Pale Fire is ostentatious, high octane genius, almost as if Nabokov were trying to squeeze a complete showcase of his novelistic virtuosity in just over 200 pages of text (an epic poem within a story within a larger story, all of which may very well be the complete fabrication of the annotator/narrator, who is quite convincingly insane). Among other things, this is a portrait of insanity and perversity on par with Lolita, but with more literary/metaliterary pyrotechnics.

This book IS amazing, but that doesn't mean I loved it.

Nabokov is a word magician, and he has such imagination. His words and his imagination merge to become an object d'art filled with originality and humor, concluding in an amusing commentary on literary critique, which I totally support.

So why do I feel the book was merely OK?

Line after line of humor is hard to take. Do you sit and read a joke book? I don’t. Or maybe this book is better if read it in small portions, not as a novel but as a conglomeration of wonderfully expressed thoughts and great lines of satirical humor. Some of the lines ARE priceless. In a novel there should also be an engaging plot. So let’s look at this novel’s plot

There are two main characters. There is an author-poet, John Shade, and then there is Charles Kinbote. John has written a poem and Charles, on John's death, is editing and compiling notes on said poem. It is just that Charles has a different story to tell and he wants it told. His literary critique of the poem twists Shade’s work beyond recognition. Nabokov is known for his unreliable narrators. Clearly, Charles is here the unreliable narrator. Of course, neither John Shade nor Charles Kinbote ever existed. The author of both Shade's poem and Charles' commentary on the poem, which becomes a whole different story about Charles’ beloved kingdom Zembla, is none other than Nabokov!

My problem with the book is Charles’ story. His story is confused; his lines tedious. He is not a good story teller. The country and the events he is describing are imaginary. His imaginary country never became tantalizing. There is no real country with real traditions and customs and history to learn about. The numerous fictional characters and events became a jumble in my head. I couldn't have cared less about Charles’ story!

I thought when I began the book that I would have difficulty reading a poem, but that was no problem at all! Shade's poem is simple reading. You forget that it is even a poem. It reads as a story that just happens to rhyme. Unfortunately it comprises only a very small portion of the book.

The audiobook presentation is not difficult to follow. You do not have to switch back to the poem as you follow Charles' commentaries; as I explained, Charles has a different story to tell. The audiobook has two narrators, one for John Shade and his poem (Robert Blumenfeld) and another for Charles Kinbote(Marc Vietor). It is Marc Vietor who reads the larger part. Both narrators do their parts well; they further personify the respective character’s personality. The book ends with the reading of the index!!! I have never read an index from start to finish. Have you? Do you want to? It is kind of funny though because the numerous references to Charles show clearly who the book is really about.

The book has some beautiful lines, some satirically funny lines and a message I totally agree with, but neither of the two main stories captured my interest!

This is the second book by Nabokov I've read, and they're both essentially murder mysteries. Is that what Nabokov is? A writer of murder mysteries?

Pale Fire and Lolita both also feature unreliable narrators and slightly too much cleverness. And with Pale Fire, in particular...if you strip away the trickiness, what's left? (The answer: Prisoner of Zenda is left.) But the trickiness is the point, you say. Doesn't this smell just a little bit like self-indulgence, though? Nabokov writes for writers; his books are meant to be compared to other books. By itself, Pale Fire is "mostly an exercise in agility – or perhaps in bewilderment" (Time, 1962). Its pleasure comes from seeing how differently Nabokov approaches his mystery, as compared to other writers. And there is pleasure in that, but I'm not 100% susceptible to this sort of game. It's just not totally my thing. For me, Nabokov is a good writer, but I wouldn't put him at the top of my list.

Pale Fire is a long poem written by the neighbor of the narrator, but most of the book is comprised of the notes to that poem, written by said narrator, Charles Kinbote, who is deeply unreliable. The notes are mostly tangent, or the poem is, as Kinbote rambles off stories about his homeland, Zembla, where "girls are as a rule mere mechanisms of haphazard lust," and which doesn't exist. Does anyone think Kinbote actually is who he says he is? No, right? The whole book is, as he suggests near the very end, about "a lunatic who intends to kill an imaginary king, another lunatic who imagines himself to be that king, and a distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of fire." My main evidence: Zembla doesn't exist. Nabokov works in the real world, as far as I know; only his narrators don't.

