Helga's Reviews > The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

Reading for the second time.

The keynote of Sebastian’s life was solitude.

In this Nabokov’s first novel written in the English language, our unnamed narrator is following his deceased half-brother, the novelist Sebastian Knight’s footsteps and interviewing people who knew him, in order to write his biography.
But did anyone know Sebastian? Who was the real Sebastian Knight?
Will he always remain an enigma?

Don’t be too certain of learning the past from the lips of the present… Remember that what you are told is really threefold: shaped by the teller, reshaped by the listener, concealed from both by the dead man of the tale.