By Vladimir Nabokov
Random House, NZ$26 | Reviewed by David Levinson

ENGLISH-language debut from the Russki best known for etching a mobius strip of broken fantasy and knotted desire – in the form of a mercurial nymphet – on the conscious of perverts and scholars and perverts masquerading as scholars alike. In that novel, the backdrop was the endless, stuttering drawl of Americana – motels, diners, suburban lodgings – glazing its perversions with a violent sense of ennui; The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, on the other hand, channel-surfs across Europe and its timeline, emerging with a grand mural of the early 20th-century cosmopolitan lifestyle.

Personal fetishes aside, however, and what you mainly have is a playful leap through the hoops of Nabokov's later obsessions: the book establishes a meta-game of cat-and-mouse between the titular character – a recently-deceased famed author – and his half-brother – the narrator – who sets about on stitching together some kind of definitive account of Knight's life, in response to a tainting biography published by his ex-advisor. Yet, despite the fact that 'definitive account' comes to mean nothing more than a modest clusterfuck of hagiographic musings, the meetings with the specters from Knight's past are readily buttressed by Nabokov's twee-but-never-coy sense of irony, wiping up the narrator's giggly spills of fanboydom. But then something cosmic happens, as the narrator's identity absence (he is referred to simply as "V.") goes from being a pinhole-in-the-cardboard to a blackhole-in-the-cardboard; and as first Knight and then Nabokov and finally the reader fall through, the borders between each are erased, until you're left with nothing but mirrors, reflecting one another into infinity.—DL

» Vladimir Nabokov | 1941