I'm also pretty convinced that Kinbote will end the story (as Nabokov himself said he would, in interviews) with suicide: "We who burrow in filth all day may be forgiven perhaps the one sin that ends all sins."

It's a fun puzzle and a fun murder mystery. And if you have a guess about why Stan Lee named Professor X after this guy, I'd like to hear it.

I was mesmerized with the planes of collision of this unusual novel. We get a pompous, self-serving introduction by a fictional editor to a poem, the poem itself, rendered in wonderful old-fashioned lyrical verse dancing life against death, and then a commentary that twists the content of the poem and the scholar’s connection to the author into an absurd dramatic framework. For dessert, an index that pulls your leg in case you weren’t sure. It’s clever, but not smug. There are challenging depths here, but there is no trouble reading it as the prose and narrative is elegant and clear. You are left a bit at sea with interpreting what an unreliable narrator is feeding you, but you the reader are empowered with clues enough to make your own frame to the narrative. It doesn’t quite have the fun factor of Vonnegut or Barth, but it leaves you with more meat per serving, particularly in its grappling over whether art is a means of discovering truth or a godlike power of generative creation.

I came at this without reading any reviews or knowledge about the book beyond widespread respect by literati and a couple of blurbs at the beginning of my 1968 paperback edition; e.g. “Continually blooms with preposterousness of a most amusing kind. The author’s talent for the witty phrase manifests itself on page after page.” My goal here is to present what an average reader (like me) might appreciate or be bored by, and so inform their reading choice. I don’t think amusement and wittiness is quite the right hook for this to satisfy most people I know. I think the draw lies more with the mystery and puzzle of the plot’s construction and the surprises of artful treasures in your path and of doorways that transport you down different paths of meaning.

We are presented first with an emulation of a scholar’s introduction to the final work of a well-respected poet before he died, John Shade. The editor, Dr. Kimbote, is a teacher in a small liberal arts college in the fictional town of New Wye in the rural state of Appalachia (with the flavors of New England), where he was the neighbor and friend of the poet. At first it sounds lucky that Kimbote has wangled permission of his friend to edit and publish the 999-line poem, existing as a manuscript on index cards. Though a specialist only in the literature of his native Zembla (some obscure European nation in the shadow of Russia), he makes us feel that the poet’s wife Sybil or true academics in poetry would have botched the job or corrupted the intended text. But slowly it dawns on us that the scholar is putting himself excessively into the scene and that we are in the hands of a possible megalomaniac who believes he was instrumental in inspiring the content of the poem. This includes his regaling the poet with tales of his country’s noble king being deposed and his crafty escape into exile from evil revolutionaries out for his blood. He promises in his commentary to document evidence of allegorical underpinnings of his muse role for the poem and more proof from discarded alternative drafts. I appreciate comic deflation of effete arrogance in the Ivory Tower of academia. I am not exactly laughing at this point, but I expect a bit more fun before I am through.

For the poem itself, I was sincerely moved in mind and spirit. Geez, why didn’t Nabokov try to make it as a poet? Shade covers in four sections his boyhood rural connection to nature and wondering about the mysteries of life and its impermanence. Then comes pieces on his origins as a poet, finding the love of his life in Sybil, and the joys of raising their daughter. He roots for the daughter to succeed despite her homeliness, but he is laid low with her tragic death, driving him to return to obsessions with the possibility of an afterlife. I have been no big reader of poetry (I was a biology major), but I got pleasures from the poem on the same order as from reading Robert Frost or Wallace Steven’s “Sunday Morning.” Obvious references suggest throwbacks to poets like Alexander Pope or Robert Browning. So few readers read poetry, so I must give a sample to see if the poem “Pale Fire” would appeal to people thinking of taking on this package composed by Nabokov. A few pages in we get a repetition of the sublime opening lines and then a bit of altered states of consciousness from Shade as a boy of eleven stuck at home alone due to illness:

I was the shadow the waxwing slain
By feigned remoteness in the windowpane.
...
There was a sudden sunburst in my head
And the black night. The blackness was sublime.
I felt distributed through space and time:
One foot upon a mountaintop, one hand
Under the pebbles of a panting strand,
One ear in Italy, on eye in Spain,
In caves, my blood, and in the stars, my brain.
There were dull throbs in my Triassic; green
Optical spots in Upper Pleistocene,
An icy shiver down my Age of Stone,
And all my tomorrows in my funnybone.

