By Vladimir Nabokov
Random House, NZ$26 | Reviewed by David Levinson

ENGLISH-language debut from the Russki best known for etching a mobius strip of broken fantasy and knotted desire – in the form of a mercurial nymphet – on the conscious of perverts and scholars and perverts masquerading as scholars alike. In that novel, the backdrop was the endless, stuttering drawl of Americana – motels, diners, suburban lodgings – glazing its perversions with a violent sense of ennui; The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, on the other hand, channel-surfs across Europe and its timeline, emerging with a grand mural of the early 20th-century cosmopolitan lifestyle.