Many years ago I read "The Bridge of San Luis Rey" with great pleasure but, unfortunately, a later movie version of it blurred my recollection of its style and plot, and it alsodimmed my retrospective admiration. In RLSK we find this novel on one of Sebastian's book shelves: "I glanced too, at the books; they were numerous, untidy, and miscellaneous. But one shelf was a little neater than the rest and here I noted the following sequence which for a moment seemed to form a vague musical phrase, oddly familiar: Hamlet, La morte d'Arthur, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde ..." The other books left a stronger mark upon my memory and bits of them are recognizably metamorphed in one or two Nabokov novels.

V. observes on this matter: "Here he seems to have passed from one plane to another rising a step higher, for, if his first novel is based on methods of literary composition — the second one deals mainly with the methods of human fate. With scientific precision in the classification, examination, and rejection of an immense amount of data (the accumulation of which is rendered possible by the fundamental assumption that an author is able to discover anything he may want to know about his characters, such capacity being limited only by the manner and purpose of his selection in so far as it ought to be not a haphazard jumble of worthless details but a definite and methodical quest), Sebastian Knight devotes the three hundred pages of Success to one of the most complicated researches that has ever been attempted by a writer " The story that he unravels probably carries no trace of Wilder's work but he, too, was interested in "the methods of human fate," - actually not as methods related to the art of composition or to cosmic patterns, but as stories that are linked by either indifferent fate or by God's tortuous will. Also in them the writer's capacity is "limited only by the manner and purpose of his selection...a definite and methodical quest"