Much of Shade’s poem is circles around what human imagination can do to create something of lasting meaning in the face of mortality. Whic is a core question I keep seeking answers for in literature and life—don’t you? At one point after the loss of his daughter, Shade has a small heart attack and experiences a vision of a majestic fountain that captivates him with its allure of a timeless reality. He is treated to a cosmic joke when he tracks down the source of a newspaper account of another person’s near-death experience of a fountain, only to learn “fountain” was a typo for the man’s dream of a mountain: “Life Everlasting—based on a misprint!” He finds a sort of epiphany in the ashes of his disappointment, that what counts is the play of mind in creating such links of meaning:

Yes! It sufficed that I in life could find
Some kind of link-and-bobolink, some kind
Of correlated pattern in the game,
Plexed artistry, and something of the same
Pleasure in it as they who played in found.

It did not matter who they were. No sound,
No furtive light came from their involute
Abode, but there they were, aloof and mute,
Playing a game of worlds, promoting pawns
To ivory unicorns and ebon fauns …

Wonderful conceptions to me. But later he finds a schism in the process of transforming these created links of meaning into his writing. He finds freedom in the mental process of creation, yet when doing so suffers from dissociation from his body, the actions of which become like freakish automaton “taking off what he has just put on” or buying “the paper he has read before”. For the step of formulating words and phrases, “the abstract battle is concretely fought”, but the power of the pen “to swoop to bar a canceled sunset or restore a star” seems to me to suggest the danger of flippant construction going astray of reality. I get a lot out of such rare attempts of writers to probe the mysteries of artistic creation.

For most readers, all this is just backdrop for the novelistic core of the book in Kinbote’s so-called commentary. He comes off like a leech in Shade’s life, and in appropriating the poem manuscript, is seen to be a threat to sullying its beauty by making it all, line by line, about him somehow. In another way Shade’s latching onto the reality of meanings that the self creates has left himself open to the fate of distortion by another self after he is gone. After I made this interpretation, I looked in the thorough Wikipedia article and learned about how literary scholars have mined a myriad of interpretations. How much of a madman is Kinbote; did he have a role in Shade’s death; could he really be the king in exile, etc? Or is all the plot just an illusion or playground for the dance of literary connections or of a virtual chess game?

I was most impressed with the truth in recognition of “Pale Fire” as an early example along with Borges “Garden of Forking Paths” of literary hypertext, analogous to the way the World Wide Web was designed to operate. For example, in the introduction Kinbote recommends buying two copies of the future book so the reader can read the lines of the poem side by side with his commentary. As another example of nonlinear options, I came across an “aha” clue when the narrator says “Kinbote” is an anagram of Bodkin or Bodkine. I paused reading to look up the word and find it means several things that intersect with the plot: “dagger or tool for punching holes in cloth” and also the name of a Russian doctor in the 19th century who discovered Bodkin’s disease, later known as the infectious viral disease hepatitis A. Plus, there is a Professor Bodkin of Russian studies whom everyone is suspicious of. See what I mean about clues and doorways that hop you to other dimensions (Nabokov called them plums)?

You don’t have to feel like an idiot for not catching onto the innumerable literary references in the book. Most are just play in a game or filigrees for texture. Even catching just a few is rewarding, but not just for erudite cleverness. For example, at one point Kinbote is talking about a walk he took with Shade and in looking for a meaningful spot in nature, a farmer’s son refers to the site as where “Papa pisses”. That readily rang dim memories of “Pippa Passes” and a smile over unbelievably recalling the lovely lines of Pippa’s song, “The year’s at the spring,/And day’s at the morn; …/God’s in His heaven/ All’s right with the world!”. But I didn’t remember without hypertexting around how her singing as she went along was influencing the actions of various villagers, including one who suddenly decided to carry out his plan to assassinate a government leader of Austria. It's satisfying to feel ever element in this book is crafted to serve a purpose.

