For the past few days, I had been reading Nabokov for the first time. You know it well that I was reading the tale of Lo-Li-Ta....
But when I was about to finish, almost three dozen pages left, I felt an irresistible urge to check how good a poet this man is! This creator of H. This creator of LO!
And this man, Yes, This man, I am telling you, set the world of 'desire in me' on fire. Something went up in smoke inside me.
Oh, man! how stunning this poetry was!
Gorgeous!
Spiffing!
a top-hole!
Ah! beauty!
I recalled Leonardo da Vinci's famous quote that'Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen'
I finished this entire painting in just two sittings keeping the Lolita aside!

Now I shall spy on beauty as none as Spied on it yet.

I read Pale Fire under the bed. I didn't roll around in the sheets and get sweaty and come at the same time like all of the sex scenes on HBO tv shows. I hid under the bed and I didn't look first to see who the bed belonged to. So long as it wasn't mine... Another sweaty body did the dirty on top and I could feel the springs pushing into my back down below. Paranoid body on top and apprehensively hopeful body below. Just below, me. Jealous wives and possessive hospital corners and family quilts. Hand of god? Who's hand (who's bed?)? Flatulence or rubbing I cannot tell as the sounds of pleasure and bodily functions sound the same. I didn't make a sound. This isn't a function, this is pleasure.
Feet of men, surely. Shoes were on the floor. Shoes that turn into other shoes like transformers or shape shifting birds. They go with everything. Loafing loafers, leather strings and laces, swaying and strutting to leave by other beds and outside doors. Dirt on the bottoms from some place else. Shoes on my feet. Mums the word and dad said no. The traumatizing walked in and the lonely married couple and their poor, dead daughter. Eavesdropping like a compliment that is better to be savored later when you don't have to face it. I don't know what to say and am not ready to believe it compliment. Fear it won't come again and will never enjoy it compliment... Going somewhere. Is there going to be pillow talk? I'll pick the closet next time... I don't want to see their faces. I don't know what the hell happened and I can't see the whole picture, only the floor, the shoes and under the bed. I like being under it and not knowing the whole damned marriage. Or affair. Or was it a one night stand. Glow and not burn. I won't know what the hell happened. It's a weird kind of secondhand intimacy. Who WAS that guy? I've heard the theories and I was where I wanted to be in the room.

I’ll example you with thievery:
The sun’s a thief, and with his great attraction
Robs the vast sea; the moon’s an arrant thief,
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun;
The sea’s a thief, whose liquid surge resolves
The moon into salt tears; the earth’s a thief,
That feeds and breeds by a composture stolen
From general excrement: each thing’s a thief.
Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, Act IV, scene III

This is not a regular review,
and may not be for you.
If you stay to read, never fear,
Nabokov announces in the foreword
whatever ‘facts’ are here.
And please note,
there is much more to Pale Fire’s narrator Kinbote,
than in the commentary below;
I’ve barely scratched the surface of his contrapuntal life.

If I grant Sybil Shade prime place,
it’s due to the negligible note,
at the very bottom of an index page:
Shade, Sybil, S’s wife, passim.

Kinbote makes copious notes
on every character in 'Pale Fire' itself,
and those in the commentary to the poem,
even the most minor players,
listing each and every reference to them,
including page numbers.

While passim means 'already referenced frequently',
Sybil Shade, translator of others' lines,
is hardly mentioned in the index,
not in the extensive note about her poet spouse,
nor in the one about her neighbour,
Kinbote himself.

For this reason, I prefer to see passim
as Kinbote's way of saying: 'we've had enough of her!’
So, in the tongue-in-cheek spirit of
The Revenge of Timofey Pnin
and borrowing liberally from Timon of Athens,
I offer a monologue interview with Sybil Shade entitled:

Sybil Shade Strikes Back

“No mumbling, please, speak up!
What know I of Kinbote, you ask?

He was a thief.
To give but one example:
my husband had a dressing-robe,
of worn-out orange toweling,
with pockets large and spacious,
in which he kept spare pens and scraps of paper,
many written upon,
odd lines and verses
that at the hour of bathing did occur,
or on waking be remembered one by one.
That robe did Kinbote plot to steal,
that old and ragged garment, and for what?
For the words trapped within its seams,
the crumpled echoes of a poet's dreams.

You need more proof than that, you say?
Each thing's a thief, in its own way?

But I'm no thief I'll have you know.
My poems are pure reflections,
not stolen imitations.
And John did never steal from anyone;
the titles of his poems are merely borrowed
from the sea of poets who've come before,
Browning, Shakespeare, Sophocles, and more.

