I started reading this book shortly after I finished Pale Fire. I wish I had managed to read the whole thing when it was fresh in my mind. I also think my understanding of the various analyses and theories would have benefitted from having read Pale Fire multiple times. Some of the things Boyd says my gut reaction is to say, whoah now, you're reading way too much into this, but then he gives some good evidence that Nabokov did put really obscure/abstruse things in his novels.

Very interesting. Boyd convinced me that Hazel - in the form of a butterfly - tries to lure Shade away from his imminent murder. But Boyd's larger claim, that Shade's ghost helps Kinbote write the commentary, is as useless as the Shadean hypothesis itself. Look, Shade's poem is in part a serious attempt to deal with his daughter's suicide. The idea that Shade's ghost would actually assist a critic, Kinbote, who solely wished to impose his own story upon the poem, turns Shade from a nice guy who sympathized with the hard-to-love Kinbote into a selfless saint who wouldn't mind donating his final major poem towards Kinbote's cracked Zembla project. Boyd, like any other critic dazzled by the conspiratorial tracking of intertextual correspondence between the poem and commentary, ignores the question of plausible character motivation in arguing for his "solution" to the novel.

Astonishing lit-crit of the greatest novel ever written, damn I missed so much until I read this and reread Pale Fire again (a few times). Boyd is incapable of writing a banal book.

A definite nessecity in trying to find out what is REALLY going on in Pale Fire. If you love Nabokov, this is the book for you.

Fascinating and (mostly) convincing. Boyd writes with clarity and an obvious love for the source material (as well as a barely-surpressed distain for TS Eliot). The insights into Nabokov and his metaphysics are extremely interesting.

Does it take itself too seriously? At times, yes. But I'd recommend it to anyone looking to get a little deeper into Pale Fire.

Well, damn. while this criticism itself does not achieve greatness, it is marvelously insightful about what is apparently a very complex novel.

i was relieved to find i was not the only one made dizzy by that book. but hazel from beyond the grave? come on now. that seems shady.