The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

Front Cover
Penguin Books Limited, Mar 1, 2012 - Fiction - 192 pages

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.

Other editions - View all

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
Vladimir Nabokov
Limited preview - 1992
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
Vladimir Nabokov
Limited preview - 1959
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Limited preview - 2008
View all »

About the author (2012)

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), born in St Petersburg, exiled in Cambridge, Berlin, and Paris, became the greatest Russian writer of the first half of the twentieth century. Fleeing to the US with his family in 1940, he then became the greatest writer in English of the second half of the century, and even 'God's own novelist' (William Deresiewicz). He lived in Europe from 1959 onwards, and died in Montreux, Switzerland. All his major works - novels, stories, an autobiography, poems, plays, lectures, essays and reviews - are published in Penguin Modern Classics.

Bibliographic information

TitleThe Real Life of Sebastian Knight
Penguin Modern Classics
AuthorVladimir Nabokov
PublisherPenguin Books Limited, 2012
ISBN0718192915, 9780718192914
Length192 pages
Subjects › 

Fiction / Classics
  
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