The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

When starting this review, what I first put down was that my reading of it was not what I’d hoped for. It seemed slow, plodding and confected at times. After finishing it, I read some reviews and found it was supposed to be funny; I had missed that.

Unwilling to give up my positive expectations, I started making up excuses:
*I know you can only read a book twice and certainly I’ll read it again.
*This was one of his early works.
*This had been written in Russian and translated by his son, Dimitry—it wasn’t even the man himself.
*I had put off reading Nabokov for such a long time while I read everything about him and his wife Vera. I studied his lectures on western literature while reading and re-reading his lectures and those masterpieces with him. I don’t know what I expected but it was too much, perhaps something that should have been introduced in the light of a burning bush, ushered in by Charles Dickens himself.

As I looked back over my notes and highlights, I realised that I had appreciated and highlighted many brilliant sentences and paragraphs as I read along.

“His memory opened its gallery of waxworks, and he knew, he knew that there, at it’s far end somewhere a chamber of horrors awaited him. He remembered a dog that had vomited on the threshold of a butcher’s shop. He remembered a child, a mere toddler, who, bending with the difficulty of its age, had laboriously picked up and put to its lips are filthy thing resembling a baby’s pacifier. He remembered an old man with a cough in a streetcar who had fired a clot of mucus into the ticket collector’s hands. These were images that Franz usually held at bay but that always kept swarming in the background of his life greeting with a hysterical spasm any new impression that was kin to them.
*On rain
“Both yesterday and today were novel and absurd days, and certainly not quite intelligible, but significant, outlines were showing through confusedly and like that darkish solution in which mountain views would presently float and grow clear, this rain, this delicate pluvial damp, developed shiny images in her soul.

*The lustre of black asphalt was filmed by a blend of dim hues, through which here and there vivid rends and oval holes made by rain puddles revealed the authentic colours of deep reflections — of a vermillion diagonal band, a cobalt wedge, a green spiral — scattered glimpses into a human upside down world, into a dizzy geometry of gems. The kaleidoscope effect suggested someone’s jiggling every now and then the pavement so as to change the combination of numberless coloured fragments. Meanwhile shafts and ripples of life passed by, marking the course of every car. Shop windows, bursting with tense radiance, bruised, squirted, and splashed out into the rich blackness.”

“A purposeful gaiety, a dash of excitement now marked the rains. They no longer drizzled aimlessly; they breathed, they spoke. Violet crystals, like bath salts, were dissolved in rainwater. Puddles consisted not of liquid mud but limpid pigments that made beautiful pictures reflecting house fronts, lamp posts, fences, blue and white sky, a bare instep, a bicycle pedal.”

Then as I sat down to write the review from the book’s first paragraph, I proved to myself that writing is thinking. Things started coming to me, connecting thoughts that hadn’t fully formed.

That queasy feeling when you’re sitting in a train at the station; you think you’ve begun to move off but it’s actually the train on the next track. In the opening pages, #Nabokov extends this inversion of the senses until the firmament reaches 50 mph, receding in the distance. When the Knave reaches Berlin, he breaks his glasses and the author sets the scenes through the perceptual dysphasia of astigmatism. Even after the glasses are replaced, Nabokov doesn’t describe the street scenes directly but rather through their distorted reflections of rippling rain water accumulated in puddles in the cobblestone streets. This turns out to be one of Nabokov’s main themes: Just as the Knave is fresh, green, and wet behind the ears, the perception of his environment is backwards, foggy, distorted, and bizarre. No one is there to say, “You’re following your dick. A wanton Queen and a philistine King are guiding you into the web where they get their pleasures.” The Knave is unable to place himself.
Now as I write the above, the brilliance and the structural accomplishment of a genius writer starts to emerge in my understanding. This was too well done for me to comprehend on a first reading; too deep, too well developed. As Nabokov says, plus can only read a book twice. I must come back to it.
By Steve