It's a tough read, not least for the difficulty in getting a handle on the tone. If that makes him sound rather like Roland Barthes avant la lettre, then the comparison ends there. This almost uncategorisable book takes the form of a critical biography of the fictional German Romantic philosopher Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, who saw clothing as the governing metaphor of human existence. It is the tale of celebrated writer Sebastian Knight, told by his half-brother, V, though as you'd expect with this author the elusive quarry retreats even as the befuddled hunter advances, and by the end we're as uncertain about the one as we are about the other. The model for this is surely AJA Symons's The Quest for Corvo, with its detective story premise, which came out shortly before Nabokov started writing this, his first English language book.

It's no surprise that many 'fictitious biographies' include a fair bit of the biographer in their narrative. 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.

Nabokov autobiography