So there are worlds within worlds in “Pale Fire”, almost like fractals. Quite a brilliant construction. I got the most out of the poem and its fragility in the face of what academics with their own agenda might do to it. Others might enjoy the challenge of figuring out what makes Kinbote tick and the twists of concern over the veracity of his stories in the context of a fictional world. It comes down to whether puzzles without definitive answers would be too frustrating to you or if instead you find freedom in ambiguity and the prospect of constructing a frame that works best for you.

FOREWORD:

"Canon Fire", a poem in heroic couplets, of thirty-six lines, consisting of only one canto, was composed by Ian Vinogradus (born March 4, 1957) during the last two days of his life (up to that point in time), at his residence in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.

He started the poem on Saturday, July 16, 2016, on the evening that the military coup occurred in Turkey. He completed it the following day, Sunday, July 17, 2016, after it became clear that the coup had failed.

POEM:

Canon Fire
[After and In Many of the Words of Vladimir Nabokov, John Shade and Charles Kinbote]

I have a certain liking, I admit,
For parody, that last resort of wit.
Though any jackass can rig up the stuff
In this epoch when packs of rogues can bluff
Like the prosemongers of the Grubby Group;
The Mitsein Man, the owlish Nincompoop,
And the Post-Modern Acolytes of our age
Leave but a pinch of coal dust on the page.
Readers who think there’s something you can learn,
Listen to distant cocks crow, and discern
Conmal, the hack reviewer of fat books
That staid academia overlooks,
Who inveighs against populist traction
With unpardonable satisfaction.
This pompous obtuse son of a bitch
Photographs all his books to show like kitsch.
Though he’s a stranger to modesty,
Like many near-cretins, he craves novelty.
Some regard the blockhead's demolishment
And his rave with similar detachment.
True, his Vollmann crits only loudly cry,
Each work is "a great book by a great guy."
Pretending to all that he’s contrary,
He lives too much in his library,
Not to mention various other nooks
Among the bewitched hush of buried books.
He surrounds himself with young boys and youths
Who generate likes in quanta profuse,
Mere mechanisms of haphazard lust.
His taste is something you can barely trust.
His titles possess a specious glamour,
He bangs on about them with his hammer.
Hence, devoted fools, timorous and grim,
Applaud his ev’ry pronouncement and whim,
While others respond with acrimony
To praise of books they can tell are phony.




COMMENTARY:

Juxtaposition of the Elements

"Pale Fire", the novel upon which "Canon Fire" is modelled, is a swarm or flight or a flutter of butterflies in a hall of mirrors.

I've always been fascinated by what happens when an author juxtaposes two or more different creative elements within the one work. What is meant by the juxtaposition? What happens as a result of the juxtaposition? Does it change the interpretation of the whole or does one element change the interpretation of the other?

In "Pale Fire", there are four such elements: a foreword, the poem itself, a commentary and an index.

Although "Pale Fire" is the name of the poem, it's also the name of the collective work as a whole. Thus, Nabokov redefines the scope of a novel, so as to extend to both a work of fiction and a (fictitious) commentary on that work.

This shaped my initial reaction to the work as a whole. It seemed that the dominant theme was the relationship of a reader's response, or an academic's criticism, to the work itself. Charles Kinbote, the academic, almost overwhelmed the author's intent or work, in his self-indulgent commentary. In a way, the work didn't live up to his expectations. Not only does he attempt to shape the interpretation of the poem, but he expresses disappointment that it doesn't live up to his inspiration or suggestions for inclusion in the poem. In a way, the muse is judging the creator.

While this point deserves and needs to be made, much more is revealed as you read on. The relationship between Kinbote and the poet John Shade is much more complex. The commentary becomes a thriller or suspense novella in its own right.

Making Ornaments of Accidents and Possibilities

A lot is revealed by the first four lines of the poem:

"I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure of the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff - and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky."

Who is the first person "I"?

Is it the poet or author, or is it the narrator? Or, perhaps, the poem/work itself? Or, double perhaps, the reader's response (which keeps the work alive)?

