In his first English language novel Nabokov sticks to his common themes of identity and memory, essentially writing a novel about himself investigating himself. The book’s narrator is identified as “V.”, aligning with Nabokov’s pen name of “V. Sirin” when writing his previous nine Russian language novels. V is here attempting to write a biography of his recently deceased half-brother Sebastian Knight, who like Nabokov was a Russian emigre educated at Cambridge and a novelist.

Interestingly Nabokov writes of the issue encountered by Sebastian/himself when writing in English rather than his native Russian:

I know, I know as definitely as I know we had the same father, I know Sebastian’s Russian was better and more natural to him than his English. I quite believe that by not speaking Russian for five years he may have forced himself into thinking he had forgotten it. But a language is a live physical thing which cannot be so easily dismissed... Let me add that I have in my possession a letter written by him not long before his death. And that short letter is couched in a Russian purer and richer than his English ever was, no matter what beauty of expression he attained in his books.

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! ( )

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. ( )

Nabokov ​első angol nyelven írt regénye (1939) a szerző önéletrajzi ihletésű műveinek egyike. Egy nyomozásnak és egy életrajz megírásának a kísérlete: egy Sebastian Knight nevű, félig orosz származású zseniális író életét és halálának titkát próbálja megfejteni Knight öccse, aki korábban csak ritkán találkozott vele. A narrátor nyomozásának célja, hogy megtalálja azt a titokzatos nőt, aki összekuszálta a nagy író életét, de egy mélyebb, filozofikus szinten a mű azt a nagy kérdést teszi fel, hogy mennyiben rekonstruálható az emberi élet a rendelkezésünkre álló töredékek alapján.
Mint minden Nabokov-mű, ez is a finom utalások, egymásba kapaszkodó motívumok bámulatos szövevénye: a hamisítatlan művészi próza kedvelői élvezettel követhetik végig a regény sakkmotívumait (bizonyos elemzések szerint a szöveg egy bonyolult sakkjátszmaként is értelmezhető), esetleg választ kereshetnek arra a kérdésre, hogy valójában ki alkotja meg a történetet, ki irányítja a véletleneket, amelyek a narrátort a titok közelébe vezetik, s aztán az utolsó pillanatban mégis eltérítik tőle.
A Sebastian Knight valódi élete egy izgalmas történetbe ágyazott megrendítő vallomás mindarról, amit Nabokov az írói mesterségről, a szerelemről, az ember lényegéről és a halálról gondolt.

> Babelio : https://www.babelio.com/livres/Nabokov-La-Vraie-Vie-de-Sebastian-Knight/17226

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 ( )