Sebastian Knight and The Year of Magical Thinking

I finished "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight." Between yesterday and today I read over 180 pages or over 2/3 of the book. The story continues from where I left off: the narrator seeks to put together the last year of his brother's life in order to compose a biography. He finds out very little but in the course of the search he is confronted by the fact that his brother might have had an affair during one short summer stay at a hotel in France. The narrator seeks for this woman to be able to better comprehend his brother's last year. The novel is well-constructed, with animated and very alive characters (even the minor ones). The language is all Nabokov, pure genius.

Why am I reading so fast? I finished Sebastian Knight this morning (I had two chapters to go) and immediately started Joan Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking." Today was all-school testing so all I had to do was sit there administering the tests. I read voraciously all morning while the students slaved over the test. I assume it was about two and a half hours but I am presently on page 101. Why did it go so fast? I have never been a fast reader, but I think only when I am completely lost in a book can I achieve so much in a single seating. Didion's book is a non-fiction account about how, while her daughter is in the hospital seriously ill, her husband faints during dinner and dies of a massive heart attack. Didion captures well the events, surprisingly so for someone to catch so much detail in such a terrible event. She details her relationship with her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, over the forty years of marriage and collaborating together. It is needless to say a very painful book, but one filled with fine passages and intense emotion. I found an awkward sentence: "It was just an ordinary beautiful September day," people still say when asked to describe the morning in New York when American Airlines 11 and United Airlines 175 got flown into the World Trade Center. I don't know but it seems strange to me... "got flown"... of course it is indeed what happened.

About her writing process, she writes:

As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish.

This is comparable to what Nabokov's narrator states about the writing process, no? I love it when writers impregnate their work with their working habits and techniques. I don't know how long it is going to take me to finish this book but I might take a break tonight (although I know I can't). This is how I love to read... forgetting everything in the daily ordinariness of my life and immersing myself into someone else's world. Escapism?... touche!

Nabokov's Genius

After reading "Lolita" a few months ago, I was given to the opinion that Nabokov is one of the greatest geniuses of the 20th Century. Now, reading "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight," I have become convinced, once again, that this man was born to be one of the greatest writers of the century. Here's a passage from today's lengthy reading:

She entered his life without knocking, as one might step into the wrong room because of its vague resemblance to one's own. She stayed there forgetting the way out and quietly getting used to the strange creatures she found there and petted despite their amazing shapes. She had no special intention of being happy or of making Sebastian happy, nor had she the slightest misgivings as to what might come next; it was merely a matter of naturally accepting life with Sebastian because life without him was less imaginable than a telurian's camping-tent on a mountain in the moon.

This is absolutely brilliant. The fact that she sees "creatures" there and not just a creature (Sebastian) alludes to the fact that Sebastian was a multi-personality visionary at the moment she met him. He envisioned a fiction--she saw the non-fiction of living with him without a judgment. Here's another passage about the writing process:

His struggle with words was unusually painful and this for two reasons. One was the common one with writers of his type: the bridging of the abyss lying between expression and thought; the maddening feeling that the right words, the only words are awaiting you on the opposite bank in the misty distance, and the shudderings of the still unclothed thought clamouring for them on this side of the abyss.

Who among those who claim to write hasn't at one point or another felt this way? The limitless possibility of language while being the most marvelous of gifts is also the most demanding addiction. One word over the next... who could make sense of the writer's world like Nabokov? I see him describing his own challenges writing in English (this novel is the first he wrote completely in English), and the struggle to get it right. Like "Lolita," "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight" is a masterpiece! Highly recommendable.

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

The half brother of Sebastian Knight is the narrator of this Nabokov classic. The narrator embarks on the mystery of his brother's life. Along the way, there is some heavy criticism from the narrator to one of his brother's biographers. Right now nothing much has happened, but the narrative is soon to snowball, I can feel it.

So I broke down and went to the bookstore and read the first two chapters of "The God Delusion" by Dawkins. He makes a compelling argument, and one is tempted to follow his critical examination of religion, but the truth is that he is a scientist and not a theologian. That, I believe, is the only draw back of the book. He should have co-authored it with some expert on hermeneutics.