But Kinbote is a thief, and worse,
a parasite, an excremental tic.
For five long months
John harboured that wormy maggot;
kept him close.
The worm became a botfly,
and attacked his host.

It was Jack Grey, you say?
who fired the shot that fateful day?

John Shade was killed by Grey,
I’ve heard that fifty times or more.
But Kinbote contrived the whole affair,
to steal my husband's words,
that their bright fire would shine instead on him,
the foul diszembling turd.

If he could have stolen John’s identity he would.
I saw the way he spied our very life
from the dark windows of his home,
and from the hill behind our house,
his Proust face watching, planning how to pounce.

I saw the way he looked at me, John’s wife.
Utmost courtesy?
Pale Fire shudders at his touch.
Passim, no more salt tears I'll shed.
I’ve talked enough of that botking.

Why do I speak this way?
It is unnatural, you say?

I lived with a poet, and translated poetry by day,
We were a rhyming couplet, and habit will have its sway.”

...............................................................



I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane

John Shade, Pale Fire, Canto 1,

……………….………………………………………

The narrator mentions Conan Doyle's 'The Case of the Reverse Footsteps'
Here's an alternative take on reverse footsteps which echoes the inside-out nature of Pale Fire:


Edit October 11th: just found this line in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight: He confused solitude with altitude and the Latin for sun. There’s a line in Pale Fire referring to ‘Solus Rex’. That could mean the ‘only king’, or the ‘king alone’ or ‘lonely’ but I thought it could also mean the sun king, the sun as king of all, at least in the context, and like SK, I was confused too but the sun as king corresponded to the envy Kinbote felt for Shade, his wantng to be Shade, a name that nicely camouflages Sun, and Kinbote himself being perhaps a king. But I know that the Latin for sun is solis not solus....

Edit Octobrr 12th: now that I've finished Sebastian Knight, I have new insights on the sun, and kings, and regicide, and the pale moon too, the White Queen as it were. Glad I cast Sybil as the moon here...

La grandezza di Nabokov l’ho scoperta di recente con la rilettura di “Lolita”, uno tra i libri migliori che abbia mai letto, per poi averne conferma con “Fuoco pallido”. Nabokov è colui che affermò in veste critica che Dostoevskij non scrive bene e che è sopravvalutato, i suoi romanzi essendo lontani dall’essere dei capolavori letterari, pertanto da lui come scrittore ci si aspetta molto e a me non ha deluso, anzi.

“Fuoco pallido” è un romanzo insolito come forma perché si presenta come un articolato commento ad un poema, accompagnato dalla Prefazione e delle Note del curatore e critico di tale poema, “Fuoco pallido” scritto da John Shade. Questo induce un po’ in errore il lettore, credendo di avvicinarsi quasi a un saggio o comunque non a un romanzo con una trama stimolante e dei personaggi ben definiti, io stessa l’ho pensato. E invece non è così, “Fuoco pallido” è un romanzo a tutti gli effetti, forse unico nel suo genere per la forma insolita, ma compatto e molto intelligente. Scritto in prima persona dal curatore del poema Charles Kinbote, il libro descrive ciò che lui avrebbe voluto che John Shade scrivesse attraverso il suo poema e cioè la storia del regno di Zembla (regno immaginario) del quale Kinbote pretende si esserne il re fuggiasco, il poema autentico invece è autobiografico e in esso John Shade rispecchia la sua vita e i momenti più cruciali, senza il minimo accenno alla distorta ed erronea interpretazione di Kinbote. Anzi, il lettore si renderà ben presto conto di quanto sia disturbato e perseguitato il poeta dal suo ingombrante e pazzo futuro curatore del poema, senza dubbio affetto da qualche mania e che non da la minima sicurezza di ciò che afferma. Questa situazione parallela di realtà- fantasia tra il poema e il suo commento susciterà immancabilmente le risate perché completamente diverse. Sicuramente è anche una parodia ai vari critici letterari che spesso e volentieri ci mettono del loro e rovinano il messaggio che un’opera si propone di trasmettere e spesso lo si fa per il proprio narcisismo, mettendo quasi in ombra (Shade) l’autore e la sua opera per mettere i riflettori sulla propria visione delle cose.

Nonostante la strana forma Nabokov riesce a tenere vivo l’interesse di un lettore non solo attraverso la comicità implicita dell’equivoco ma anche attraverso le due storie che Kinbote intreccia: quella del regno di Zembla e quella della sua “amicizia” con il poeta Shade al quale la racconta, convinto di essere la sua musa; entrambe le storie vengono gradualmente avvicinate e unite attraverso un altro personaggio, Gradus, che darà una impronta gialla al romanzo. Da notare i nomi dei personaggi, tutti sono rappresentativi e cambiano anche, Gradus ad esempio in Francia si chiamerà Degré! Shade- ombra, Kinbote cambia varie volte attraverso anagrammi per esempio Botkin etc.

