New Directions Paperbook: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (Paperback)

from tikitu-reviews

Far less emotionally disturbing than Lolita, less irritating and tricksy than Pale Fire, but almost as beautiful as the first and almost as clever as the second. The Real Life has a lot in common with Pale Fire. It's putatively the biography of an author, as Pale Fire is putatively an annotated c...

from HadriantheBlind

Nabokov's first foray into English, a story about a novelist, his brother, and the search to discover the 'real life' of the former. Nabokov's prove is not as sparkly as usual, as he is still becoming accustomed to English, but it still shines. Recommended to those who know the struggle of an art...

from Clara53

As Conrad Brenner wrote so aptly about the author in the Introduction to this novel - "He is NOT the author of only one book ("Lolita") and only one masterpiece. He is not a literary curiosity". True, Nabokov is mostly known for "Lolita" (which I am yet to read - having grown up in that part of t...

from Clara53

As Conrad Brenner wrote so aptly about the author in the Introduction to this novel - "He is NOT the author of only one book ("Lolita") and only one masterpiece. He is not a literary curiosity". True, Nabokov is mostly known for "Lolita" (which I am yet to read - having grown up in that part of t...

from Widsith

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 detai...