I don't buy most of the third part of his reading, but it's still entertaining and informative. Still, the affective fallacy his reading is hung on grates at times.

The first time I read *Pale Fire*, it was in a poetry class in college. One quarter of the class was devoted to Nabokov, with the rest devoted to Blake, Hart Crane and a few other texts I don't quite remember. Just as John Shade laments, there where plenty who simply didn't read the text, and plenty who gave it an amateurish reading that (speaking from personal experience) comes from an indifference to the course. University, nowadays, is about getting a diploma that becomes cheapened with every graduation. As John Shade tells us in the novel:

I am generally very benevolent [said Shade]. But there are certain trifles I do not forgive." Kinbote: "For instance?" "Not having read the required book. Having read it like an idiot. Looking in it for symbols; example: 'The author uses the striking image green leaves because green is the symbol of happiness and frustration."

I'm sure there was a fair bit of all three sins in my sophomore seminar. It is unfair to blame the poor associate prof who taught it, though. The man was rowing against the tide. He was the first one to make me care in the slightest about Poetry, and he must certainly join my other household idols for that kindling: the teacher that helped to found my love of music and the one that helped me read a decent novel.

That first reading opened many questions that were never resolved. Unfortunately, many students surely left the class with the exact wrong interpretation of Nabokov, according to Boyd: He is a smirking teaser, a prestidigitator, who wants to dazzle us and no more. I had an intuition that there was much more to this text that I was missing, but it took me until now to return.

I read Pale Fire for the second time cover to cover before reading the Boyd exegesis. The satisfaction I gained from seeing things that I had missed the first time was delicious. I am certain that my ability to read has grown in the years since first approaching Nabokov. What a blessing to be able to read and to know that greater mastery is always in your range if you will work for it. Nabokov stresses to his students that they must have the patience of poetry and the passion of science. Most people would expect those adjectives to be switched. Nabokov has it right. A line of a poem is fundamentally a unit of attention. Attention is near to drowning in the flood of symbols we live in. Writers like Nabokov and readers like Boyd give me hope that I could one day be as literate as them, and that it would be worth it. I will need to resist the deep, cozy grooves that have been etched by Netflix, Twitter etc. etc. the gol darned Internet.

The reading that Boyd arrives at in this text is one that took decades of reflection and discussion. I am convinced of his major claims, which seem pretty audacious, but I'd like to see you come up with something that better explains the facts of the text. We could all learn a thing or two about reading from Boyd. I am in awe of his diligence, his patience and passion. The first two times I read the novel, I was too lazy to even look up the Shakespeare passage in Timon Of Athens. For shame. To paraphrase Marx, there is no royal road to science; you better work for it, honey.

I've never been quite sure about Brian Boyd's solution to the riddle that is "Pale Fire," if for no other reason than that it just seems too difficult, too hard-won, too complicated, too twisty-turny, even for Nabokov. Nonetheless, this is a superb critical detective story, in which the leading expert on the great man admits, first, that he was wrong about the solution he proposed in his biography, and then offers a most imaginative (if not fully convincing) alternative view.

I've never read a literary critique like this "for fun," but Pale Fire begs to be understood and I knew there was no way I was going to figure out Nabokov's complex riddles on my own. My father gave me this book, and I'm making my way through it slowly and with great fascination. Honestly, I was expecting a book full of ridiculous supposition, a critic reading deep meaning into words and literary allusion (or illusion...?) and leaving me frustrated and disappointed - not only by the critique, but ultimately the book I started off loving. Not a great attitude, I admit, but fortunately, I couldn't have been more wrong. Boyd's clear and absolute respect (love would probably not be too strong a sentiment) for Nabokov's work and his depth of understanding about the literary context of this novel is a pleasure to read. He lays out the varying theories that exist about this book - all interesting in their own rights - and then proposes a new one. I'm just delving into his premise about the true narrator of this novel now, and I'll readily admit that I'm about 85% drinking the cool-aid. That said, he definitely has taken me deeper into Pale Fire than I could have imagined was possible, which occasionally brings out the skeptic in me. However, I nevertheless highly recommend this book to anyone who read Pale Fire and finished wishing for more, deeper understanding and to anyone who just loves Nabokov. I'm going to put Boyd's biography of Nabokov on my list to read. I should note that I never quite finished this book (my attention span for literary critique apparently doesn't go much beyond about 175 pages), but would still recommend it and hope to pick it up again some day.

This is an outstanding exegesis of 'Pale Fire', which I highly recommended to anyone as awestruck by the labyrinthine intertextuality of the novel - and in particular its use of 'texture' as mirror - as I was. One reads Nabokov often with a sense that one is being toyed with; that a deeper artifice and more obscure shades animate and colour the exquisite surface to which we are lucidly aware. Boyd has accomplished not just the tender disassembly of this masterpiece of allusion (an act of veneration rather than discourtesy), but the finessed unveiling of successive revelations in a fashion systematised towards his theory of the novel's metaphysics. The clarity with which one begins to witness the grandeur of the novel is exhilarating, and the denouement itself is stupefying - and yet, one eventually sees, deeply hopeful, and deeply beautiful.

read parts. then got to feeling like I was at UofL again and got bored. sometimes reading something and purely enjoying it, "getting" some of it but surely not every single last little bit of it, is good enough for me.

Has no other scholar explored Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire as well as Brian Boyd? I enjoyed reading this book-long essay for the most part, though I confess to reading the last third impatiently, and I find Boyd's main thesis of Pale Fire unconvincing. That said, there's much to learn from Boyd's interpretation, and it seems to me his solution to the puzzle at the heart of Nabokov's work is almost correct. Spoilers to Pale Fire follow.

