Book description
Spurred on by admiration for his novelist half-brother and irritation
at the biography written about him by Mr Goodman ('his slapdash and
very misleading book'), the narrator, V, sets out to record Sebastian
Knight's life as he understands it. But buried amid the extensive
quoting, digressions, seeming explanations and digs, Sebastian's
erratic and troubled persona remains as elusive as ever.
Nabokov's first novel written in English, The Real Life of
Sebastian Knight is a nuanced, enigmatic potrayal of the
conflict between the real and the unreal, and the futile quest for
human truth.
Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) was born in St Petersburg. He wrote his
first literary works in Russian, but rose to international prominence as
a masterly prose stylist for the novels he composed in English, most
famously,
Lolita.
Between 1923 and 1940 he published novels, short stories, plays, poems
and translations in the Russian language and established himself as one
of the most outstanding Russian migr writers.