Il testo è anche pieno di riferimenti letterari che ho apprezzato moltissimo (soprattutto quelli a Proust e alla sua opera) e sommati alla forma strana, agli artifici letterari usati, alla bellezza della prosa, alla leggerezza dovuta alla comicità, “Fuoco pallido” risulta essere una lettura incantevole se la si prende per il verso giusto, perché secondo me gli si deve andare incontro, la si deve cercare, per leggere questo libro il lettore deve avere voglia di giocare un po’ con Nabokov, di seguirlo e di trovare gli indizi che gli lascia strada facendo in questo mondo inventato che è il regno di Zembla e non solo.

https://www.qlibri.it/recensioni/roma...

n  

What stunning conjuring tricks our magical mechanical age plays with old mother space and old father time!

n
So clever, and clever-clever, but also acute and funny though ultimately tragic - this just couldn't have been written by anyone except Nabokov.

On the surface, we have a 999 line autobiographical poem written in heroic couplets (Kinbote thinks it's like Pope; me, I was thinking of a shorter The Prelude, and Wordsworth is one of the poets conjured up in Wordsmith College along with Goldsmith) - or is that 1000 lines, if the last line is also the first (or the first is also the last...) giving a ring composition that echoes the complicated navigations through the text itself?

If one story is given in the poem of John Shade, an English professor, then a quite different story, and one which proliferates dizzily, emerges from the supposed commentary written by Dr Kinbote - who may be the exiled king of Zembla... or may be crazy...

This is a bit like Through the Looking-Glass with a self-consciously literary slant. Zembla (semblance?), Shade (shadow, ghost, and Shadows from Zembla i.e. assassins), mirrors, the glass in the opening and closing line, all combine to reflect dazzlingly the multiple stories that spiral out from the source text or poem. Kinbote's 'commentary' that is actually a parallel text to the poem he is supposedly glossing, the stories that peek out from behind and within this gloss (Charles II, the Russian Revolution just for starters), the possibilities that are scattered through the end - all are held in orbit through Nabokov's masterly skills.

I've seen reviews which love the poetry - but actually, it's pretty bad poetry in many places ('so fast did life, the woolly caterpillar run') which, I'd suggest is part of the joke, but also part of the tragedy. This can be read as merely a clever satire on academic work and the role of the critic; on reception over authorial intention in shaping hermeneutics, on reading and missreading - but that would make it cold and slight, and actually the overall text is more alive and meaningful than that.

It's a glorious feat to have written something that does so many things at once - and which left me feeling, ultimately, very moved as the spacial journey of 'Kinbote' and the characters in his narrative becomes synchronized with Shade's temporal race to finish his poem (and his life), even while we, the reader, also strives to reach the end of all the stories and make sense of them together. A unique form but very human stories.

n  

Life is a message scribbled in the dark.

n
One of the reasons I’ve decided to rehash a love affair with poetry this year is because of what Jane Hirshfield says in Nine Gates: “No matter how carefully we read or how much attention we bring to bear, a good poem can never be completely entered, completely known.” When I’ve been reading a Thomas Hardy novel longer than anticipated (a novel known for its preachiness, albeit seasoned sentence structures), a narrative poem and novel like Pale Fire simply rises to the top, propelling me forward through the starkness of verse; assonance and alliteration keeping me focused, imagery helping me view melancholy in its lucidity, metaphors giving me raw emotions. I guess this is what Ezra Pound calls a mixture of logopoeia, a poem’s intellectual component, and melopoeia, a poem’s music.

Bring back the classic couplet and make it modern, shall we? For if we’re truly being honest, we’ll admit that Nabokov sexified the rhyme form. Nine hundred ninety-nine lines, four cantos, “beautifully accurate when you once make the plunge and compel yourself to open your eyes in the limpid depths under its confused surface”—says Charles Kinbote, the fictional editor of this masterpiece.

n  How ludicrous these efforts to translate
Into one’s private tongue a public fate!
Instead of poetry divinely terse,
Disjointed notes, Insomnia’s mean verse!n

A child has committed suicide, or drowned? Her parents are left to ponder. A poet writes the story of grief before—before what transpires? I leave you to inquire. This poet's mind wanders, and parts of this poet’s contemplation reminds me of Banville’s main character’s in Ancient Light—the underlying mysteries of a long-time relationship, the death of a beloved and only daughter, grief envisioned through words, an unreliable narrator.
n  

