Customer Reviews

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

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3 star:		(4)
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This exquisitely written novel fills one with despair. It is a sadness that was perhaps felt by many after such rare and creative geniuses as Mozart, Van Gogh, Shubert, and Gershwin all died too young after such short careers. Some of these men, like Sebastian Knight, died in relative obscurity. Sebastian's half-brother, the narrator of this novel, enters upon a journey to uncover the last months of Sebastian's life, to discover his secret, and perhaps to find out about the shadowy woman who was supposedly his last lover.

Sebastian's handful of books were admired by some of the critics, who found them scholarly and poetic, and his last novel was judged a masterpiece. Most of Sebastian's books were little read by a public who were probably more inclined to read the popular potboilers of the day. The half-brother, while loving and admiring Sebastian, barely knew him himself, only knowing that Sebastian lead a lonely, sad existence, and that he suffered from a congenital heart condition. What lends much of the novel its sadness is the palpable desperation of the narrator's quest. While his efforts in uncovering his brother's secret may have been less than successful, he did learn much about what Nabokov calls our common shared humanity with the souls of others. This is a beautifully written and heartfelt narrative that should be read by those who appreciate great literature.

This is my first try with Nabokov, and I must say that I was almost overwhelmed by his masterful and playful use of the English language. A fun little detective story rests atop a rather dark investigation into the nature of human identity. In fact, there are many layers of meaning mixed up with so many cruel jests in this book, that often I found myself passing them by, promising aloud that I would read the book many more times. Recommended for all serious readers.

I usually dislike the unreliability and uncertainty of the postmodern novel, the often tiresome games the writer plays with the reader's credulity, the deliberate undercutting of the illusion of reality. But for me at least Nabokov succeeds where so many fail. This is a charming and convincing narrative, mixed with what strikes me as a deliberately insoluble mystery of identity. I can't tell you why it works; perhaps just because it is extremely well-written without a touch of the self-conscious strain of modern "literary" writing. Lots of humor. Very satisfying read.

According to the Introduction by Conrad Brenner this was written in 1938 in Paris. It was Nabokov's first book composed in English, although I understand he had translated "Despair" into English from his Russian in 1935. What stands out to me is the contrast between the English English of "Sebastian Knight" and the American English that he employed so marvelously in "Lolita." Only a master of language--which Nabokov is without doubt--could have written both novels. Yet, while the differences in idiom, spelling and expression are true and distinct, the intricate, precise composition of plot and the deliberate game-playing with the reader, which are hallmarks of Nabokov's unique style, are very much the same in both novels.

What isn't the same is the experience for the reader. In "Lolita" Nabokov plays upon the reader's sense of what is right and wrong to the extent that we find ourselves in sympathy with Humbert Humbert who, objectively speaking, is a pedophile, a rapist and a child abductor. In "Sebastian Knight" our sympathies are confused, at least in the beginning, although in the end it is hard not to identify with Sebastian's loving half-brother who does the first person narration. What Nabokov plays with is the reader's sense of who really is narrating the story. The authorial command of the book--the authentic voice behind the telling of the events--is it really Sebastian's nearly anonymous half-brother or is he just a shill for Sebastian himself? Or is this (on another level) a story of Vladimir Nabokov himself as this brilliant writer "Sebastian Knight" told by Nabokov in the guise of a supposed younger, adoring half-brother?

This is the trick of the novel. How Nabokov adores tricks! How he loves to fool and misguide the reader and play with the reader's sensibilities and perceptions! He does this because to Nabokov the novel is a deception, an art form like all art forms that relies on a representation of truth controlled by the artist. What is the truth of Sebastian's life? What is the truth about Nabokov's life? Was he in some sense the tortured Sebastian whose work was misunderstood and misinterpreted by the vain and stupid Mr. Goodman? Was he in some other sense Humbert Humbert whose shameful acts could only see the light of day in a novel?

Nabokov has answered in the negative. He insists that his characters are puppets on his--the artist's--string. And of course we must not commit the biographical fallacy--or so I was taught many years ago in undergraduate English classes. But no artist's life is completely removed from his work. And no writer of fiction can completely divorce himself from reliance on that which he knows intimately. What is marvelous about the great writers--Tolstoy, Shakespeare, et al., and Nabokov himself--is their ability to be so many characters and in those characters to display the psychological veracity that makes the characters seem truer than true.

