ŷ������

When I finished reading “The Real Life of Sebastian Knight�� I felt that I had been checkmated by Nabokov. In response to my puzzlement, I immediately opened the book at the beginning again and began to read it for a second time. I wanted to trace the strategy that this Chess-player-of-an-author had mapped out and the moves he had deployed so as to corner me the way he had done.

I have read little of Nabokov and have been wanting to take him up for a while, but my recent read of Un revólver para salir de noche, awoke my curiosity anew and I felt an urgent read to read his work.

I know I am not being particularly perceptive by noticing the references in this novel to chess--from the names such as that of Sebastian Knight himself, and of Claire Bishop and her husband, (she married another Bishop), to those of other characters--like the one who is identified as Black and who holds a chess piece in his hands when he welcomes the Narrator. The most mischievous chess reference, though, is the inclusion of the Hospital of St Demier in France (view spoiler)[ There is no such Saint in French; there is St Damien, but the word “Demier�� is the French for a checkers board) (hide spoiler)].

I will not be making a very original contribution either by saying that this novel is a fine-spun parody of the literary genres of Biographies and Detective stories. I imagine most other reviewers have already elaborated on this. But for my own sake I would like to comment on some of these features. As a Prelude I will remind the reader of this text that the book presents a Russian émigré, vaguely identified as V (Vlad?)., who writes an account on how he prepared to write a biography of his half- brother, Sebastian Knight, who had become, prior to his early death (aged 35) a successful writer. We read the account as if it were the biography itself.

I admit that in my first reading I was at first taken by the Narrator but gradually I began to feel some cracks in the story. There certainly was a reasonable chronology, although it is not presented in succession; the events jump about as if on a two-dimensional board. That’s why in my second reading I plotted the lifeline of the various events, paying attention on whether there was any twist. I did not detect any, but I did wonder at how the Narrator reconstructed Knight’s life given that since they separated in their youth (1919) they had only met about four times. The Narrator (Vlad?) expounds on his sources on each occasion, which however does not dissolve our scepticism on the reliability of the whole story. May be suspecting our hesitation, the Narrator states that he “has an inner knowledge of Knight’s most intimate thoughts�� �� which almost made me laugh when I read it. That something was at stake on the way this narrative was constructed was blatant when the Narrator (and here I could hear Nabokov’s voice �� as a reader I am surely also allowed to that ‘inner knowledge��) after a string of indications of what crosses Knight’s mind in a moment of meditative solitude, sort of gives up and suggests that “perhaps, we shall be near the truth in supposing that while Sebastian sat on that fence, his mind was a turmoil of words and fancies, incomplete fancies and insufficient words…��

The Narrator, when not able to interview direct witnesses, takes recourse to the books that Knight has published, extracting information from them, assuming that they are autobiographical. This raises the issue, not just on the veracity of biographies but on the limits of fiction, and we could imagine (again, my ‘inner feeling��) that Nabokov posits himself critical of this. And yet, her Claire Bishop--who types away and edits Knight’s books as well as manage all his literary engagements and negotiations—inevitably points at Véra Nabokov, who did exactly like the fictional Bishop.

And almost as a final twist we are told that Knight, for his final book was preparing a fake biography, for which he collected clippings from newspapers and even advertised for photographs of anonymous people. Could the Narrator (Vlad?) be doing something of the sort? About ten years after the publication of this novel Vladimir Nabokov gathered paper clippings that would help him in producing his most famous work.

Commenting further on the issues of Biographies/Fiction/Narrator/Authorship would lead me too much into the mined territory of SPOILERS. I will leave just say that, now that we all have to wear ours masks, I highly enjoyed this masked account.

There were other features that enriched further this reading, all of them testimonies to Nabokov’s literary and linguistic muscles. There are alliterations; jokes with dates and names; literary tricks such as end-of-chapter cliff hangers or the application of a literary style at the same time it is being censored (an example is the cinematic approach of creating a series of loose, unconnected scenes, but that simulate continuity by the way they are juxtaposed); some Russianness in the writing (such as the tendency to convert any noun into an adjective �� ‘Aproned pedlar��). I also detected again his preference for the colour ‘violet�� (mentioned ten times), that I had already noticed in his Despair.

For my coveted future exploration of Nabokov’s work, I had thought I would start with his first novel in English, but now have decided that my next will be Invitation to a Beheading.