are wondering what he is actually doing and why. What is V. actually searching for? And, maybe, what is wrong with him? Also I was left wanting to know more about this Sebastian Knight, author of several novels, all of which Nabokov goes into in some detail and all of which left me wishing they were real (and some elements were real). Mixed in all this play are a few notes on how this author thinks about writing...I mean, of course, maybe. How Sebastian Knight "used parody as a kind of springboard for leaping into the highest region of serious emotion", as if he was, "a clown with wings". Or later, V. commenting on all Knight's aspects, he says, "It's not the parts that matter, it is there combination". And he has interesting things to say on how an author struggles writing in English as second language, searching for words or expressions that he can't find or don't exist in the language. And the novel has moments of seriousness, but is quick to undermine them. The two most moving parts of the novel are each based on a humorous error. And they're still moving. This is a difficult but enjoyable novel. Nabokov has a clear theme of having a character or narrator talk about what he's doing in way that makes sense to him, and that also thoroughly undermines him to the reader. It's a difficult trick he has kind of mastered, or was mastering. He touches on this in 3rd person in [Laughter in the Dark], and pushes it heavily when the narrator becomes a murderer in [Despair], or a pedophile in [The Enchanter]. It's where I'm expecting [Lolita] to go, which I hope to read for the first time this April. 2021 https://www.librarything.com/topic/328037#7406148 This was Nabokov's first novel written in English, and it's startling to learn that he only switched from Russian because he decided to enter it into a British literary competition. Famously, he wrote most of it perched on a bidet in his Paris apartment so as not to disturb his young son, a detail it is impossible to learn without trying to pin down a certain gushing, purgative quality to the prose… It is, in fact, just as typically (if embryonically) Nabokovian as his later work, and in theme as well as language. Sebastian Knight is full of pre-echoes of the kind of things that will eventually dominate Nabokov's bigger, more famous books: identity, memory, literary pastiche, linguistic playfulness, formal games, and a direct, witty, elaborate narrative voice. It takes the form of a biography of a deceased writer (Sebastian Knight) written by his anonymous half-brother, identified only as ‘V.’ (recall that all of Nabokov's previous books had been written under the pen name of ‘V. Sirin’) – but it is quickly obvious that in fact we'll be hearing less about Knight himself than about V.'s attempts to research and write the book we are reading. The end result comes over as something like a cross between Tristram Shandy and Steve Aylett's Lint (though not as funny as either). There are copious quotations from and comments on Knight's oeuvre (he was, we are told, the author of such bestsellers as Lost Property and The Doubtful Asphodel), and these allow Nabokov to outline a theory of literature from, as it were, a safe distance. Many of the effects Knight is credited with – words and phrases that almost mystically convey an impression of something, though you can't understand how – are effects that you can recognise in Nabokov's own writing, if not here then certainly later. Meanwhile a very funny subplot consists in our narrator's keen desire to rubbish the author of a previously-published biography of Knight which, V. insists, has got things all wrong. These sections allow for some sly pastiching of academic prose, as well as giving voice to Nabokov's distaste for the whole process of examining writers through their personal lives or their supposed relation to ‘world events’. The bulk of the plot resides in those sections where the narrator is chasing down leads in the real world, trying to locate women that his brother had been involved with, and these sections at times play with the conventions of detective fiction. Sebastian Knight and the narrator, like Nabokov himself, grew up in Russia and had to flee after the Revolution, and there are some beautiful early descriptive passages that deal with St Petersberg: the pure luxury of a cloudless sky designed not to warm the flesh, but solely to please the eye; the sheen of sledge-cuts on the hard-beaten snow of spacious streets with a tawny tinge about the middle tracks due to a rich mixture of horse-dung; the brightly coloured bunch of toy-balloons hawked by an aproned pedlar; the soft curve of a cupola, its gold dimmed by the bloom of powdery frost; the birch trees in the public gardens, every tiniest twig outlined in white; the rasp and tinkle of winter traffic… But ultimately Nabokov is never very interested in plot, and nor am I when I read him – what I'm interested in are the aesthetic effects. There are plenty here, but they still feel like they're looking forward to what's to come. Partisans of this novel say, a little defensively, that it can be enjoyed for its own sake and not just as an early curiosity, but I couldn't help feeling that the most interesting aspects of Sebastian Knight are things seen to more triumphant effect in Pale Fire, Lolita or Ada. But Nabokov being Nabokov, there is still lots to enjoy and to be suspicious of – the stress on mistaken identity and authorial secrecy make you wonder if, perhaps, Sebastian Knight and ‘V.’ are really one and the same, engaged in a perpetual game of mirrors that ultimately points back to the puppeteer behind both of them, hunched gleefully on his bidet in 1930s Paris… no reviews | add a review
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, the first novel Nabokov wrote in English, is a tantalizing literary mystery in which a writer's half brother searches to unravel the enigma of the life of the famous author of Albinos in Black, The Back of the Moon, and Doubtful Asphodel. A characteristically cunning play on identity and deception, the novel concludes " I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows." One of the twentieth century's master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899. He studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, where he launched a brilliant literary career. In 1940 he moved to the United States, and achieved renown as a novelist, poet, critic, and translator. He taught literature at Wellesley, Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard. In 1961 he moved to Montreux, Switzerland, where he died in 1977. "Witty and sad at the same time. Profound and dazzling." -- Chicago Sun-Times No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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Interestingly Nabokov writes of the issue encountered by Sebastian/himself when writing in English rather than his native Russian:
Nabokov may mourn the loss of writing in his native language, and be correct that equal mastery may never be attained in an adopted one, but that only shows what an incredible genius with language he was, since even in this beginning effort his skills in English are astonishing.
The pleasure of reading Nabokov’s prose and following his mind as it explores its themes is far greater than a recounting of plot could indicate, so let’s not be too concerned about its details. There’s a bit of a mystery and all that, which is well enough. Let’s leave it and get to the ending, the well quoted ending, “I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I...”
Unlike some reviewers I do not think this is a possible indication that “V” and Sebastian could be the same person in the text. Within the strict bounds of the text, they are different people. It’s rather Nabokov being all postmodern, taking over the authorial voice directly from “V”, who is already one stand in for himself of course, and asking aloud what is the difference between author and character, who is another stand in for himself. To take the last lines a bit more fully:
“The bald little prompter shuts his book, as the light fades gently. The end, the end.” That’s Nabokov, speaking of himself bringing this novel to a close, not just “V” speaking in the text. “They all go back to their everyday life (and Clare goes back to her grave) - but the hero remains, for, try as I may, I cannot get out of my part: Sebastian’s mask clings to my face, the likeness will not be washed off. I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows.”
The “I” here is clearly Nabokov, the “bald little prompter”, the author, the hero, Sebastian’s creator, and Sebastian himself. Whoever that may be! ( )