The Real Life of Sebastian Knight by Vladimir Nabokov Its sentence-by-sentence delight in evoking past times offers a model that few "proper" historical accounts can hope to follow – not least because it's skipped on a decade before they've tied their bootlaces. Woolf's light-hearted "escapade" is a satirical romp through the very idea of a biography, with its portrait of a nobleman who lives from the Elizabethan era right through to the 1920s, somehow changing gender along the way. The pathos of the book comes from dull, plodding Zeitblom's realisation that he can never hope to catch the mercurial personality of his genius friend, but that he must try nonetheless. Mann's book is the story of the modernist composer Adrian Leverkühn, as told by his childhood friend Serenus Zeitblom. This slow, stodgy, quite wonderful novel gave me the template for my own fake memoir. Here then are 10 "fictitious biographies" (Nabokov's term) that I've found particularly inspiring.
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