It is interesting to know that Nabokov, after the success of "Lolita," went back and translated into English the novels he wrote in Russian under the pen name V. Sirin. It is also interesting to read at the end of Chapter 18 in "Sebastian Knight" these words: "And sometimes I tell myself that it would not be inordinately hard to translate ...[Sebastian's novel 'The Doubtful Asphodel'] into Russian." Here again the narrator is at odds with himself as to his English language abilities. Before he was poor in English; now he could be a translator from English into Russian.

This raises the further question, mentioned below, as to what extent we can trust the younger brother--perhaps with younger brother aspirations--on other matters. We might ask ourselves, is the narrator being fair to M. Goodman? To what extent is he objective about Sebastian? We can even ask are Sebastian's strangely named novels really all that good? The prose selected as quotes from those novels is striking yes, but so is the prose of our (unreliable?) narrator, who although he claims no expertise in the English language, gives the lie to that bit of modesty by writing (as far as this reader can tell) as well as his older half-brother. The sense we have about the authorial voice is further confused by how much both brothers sound alike. Normally this would be a fault, but because Nabokov's intent is to fuse the three authors--himself, Sebastian and the first person narrator--into one in such a way as to suggest to the reader that artifice and reality are not so easily distinguished.

What I also like about this novel is the sense of Europe between the two great wars that Nabokov achieves. There are no dark clouds hanging over Europe, and there is almost no mention of the senseless war that ended some twenty years before. Nabokov and his characters care not the slightest for politics or international intrigues. There is a clear, deliberate effort at showing life entirely without war or the threat or aftermath of war. Only once does Nabokov acknowledge that there is a political world beyond the day-to-day concerns of his characters. Near the end of the book as his hero is rushing madly to get to Sebastian before he dies, he asks in passing, "Who were those idle idiots who wrote on the wall, 'Death to the Jews'?..."

Few writers can use coincidence to surprise and delight the reader the way Nabokov can. One recalls Charlotte Haze conveniently killing herself off at exactly the right time by running out in front of an automobile. In Sebastian Knight we have the narrator conveniently meet on a train a man, who for unknown reasons comes to the narrator's aid and helps him find the identity of a mysterious woman that Sebastian loved and lost.

Finally I have to say that for many readers this novel will develop too slowly and too obscurely to be readily appreciated. But stay with it. It builds to a kind of intriguing lucidity and even develops into a dramatic narrative toward the end.

[Note: Nearly a hundred of my fiction reviews by great literary artists and others not so well known are now available in my book, "Novels and other Fictions." Get it at Amazon.]

Novels and other Fictions: reviews by

Once I had closely re-read the first 10-20 pages to better absorb the personal histories, which I found confusing at first read, I was well-fortified to enjoy the rest of the book. The writing is fabulous and I liked the mystery motif. There were very few slow spots and plenty of humor and seeming insight, yet the book had only a superficial effect on me. I left not really feeling I understood Sebastian or his half-brother (Knight's biographical researcher) very well at all -- and not particularly caring either, because it was so pleasant to read and I'm not sure that it was the author's intention to make us really care about the characters. While there is deep philosophy discussed, the book had a lightweight feel. Maybe that was the intent of the book -- to make the point that people (the half-brother biographer and the famous brother) are ultimately indescribable no matter how much you describe them and their acts. Or maybe it was just a display of great writing that was intended to transcend the content, a virtuoso display. In a certain way it reminded me of the previous book I read, This Side of Paradise by F.Scott Fitzgerald, in that each is the story about a purportedly brilliant young author (Fitzgerald himself, and the fictional Sebastian Knight). But Fitzgerald's book, while sophomoric and at times silly in the beginning, ultimately became quite serious and almost sublime -- plus we know what actually happened to talented Fitzgerald, adding another layer of poignancy. Nabokov's book also reminded me of some of the Nouveau Roman authors of the 1950's-1960's where all of the detail is just an intellectual game, not intended for serious reader involvement. Nevertheless, I will definitely read more of Nabokov. This was I believe his first book in English and I figured I would start there.

