The Real Life of Sebastian Knight   ::   Набоков Владимир Владимирович

L. Coleman has called it 'al clown developing wings, an angel mimicking a tumbler pigeon', and the metaphor seems to me very apt. Based cunningly on a parody of certain tricks of the literary trade, The Prismatic Bezel soars skyward. With something akin to fanatical hate Sebastian Knight was ever hunting out the things which had once been fresh and bright but which were now worn to a thread, dead things among living ones; dead things shamming life, painted and repainted, continuing to be accepted by lazy minds serenely unaware of the fraud. The decayed idea might be in itself quite innocent and it may be argued that there is not much sin in continually exploiting this or that thoroughly worn subject or style if it still pleases and amuses. But for Sebastian Knight, the merest trifle, as, say, the, adopted method of a detective story, became a bloated and malodorous corpse. He did not mind in the least 'penny dreadfuls' because he wasn't concerned with ordinary morals; what annoyed him invariably was the second rate, not the third or nth-rate, because here, at the readable stage, the shamming began, and this was, in an artistic sense, immoral. But The Prismatic Bezel is not only a rollicking parody of the setting of a detective tale; it is also a wicked imitation of many other things: as for instance a certain literary habit which Sebastian Knight, with his uncanny perception of secret decay, noticed in the modem novel, namely the fashionable trick of grouping a medley of people in a limited space (a hotel, an island, a street). Then also different kinds of styles are satirized in the course of the book as well as the problem of blending direct speech with narration and description which an elegant pen solves by finding as many variations of 'he said' as may be found in the dictionary between 'acceded' and 'yelped'. But all this obscure fun is, I repeat, only the author's springboard.

Twelve persons are staying at a boarding house; the house is very carefully depicted but in order to stress the 'island' note, the rest of the town is casually shown as a secondary cross between natural mist and a primary cross between stage-properties and a real-estate agent's nightmare. As the author points out (indirectly) this method is somewhat allied to the cinema practice of showing the leading lady in her impossible dormitory years as glamorously different from a crowd of plain and fairly realistic schoolmates. One of the lodgers, a certain G. Abeson, art dealer, is found murdered in his room. The local police officer, who is described solely in terms of boots, rings up a London detective, asking him to come at once.