We have been married forty years. At least
Four thousand times your pillow has been creased
By our two heads. Four hundred thousand times
The tall clock with the hoarse Westminster chimes
Has marked our common hour. How many more
Free calendars shall grace the kitchen door?

n
You read this and want to feel bad for Nabokov, that he took so many literary hits for this one, from critics unable to see beyond the "confused surface," or to see, as Nabokov once said, that “all art is deception.” Try explaining intentions to the reader, Goethe said, and “the reader will always go right on demanding that which the author is trying to avoid.” Sure, I read the long poem and did not bother much with Kinbote, the peculiar narrator, for his commentary I found laborious and slightly pretentious. But the poem? Give me a break, critics; I found its arrangement and wordplay stunning:
n  

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff—and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.
And from the inside, too, I’d duplicate
Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:
Uncurtaining the night, I’d let dark glass
Hang all the furniture above the grass

n

On the one hand, I agree with D.J. Enright, who called this sort of thing "farting a tune through a keyhole" -- very clever, but is it worth the effort? I only "got" about a third of the trilingual puns and paleo-Baltic in-jokes -- and I'm certain I have no idea which unreliable narrator hiding behind which curtain is the "real" author of this work -- I still grooved on Vlad's trickster erudition and cinematic (or rather GIS) eye for space and place.

Is it worth all the effort? No, probably not. An elitist Franco-Russian academic poking fun at American academia: who cares? And worse, too many of the jokes rely on Nabokov's odd belief that being queer is inherently hilarious. (I'm guessing this mostly what put Gore Vidal off this novel.) Obviously you can't read this puzzling novel just once and give it a star rating, so consider my three stars above a "first-go" attempt. If I get sucked in for a second reading (probably by convincing enthusiast Ron Rosenbaum, or Brian Boyd) I'll revise this review accordingly. Who knows maybe it'll even lose a star (kick over the statues, etc.).

If I were just rating this book based on Nabokov's craft alone, it would be a 10/5. Nabokov's use of footnotes to tell a story and his skill in using an unreliable narrator are absolutely genius. In rating it based on how I personally feel when I read it however, I can't go above a 3. The story just didn't grab me that much.

I think part of the problem is the fact that every time I read a Nabokov novel, I am looking for another Lolita. Lolita is my favorite novel of all time, to the point of even writing my master's thesis on it. Nothing that I have read since reading (in my opinion) Nabokov's masterpiece has even come close, even from the man himself. I wish I could approach his work apart from that novel, but I think I will always be making that comparison whenever I read any of his work.

Бесконечно прекрасный роман, который я теперь никогда не полюблю и не перечитаю, потому что он всегда будет напоминать мне об этом времени.

I feel like I should reread this and really dig into it. I enjoyed it for the most part. Can’t wait to read Lolita.

Un libro dentro de un libro. Una muestra del talento excepcional de un autor excepcional. La versatilidad de Nabokov es abrumadora y está fuera de discusión. Sin embargo, su lectura dista mucho de ser sencilla y su interpretación aún más.
Shade es un poeta ficticio, reconocido académico, que ha escrito un poema con 999 versos. Kinbote es un stalker, un ególatra, un lector fanático (pero estilo"Misery") que hará un "riguroso" análisis del mismo. Y, en su obsesión autorreferencial, se convencerá, e intentará convencernos, de que todo el poema de Shade trata de él y de todas las historias, reales o imaginarias, que le ha relatado al poeta con el que ha conseguido trabar amistad.
Una lectura árida y difícil que puede resultar extenuante. Un juego de mentiras y obsesiones, donde dificlmente podremos estar seguros de cuánto es real y cuánto un delirio megalomaníaco. Un libro que puede destrozar expectativas previas pero, al final, una experiencia recomendable para salir de lo gris.

Pale Fire presents a 999-line poem from murdered poet John Shade, followed by an unreliable commentary (and earlier intro) from his stalker and apparent chum Charles Kimbote. The commentator takes an arch tone to his union with shade, exaggerating and distorting his position in the poet’s life, and uses the space to expand on the history of his homeland Zembla in lieu of discussing the poem’s content. Upon a first reading I found the book something of an extended academic titterfest, albeit larded with the usual Nabokovian puzzles for militant close readers, and upon a second read, my opinion hasn’t changed much. The digressions on Zemblan kings and princes are (intentionally, but so what?) long-winded and dreary, and the line-by-line commentary, although amusing in places, doesn’t particularly dazzle except as a series of Vlad set-pieces, like a looser Pnin, albeit with more formal ingenuity. The poem isn’t supposed to be a spoof of bad poetry, according to Vlad biographer Brian Boyd in this boxset special edition. It ain’t half bad, that poem.