... this novel, Nabokov's first published book written in English, the same five stars that I've given every other novel of his that I've reviewed, even though I didn't enjoy it as much as any of the others. I'm assuming that, in another setting or another season, I might have relished its artifice. All the earmarks of Nabokov's verbal virtuosity are there -- the puns, the word games, the slithering tangles of syntax, the lapidary images, the delicious snobbery, the coyly contrived misapprehensions-- but in this book, somehow, his pretences seem uncomfortably pretentious and his precious jewels of language get to be annoyingly 'precieux'.

"The Real Life of Sebastian Knight" is the first-person account of a Russian emigré's attempt to write the biography of his older half-brother, Sebastian, a novelist who may or may not have been acclaimed as a literary genius before his untimely death of heart failure. We have, it's important to note, only the narrator's word for the dead author's brilliance; the frequent quotes from Sebastian Knight's writings are curiously ungainly and at times quite foolish-sounding. After a lengthy description of Sebastian's childhood and education -- an oddly incomplete and disjointed account because, as "V" confesses, he didn't share much with his brother or maintain intimate contact with him after emigration from Russia -- the biographer focuses his compulsion and our attention on a mystery, the identity of a Russian woman whom Sebastian met at a health spa, for whom he abandoned his wife. The fact is that V had no idea of the woman's existence until he was charged, in his brother's will, with the destruction of her letters, and not until the flames are already consuming those letters does V realize that he needs to 'know' the mystery lover in order to penetrate into his brother's inner life.

Frankly, to my reading taste, Nabokov takes far too long preparing the mystery. Fully the first half of the novel seems merely an exercise in indirection, and I found myself tempted to toss it aside. Was the already great Russian writer struggling to find his 'voice' in English? If so, he found it only halfway through the book. The second half, the unraveling of the Russian lover's identity and the narrator's attempt to subsume his own identity in his brother's 'soul', makes a compellingly kinky story.

Vladimir Nabokov is one of the giants of the twentieth century literature. He is best known for writing "Lolita", a book that to this day remains extremely controversial. His writing is characterized by a highly literary and complex style and themes, and some of his later works are almost incomprehensibly difficult to decipher. All of this is that much more fascinating when one takes into the account that English was not Nabokov's native tongue, and he started using it in his writing relatively late in his literary career.

"The Real Life of Sebastian Knight" is Nabokov's first English language novel, and in many respects it's the most accessible work stemming from his English phase. The story is conventional enough - a Russian émigré in the 1930s Europe is trying to piece together the secrets in the life of his recently deceased half brother, Sebastian Knight. The two have largely been out of touch during most of their adult lives, and piecing together the intimate details of Sebastian's life turns out to be a bit of a detective work. The narrator, identified only by his initial V., has been admiring his half-brother's literary career, and is intent on making sure that Sebastian's works are appreciated and promoted.

The novel contains many allusions to Nabokov's own life, including many big autobiographical chunks. Nabokov was also in real life alienated from his own brother, but one gets sense that both V. and Sebastian Knight are in a large measure based on Nabokov himself. The book's ending only serves to highlight this ambiguity.

The style of writing is equally very accessible, but even here are present certain stylistic devices that Nabokov would push to their limit in his later works: wordplays, literary and other allusions, and the blurring of the line between the fiction and the reality. In many subtle ways V. is a prototypical unreliable narrator, another of Nabokov's often-used stratagems.

This is a very well crafted novel that will appeal to most Nabokov's fans, even though it doesn't dazzle with complexity and literary mastery of his later works. It's definitely a worthwhile read.

This is not, as some reviewers suggest, Nabokov's first published English work - he had translated Despair from the Russian in 1935 and had re-written Laughter in the Dark in English in 1938 (incidentally, this edition became his first American publication) - but Sebastian Knight does mark the author's first work that was conceived, written and published in English. Although Nabokov's decision to adopt English as his literary languge had more to do with financial considerations than for psychological or existential reasons, he must have considered the decision profound enough to make it a priciple theme of the novel. His protagonist, the Russian born Sebastian Knight, not only writes in English, but has taken his English mother's maiden name and turns his back on his native country and language - only to make a desperate effort, at the end of his life, to regain some of his Russian identity.