The real event is a bird hitting a windowpane, unaware that the sky it is flying towards is a reflection, a fiction, a falsity, a fraud, a semblance of reality.

The bird is not so much lost in translation, as lost in transition between reality and fiction.

The bird we think we see isn't real, but a shadow, an illusion. Yet, even if the real bird dies as it hits the windowpane, the illusion continues, it "lives on, in the reflected sky." In a way, fiction has the ability to transcend reality.

At one point, Kinbote asserts that:

"'Reality' is neither the subject nor the object of true art which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average 'reality' perceived by the communal eye."

Ironically, Kinbote believes that Shade's fiction should look more like his (Kinbote's) reality. This is quite different from expecting the work to look like his fiction, the fiction that he imagines as he reads the work. Both reactions are possible in this work. However, in a normal case (where a reader has had no factual input into the conceptualisation of the actual work), only the second reaction is possible.

A Monstrous Semblance of a Novel

Nevertheless, we as readers of the work approach the commentary, prepared to give some credence to Kinbote's version of the poem. His interpretation seems to reflect his intimate knowledge of its creator and its creation, as well as his purported influence on its creation.

Yet, as we read on, we become more convinced that Kinbote is misguided, egotistical, maybe even insane. Thus, bit by bit, he becomes an unreliable narrator or commentator.

We learn that other academics question Kinbote's views, in favour of their own. They stake rival claims for ownership of the frontier field of Shadean Studies.

Perhaps, this is Nabokov's way of questioning the veracity of all academic interpretation and criticism? Perhaps, he was trying to create a work so sophisticated that it would keep critics forever guessing (wrongly!) about its meaning (whether or not this is a worthwhile task at all).

Kinbote suggests (a little disingenuously):

"I have no desire to twist and batter an unambiguous apparatus criticus into the monstrous semblance of a novel."

As Nabokov himself would say:

"I do not believe in any kind of interpretation."

Perhaps, he just wanted us to enjoy the beauty of the language, and to play along with his ludicrous game.

Maybe, he just wanted us to fly into the windowpane, to pass through the looking glass, and discover the fictitious world that lies beyond, the semblance of the world of Zembla that is there?

"Engazhay and Compelling"

As if this is not possibility enough, Nabokov encourages and permits us to question whether Kinbote is the construction of Shade, or vice versa. Is one a shadow of the other? If so, which one?

If we ignore the author himself, which narrator should prevail?

Nabokov/Shade inserts a syllogism into his poem:

"Other men die; but I am not another; therefore I'll not die."

Is the first person narrator a fictional person who, unlike the author and the reader, cannot die? Is literature and its assemblage of characters capable of immortality?

"How curious that our rationality feels satisfied when we plump for the first explanation?"

"How ludicrous these efforts to translate
Into one's private tongue a public fate?
Life is a message scribbled in the dark."

This is the most ludicrous novel ever written. So far.

INDEX:

Conmal, Duke of Arrogance line 11, cretinous nature line 17, his presence in library line 24, identity almost revealed line 27, writing style line 11

Mitsein Man, Heideggerian henchman line 6

Vollmann, William T., The most overrated American novelist since William H. Gass, uncritical review of line 21

Stop it Nabokov, you're making every other writer on this planet look terrible.

This novel, which basically rejects every element and characteristic of our common conceptions of "novels", is a masterpiece of form and structure. It is a book made up entirely of footnotes. In the beginning, we are presented with a poem, a 999-line poem called Pale Fire. The "novel" part of this "novel" resides in the commentary and footnotes on this poem.

Nabokov constructs an entire narrative, complete with rounded characters and locations, within the line-by-line commentary of the poem. It is wonderful. I cannot sing its praises any higher. Like in Lolita we are introduced to a less than admirable, unreliable narrator Charles Kinbote. Slowly he begins his commentary on his friend's poem, Pale Fire. However, as the footnotes pile up, we stray further and further away from academic citation and we are plunged into Kinbote's megalomaniacal and deranged mind. Like Alice down the rabbit hole, we have nothing to grab and the darkness evades every word.

Pale Fire is a true masterpiece. The quintessential anti-novel. Its utter subversion of what we know as literature can only be comparable to Joyce's Ulysses. And like Ulysees, I can say without doubt that this is one of the greatest novels of the 20th Century, if not, all time.

