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stevo67 's review for:
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
by Vladimir Nabokov
This was Nabokov’s first book written in English. It’s both simple and tricksy. On the surface a straightforward story of a half-brother trying to piece together his dead sibling’s biography, a sort of detective story. But as expected with Nabokov nothing is entirely simple. The narrative is never resolved. We never really find out what transpired in the sibling’s final months. Much is about whether real meaning can ever be discovered and perhaps the stories we weave about ourselves.
By all accounts this book was one of the first postmodern novels- a book about how the narrator is struggling to tell the story rather than actually tell it. These devices seem commonplace now but this would have been utterly remarkable when it was published in 1941.
By all accounts this book was one of the first postmodern novels- a book about how the narrator is struggling to tell the story rather than actually tell it. These devices seem commonplace now but this would have been utterly remarkable when it was published in 1941.