There are many parallels between Nabokov, the author, and Sebastian Knight: both were raised in St. Petersburg, both spoke English as a child, both were educated at Cambridge and both made the decision to write in English (although Nabokov published nine novels and many short stories in Russian before the switch), but to call the novel autobiographical would be a stretch. It is, however, a biography. Sebastian's half-brother, V, disgusted with the only other biography of his brother, written by a hack who is more interested in social generalizations than in his subject's art, and who attributes Sebastian's death to "the inability of a sensitive soul to withstand the anguish of the epoch", decides to write his own account. Although the half-brother is a businessman and has had no previous literary experience, he is able to write an excellent biography because he is concerned with Sebastian's thought processes and his art. How V accumulates the details associated with his brother's life is the focus of the novel and is, as the publisher notes, a "literary detective story."

As with any detective story, the sleuth often tries to assume the identity of the investigated (at least pyschologically) in order to solve the case, and often there is a blurring of identities as one personality morphs into another. As with detectives, so it is with writers. Brother V, immersing himself into the life and art of his brother, Sebastian, begins to think as his brother and his writing acquires an art of its own. And the morphing does not stop here. The plots of two of Sebastian's novels should be familiar to readers of Nabokov's Russian fiction. The Eye and The Gift are both discernible in the works of Sebastian and just as Sebastian and V become indelibly entwined, so does Vladimir Nabokov, as both creator and colleague of the two characters.

V, the narrator of THE REAL LIFE OF SEBASTIAN KNIGHT, has spent little time with his older half-brother, the accomplished but obscure novelist Sebastian Knight. But shortly after Sebastian's too-early death, a biography, "The Tragedy of Sebastian Knight", appears that V considers a "slapdash and very misleading book." In response, the strangely loving V commences to research his own book about Sebastian, THE REAL LIFE OF SEBASTIAN KNIGHT. Problem is: V doesn't know Sebastian well. There are a few memories of childhood and the occasional interactions of the distant brothers. Otherwise, V has to rely on Sebastian's five novels, and some gumshoe work, to "bring up his life bit by bit... soldering the fragments with my inner knowledge of his character."

Basically, Nabokov splits this quest, V's effort to capture his brother's real life, into two narrative elements. The first element, insightful commentary on Sebastian's five novels, is probably a bit of a stretch for many fans of The Nab. Here, V highlights passages from Sebastian's novels and then surrounds them with amazing interpretation, which V says illuminates Sebastian's talent, values, and character. This is certainly an opportunity for Nabokov to offer brilliant fragments. And, this reads like a dazzling spoof of literary criticism and connoisseurship. (Are you reading this, James Wood?) Still, there are moments when V, darting from fragment to fragment in his outpourings of enthusiasm, is hard to follow. Sad to say: but for this reader, this element of the quest is overly literary and I didn't quite get the jokes. Even so, Wikipedia says Edmund Wilson enjoyed this playfulness immensely.

On the other hand, V's investigation of Sebastian's personal life is touching and magical. Here, V's learns that Sebastian, despite his rich literary sensibility, lived a lonely and unglamorous life. But in this narrative component, V's social interactions, especially with Mr. Silbermann, are fun and wonderful and sorta like magical realism. The Nab put this in for non-professors like me.

As usual with Nabokov, the writing is absolutely great. Here is one of numerous examples, with V describing the burning of Sebastian's letters, which occurs in Chapter 4. "But as I was burning them in the grate one sheet of the blue became loose, curving backwards under the torturing flame, and before the crumpling blackness had crept over it, a few words appeared in full radiance, then swooned and all was over."

Recommended (but not easy).

Vladimir Nabokov is perhaps my very favorite author, and so I approached this work withthe mindset of "it must be at least good." It is. It contains the subtlety and puzzling qualities and droll humor of his great works and still manages to work in its own little bit of beauty. It also has its duller stretches, it lacks a real point, and it is more than vaguely pretentious, but nothing unforgivable. As his first full-length work in English, perhaps it should be treated more as an experiment in compositional workability than anything else.
The relative ease of reading this as compared to Nabokov's best, like 'Pale Fire' and 'Lolita,' may make it a good introduction to novices.