It’s a well-known fact that dogs have a talent for smelling far better than our own. They can detect much fainter scents from much farther away. What’s more, when a stew is cooking and all we smell is stew, they can pick out each ingredient –- the potatoes, carrots, beef and even the bay leaf and parsley flakes. Close readers who are analogous to these super sniffers are the ones who will enjoy this book the most, I suspect. No worries for the rest of us, though. I’m proof that this can still be a good experience even if the only thing you can distinguish is stew.

As must be true of most Nabokov works, this book features multiple layers of intellectual fascination. There are those I recognized, those I read about after the fact, and even a few “plums” that Nabokov said were yet to be plucked years after publication. The base level is the story itself. It’s structured, cleverly enough, as a 999-line poem by a character named John Shade along with a metafictive analysis around it comprising a forward and an extended commentary by Shade’s university colleague and neighbor, Charles Kinbote. The poem is actually pretty good, though parts seemed slightly satirical. It details events in the poet’s life including encounters with death, idylls of the day-to-day and insight into the creative process. The rhymes were clever, too. However, the poem was just the starting point. The crux of the story was Kinbote’s reaction to it. We quickly realize a second level to the book –- that this fellow academic and wordsmith is off his rocker. He had long, discursive comments where he began inserting himself into the poem in ways we as readers know couldn’t be true. Kinbote’s style was literate and at times pompous – almost a caricature of a bloviating professor. To be honest, I liked it. I kept imagining Frasier Crane in the role. Nabokov was no doubt poking fun at academics, especially those who write literary criticisms.

Kinbote’s analysis was often marked by a strained (and comical) attempt to tie his own narrative to the poem. It featured a country in the far north of Europe called Zembla ruled by a certain King Charles. Is it a coincidence that this is Kinbote’s given name? I think not. Nor will you. We also learn of an assassin who was part of a Soviet-backed revolutionary group. Though slow-witted, he tracks King Charles down to the college town in Appalachia where they live and (technically this is a spoiler, though I think most would agree that the plot points were of secondary importance and therefore spoilable) mistakenly murders Shade. This is notable in that Nabokov’s own father was killed by mistake by an assassin in 1922..

The next layer was one I had only partial success interpreting myself. It involves the fiction within the fiction and Kinbote’s true identity. Some of the hints are obscure, but I’ll mention that the Index at the end of the book can be a help. A scarcely mentioned Russian scholar by the name of Botkine was noted as an anagram of Kinbote. Some critics have speculated that Kinbote was an invention of Shade. Others (though fewer) think it may have been the other way around. Anyway, if you’re the kind of reader who likes to try smelling what kind of onion was put in the stew, this layer will add to your pleasure.

My own enjoyment came from imagining the fun Nabokov had writing it. He could lampoon the field of literary criticism, comment on how easy it is to insert personal experiences and perspectives into an analysis (how could it be otherwise?), and demonstrate his talent as a polyglot (he grew up speaking Russian, English and French at home; studied Slavic and Romance languages at Cambridge; and must have enjoyed constructing a vaguely Germanic sounding Zemblan tongue in Kinbote’s commentary). I couldn’t help thinking of this book as a subtle but indecorous display of whimsy. It’s dressed up in formal attire, but with a T-shirt underneath that says “I’m with Stupid →”.

I took a few points off for being a tad slow, and a few more for trying too hard to be cleverer than I could perceive, but the levels of wonder left over still merit four shiny stars. Recommended for those too sheepish to read Lolita on their commuter trains.

Five stars for the poem, five for the two suicidicentric pages (six for the paragraph about falling from an airplane), five for the vocab lessons, five for superattentively composed prose, two for the commentary section in general (not much readerly engagement/enjoyment throughout). It seems I might not really love Vlad Nab all that much. I often appreciate/admire the prose, sure, but the scintillation of rare and iridiscent lepidopteran-like language maybe gets real old real quick? Also, thematically, the artfully woven cocoon seems ultimately not to reveal much of a real winged worm -- or if it exists, it's so camoflagued by design that searching for its existence seems nonsensical. A disappointing read for me, ultimately.

