The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Vladimir Nabokov

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight was Nabokov’s first book in English. It’s the story of Sebastian Knight’s brother, the near-anonymous V., on a quest to write the biography of his eponymous half-brother. Another biography has been released, which is totally unsatisfactory, both short-sighted and ignorantly uncharitable. V. traces past lovers and old friends, but ultimately they reveal little about the man himself – their own biases and confusions mean the picture of Sebastian is built up only in a collection of hazy refractions.

Equally adumbrated is V., who tries to keep himself out of the biography, yet builds his picture of Sebastian through anecdotes. Nabokov himself peeps through the cracks in the text again, his life overlapping remarkably with that of Sebastian, and there is the impression that the tortured, inspired, lonely and flawed figure is the sort of person (if not the precise person) the romantic in him would like to be.

However, just like Sebastian’s novels, which are ambitious and bizarre, this is an idea that would have been better rendered as a short story. The distanced characters fail to interest, the concept grows quickly bland and the mechanisms of the plot far more blatant and clumsy than any others in Nabokov, save perhaps in Despair, where the ‘twist’ feels empty for seeming as though it should be a surprise.

Nevertheless, there are moments of brilliance, here – in the final chapters, the pace is excellent, the emotional content unsubtle but moving, the bathos (recurring in this novel) exquisitely executed and the dream sequence one of the best and most dream-like I have ever read.

In addition, Nabokov’s jarring presence is only peripheral: there are no self-allusions or anagrammatic appearances, only similarities in biographical details, which one who knew nothing of Nabokov’s life would not even register, and which are perfectly feasible.

His style is simpler, more direct than it grows. It is only a shame that there is not a better idea behind what, thusly lacking, can only be a mediocre novel, a minor work amongst monumental achievements.