Word: sebastians
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...REAL LIFE OF SEBASTIAN KNIGHT (205 pp.)-Vladimir Nabokov-New Directions...
When fame strikes a writer late, reprints of his earlier works sometimes become exciting discoveries. This is what Boris Pasternak's publishers hope for with his slim, 1934 story The Last Summer (see below); similarly, Vladimir Nabokov's literary handlers hope that The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) will acquire Lolita's gilt by association. The first book Nabokov wrote in English (his workshop was the bathroom of his one-room Paris flat), Sebastian Knight has a low sex quotient and no nymphets. Instead, it is devoted to themes that novelists seem to be born with...
...down-at-the-plumbing Loire chateau crammed with impressive horrors: the count's plaintive wife (Irene Worth), who fears for her life because of a portentous clause in her marriage contract; his child-mystic daughter (Annabel Bartlett), who paints pictures of "secret police" shooting arrows into St. Sebastian; a serpent-eyed sister (Pamela Brown) who blames her brother for the death of her fiance; and a dotty old dowager (Bette Davis) who writhes and flops about a cream-puffy bed, smokes cigars and has her morphine served up in toy Easter eggs from Paris. For the lonely professor, there...
Viola is the one honest, sincere, and normal person in the play. Yet for most of the time she must go about abnormally disguised as a young boy, who looks like her twin brother Sebastian. The problem was quite different in Elizabethan times, since actresses were interdicted and both roles were taken by young boys. Miss McKenna is able to convey a zestful boyishness without ever losing her innate womanliness. And more than any one else in the cast, she pays attention to the poetic qualities of the text (though on opening night she sometimes lowered her voice...
...cold-voiced Malvolio, Fritz Weaver is adequate. His best moment, though, occurs when he is speechless: in his cross-gartered scene he brings along the forged letter and, misinterpreting Olivia's question, "Wilt thou go to bed, Malvolio?," drops it on the ground in stunned amazement. William Daniels' Sebastian leaves a favorable impression. Frederick O'Neal looks the part of the sea-captain Antonio, but his Shakespearean diction is woefully deficient...