I feel completely unqualified to rate this book. Mostly because I don't think I really understood all of it but I did really enjoy it so I'm going with 4 stars that could potentially go to 5 on a reread. Because if ever a book needs to be read more than once it's this one. If you like linear straightforward easy to understand stories this is not for you. If, on the other hand, you like complicated hard to understand books that you have to spend time chasing down references and doing a lot of flipping back a forth this is totally the book for you. I really enjoyed my first pass at this one and look forward to another go with it in the future.

This novel was first printed in 1962. I have never encountered a more original plot . This book has it all.
Without a doubt, one of the 20th century's seminal pieces of literature.

Something tells me that having a conversation with Nabokov would’ve been a real sonofabitch. He would just dominate the conversation, leaving you to wonder at his imaginative wordplay, density; his unparalleled ironic detachment and cynicism. Hard to get a word in edgewise with a guy like that. Dinner parties must have been a nightmare.

Look, Pale Fire is flat-out fucking Genius—there’s no way around that one. It has more layers than a lasagna operating at any given time and, because Nabo gonna be Nabo, it’s even funny to boot. Look for yourself:

“Of the not very many ways known of shedding one’s body, falling, falling, falling is the supreme method, but you have to select your sill or ledge very carefully so as not to hurt yourself or others. Jumping from a high bridge is not recommended even if you cannot swim, for wind and water abound in weird contingencies, and tragedy ought not to culminate in a record dive…”

Even if McCaffery and I differ in opinion on its ranking, there is no question as to the place Pale Fire deserves in the vanguard of the canon. Nabokov had a truly remarkable gift for creating vampires of the human variety—he’s the thinking man or woman’s Bram Stoker. The conceptualization (much less the execution) of this novel is mind-boggling. Alas, I'm spent on superlatives. Tired of fawning. Read it or forever live with the niggling feeling that your existence can never truly be whole ("or something like that," to quote Uncle Bob Pollard).

Bastard couldn’t pass up an opportunity for alliteration to save his life, though.

This is an interesting book, to say the least. In regards to understanding it, deconstructing it, I’m at a loss. This thing is like a prism, its meaning shifting like varying light combinations depending on how you hold the crystal. On the surface, it can be interpreted as a treatise on creating and life. This book starts off with the remarkable poem Pale Fire by the poet John Shade, followed by the “interpretation/analysis” by our good buddy (Shade’s neighbor) Charles Kinbot.

So I remember when the first season of Westworld was going on I went down the rabbithole of fan theories (some of the stuff people came up with was ridiculous, fun, sometimes kind of amazing too). Sort of the same deal here, after finishing the book I’ve been reading up on the varying interpretations of this work and it is absolutely fascinating. One interesting thing I read talked about the importance of Shakespeare and how he and his work relate to this story. There are a ton of Shakespeare references throughout, and that’s a pity because I haven’t read Shakespeare in ages so much of that is lost on me.

You can def go down the rabbithole trying to deconstruct who is who in this thing. You could probably come up with all sorts of incredibly complex and plausible ideas. I’m not sure how deep it goes beyond the surface, or if it is all just an incredibly elaborate prank. I wouldn’t put it past Nabokov, he seems like the kind of guy who enjoys treating people like idiots (dont’ get me wrong, I do think he’s a great writer but massively massively arrogant).

Regarding style. Nabokov is a stylist (THE stylist), sometimes overstyling imo, getting too clever with the writing. There are moments where he uses a word and it feels like such pure unnecessary show-off (micturate, nictate, pate instead of more common words). That said, his ability to weave imagery with words is undeniably masterful, and so it’s incredibly easy to just sink into the writing and enjoy his use of language even if it is over-ornamented at times. And while I complain about some of the over-ornamentation of the language, he still uses some incredibly fun words: torquated, speluncar, lemniscate, stillicide, etc. And I swear to God his favorite words have to be sepulchral, mauve, azure, nacreous, contrapuntal, and pate!

A few fun callbacks to his other books in this one, including “Hurricane Lolita” and some references to dear Prof Pnin.

So yeah, I don’t even really know how to interpret this one, but the ride itself is quite fun.