Of course Boyd is entirely correct that the most superficial interpretation the intelligent reader could form of Pale Fire is that the odd neighbor of our poet John Shade is in fact the king of a faraway frozen land, living in exile in New Wye, Nabokov's stand-in for New York. At the next level of interpretation the reader will conclude that it is not the case that the neighbor is an exiled king but a mentally ill person suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, multiple personality disorder, superiority complex, as well as a host of other things.

What struck me in Boyd's exploration of this second level of interpretation is the extent to which this neighbor draws from his surroundings to construct his magical frozen kingdom. The photographs on the wall of his rented home become characters in his story. Details of the outside world come from the set of encyclopedias along the walls. As for his academic colleagues (he is, after all, a professor at the same university where John Shade teaches), he transforms those into political extremists in search of his treasure, the crowned jewels.

And there is one major detailed I missed in reading Pale Fire for which I am grateful to Boyd here. The man who shot John Shade in the heart did in fact kill the man he aimed at, though not his intended target. The man who shot Shade was no assassin from a foreign land as the mentally ill neighbor believes but another mentally ill person who mistakes Shade for a man who had wronged him. This mentally ill person's name is Jack Grey, an escapee from an asylum. It is in response to this man that our neighbor extends his persecution complex and his paranoia, of which 40 per cent of his text is concerned with.

What about Boyd's central thesis? Let's state what it is first: The poem Pale Fire by John Shade and its booklong commentary provided by our unstable neighbor are in fact written by them but at the influence of the wraithish presence of Shade's daughter, Hazel, who committed suicide and who can be seen to be at the heart of the poem. What speaks against this claim? Little textual evidence, and what is called up by Boyd seems to point to a less definite conclusion that I think coheres with a more reasonable thesis.

Here is my thesis of Pale Fire, though I could be wrong. Pale Fire is a book that explores how art helps us wrestle with and can comfort us when we are faced with the limitations of our own mortality. That is awfully high-falutin' but I think it's correct and rather rich. Let's explore.

Art for Nabokov is about "turning accident into ornament," imposing meaning onto a series of what seem like random events. In particular, the poet in the novel, John Shade, is trying to come to terms with his daughter's suicide. There may or may not be life beyond the grave. There in the book, it does seem, following an extremely convincing section by Boyd, that Shade's aunt Maud is or is believed to be communicating with Hazel after death, warning her not to go on a date the night she will kill herself. It also seems, in line with Boyd's argumentation, that Hazel either is or embodies in Shade's mind reincarnated as the butterfly the Red Admirable. But the book does not demonstrate, contrary to Boyd's claim, that anyone is definitely communicating beyond the grave, though they might be. The ambiguity is what helps give body to the poem and the narrative commentary.

Let's explore the importance of accident in art a little more. Definitely life's accidents can be shaped into art, and all the better for it, because then through the art we can make sense of something that seemed as though it did not make sense. This is relevant to the work because the accidental meeting of John Shade and the mentally unstable neighbor does point to an influence they have on each other, though it's not the kind of influence our neighbor tells us it is. The neighbor would have us believe that he can find traces of his invented fairy-tale kingdom in the poem Shade wrote. In a sense, he is right. The neighbor's occasions to talk with Shade did actually appear to spark in the poet some lines of thought to pursue in the poem. One salient example: the neighbor shares that his uncle once flew in airplane into the side of a building; this reminds Shade of the time he witnessed a bird, the waxwing, crash into a windowpane when Shade was just a boy--and this is the central image that sparks the poem! The influence runs the other way as well. Shade's preoccupation with his daughter's suicide leads our neighbor to reflect on his own suicidal thoughts. Shade's assassination leads our neighbor to make up a story about an attempt on his life.

These accidental influences make the story richer, and I'm grateful for Boyd for influencing me. Now as I read Pale Fire, I see it with fresh eyes. Thank you, Mister Boyd.

First, let me state that this must be the best single analysis of Nabokov’s marvelous work. It enhanced my enjoyment and understanding of the book — particularly Shade’s poem — and peeled layer upon layer of allusions, puzzles, and links between poem and commentary with which Nabokov accreted his finest book.

That said, there is something rather amusing and, well, Kinbotean about reading a 320 page book of commentary full of out-there theories about a 180 page insane commentary of a 999 line poem. But this is all part of the fun. Boyd is an enthusiastic teacher and the perfect guide.

Great, if you want to know what the fuck is going on in Pale Fire. Some nice general information on how to read and specifically how to read Nabokov.

If you’re on a reread of the novel, I would highly recommend this. After a first-time read I feel it wouldn’t quite work – Boyd REALLY goes into the minutiae of the text but even then, there’s so much Nabokov throws at the reader that it’s not like he ruins the book or anything. Though I would wonder if Nabokov would see him as Kinboting (or is it Botkining?) his work. I loved the explication of the supernatural elements of the novel (the butterflies) – pretty mind-blowing and again was just another mirror of the act of reading the book itself – the stories (there are several!) being channeled by the reader as they create the novel in their mind.

At the very least, it just raises my love for Pale Fire, and makes me want to read it again! Though maybe in another ten years – so many books….

Boyd offers solid analysis on Nabokov as usual. This book gave tremendous insight into Pale Fire which made me update my rating for it from a 4-star book to a 5-star book. The first ~70 pages of this book would warrant five stars. However, as Boyd progresses, I feel like he goes off on tangents and finds things that simply aren't there (ironic, because that's what he accused Mary McCarthy of doing). Furthermore, he has this morbid obsession of defending Nabokov at every turn,(trying to portray him as a saint when he definitely was a controversial man) especially his ghastly translation of Eugene Onegin. 4 stars out of 5.

Is it just me or is Boyd just crazy