Too Post Modern for my taste. The book is excellently written and could be enjoyable except for all the word games, pomo tricks, allusions, and so forth that I was constantly stumbling over as if Nabokov were little Jack Horner, declaring what a smart boy am I.

Not my cuppa. ( )

It can kind of be slow at times, but it doesn't really get boring because the prose is beautiful. Nabokov can string together words like no other to create powerful imagery. The idea of it, the 999 line poem, is fantastic. Is the poem actually great or is it garbage? I love this piss take of academia (or is it???), and the themes of obsession and the deception that Nabokov uses. You never are really sure what's going on, what's true and what's not, but it's interesting because of that. ( )

Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire is both odd and powerfully written. It is a masterwork of creation: who but Nabokov would have thought to write a book like this? In fact, Pale Fire is so odd, I have a hard time calling it a novel.

Pale Fire has two main parts. One part is a 999-line poem (about 30 pages) by the recently deceased (fictional) John Shade. The other part is (fictional) Professor Charles Kinbote’s commentary on the poem (about 185 pages). Nabokov has expertly woven a completely unrelated commentary in with a fairly coherent poem. Trust me: it is funny, in a subtle way.

In his forward, Kinbote carefully explains that we should begin with reading his commentary, and only reference the poem on occasion. Kinbote believes his commentary shares the real meaning of Shade’s poem.

I did not trust Kinbote’s instructions for reading the book, just as I didn’t trust most of what he said. And yet, there is a humor behind his conceit and pride. From the beginning of that forward, the reader began to suspect that something was not quite right with Kinbote and his commentary. Kinbote has his own story to share, all about his native country of Zembla, and he sees everything through that filter. Kinbote’s conceit got on my nerves to some extent. I laughed out loud a little, but by the end I was a bit tired of Kinbote’s long-winded discourses on Zembla.

I think the deeper purposes behind this book are beyond me after one read. Pale Fire is a book one can dissect for years and still not understand completely. In the end, I am torn between thinking Pale Fire is genius because of how Nabokov set it up and being completely annoyed by Kinbote’s self-conceit and cluelessness. I do acknowledge that it was a fascinating concept and somewhat amusing to read, albeit irritating at points.

More on my blog

I can't imagine how I missed out on reading Nabokov's masterpiece [Pale Fire] for all these years. I am thrilled to have made the acquaintance of this remarkable text. A shimmering puzzle of poetry and prose, it defies classification.

The book purports to be the annotated posthumous publication of poet John Shade's final four cantos, an autobiographical poem that explores the meaning of life and art. The notes are written by a neighbor in the insulated university town where Shade lived and works. The poem's notes quickly dispense with any pretense of explicating the poem and instead recount the commentator's life and his relationship with the poet and his wife. The commentator casts himself as the exiled ruler of the northern kingdom of Zembla. He believed his epic tale to be worthy of commemoration and, as he ardently pursues a friendship with the poet John Shade, he hopes Shade will find the words to frame his story and praise the beauties of his glorious land. His growing frustration at Shade's autobiographical poem, which fails to capitalize on the brilliant material he has supplied, builds throughout the notes.

The book is rife with word play, characters leading double lives and outright lies in places. At many junctures, Nabokov's presence is palpable and the reader is left to wonder which fictional characters and which fictional events are imaginary and which are real … quite a feat for a work of fiction. The bizarre commentary and index at the end of the book give the careful reader many clues that only raise more questions and leave the reader anxious to start unraveling the puzzle all over again. ( )

Spoilers throughout.

Pale Fire is Lolita’s sister and artistic equal, and as such is one of the very best English novels of the 20th century. Both novels were created by Nabokov at the arrogant peak of his inventive and intellectual powers in the 1950‘s and early sixties. Arrogant because he is the first to tell you that he thinks like a genius. More interestingly, he had unshakable ideas on what the art of literature is and heaped scorn on those whose different approach did not meet his standards: Faulkner, Dostoevsky, Mann, Eliot, Poe, Hemingway. On the other hand he was quite generous in his praise of those that with certain works met his criteria for real genius: Chateaubriand, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Joyce, Proust.

The inspiration for the structure of Pale Fire: Foreword, Poem, Commentary, Index: was born in Nabokov’s 10 years of scholarly work (1954-64) translating Eugene Onegin into English. (Naturally, he used Onegin’s commentary as a platform to rain fire on other translators, by-standing 18th and 19th century poets and writers, stupid readers and politicians. Still, he comes across as the most scholastic scholar that ever schooled.) Imitated since, this structure was first applied to the novel form by Nabokov. It is the artistic purpose of the structure that should be noted: it highlights the connections between different parts of the novel. Commentary makes connections within the Poem, Index makes connections within the Commentary. Pale Fire is a novel about connections, the links and bobolinks. I feel the Index replaces Nabokov’s usual Introduction or Afterword to his novels, where he highlights the links between certain themes, like the Vanessa butterfly in this novel, that the reader may have missed.

The Poem is by Samuel Johnson look-alike John Shade, who is a stylized Nabokov. The poem is autobiographical, covering Shade’s father and mother’s death when he was a child, his surrogate mother’s death, his love for his wife, the excruciating suicide of his only daughter and finally his own death. The pain of the earlier deaths are assuaged when Shade discovers a reasonable hope for an afterlife.

The Foreword and Commentary are by Charles Kinbote, piss-poor scholar, neighbor and lunatic. He also is a stylized Nabokov, borrowing his exile status and talent at writing prose. Although one crucial note regarding The Haunted Barn and The Nature of Electricity complement the theme of an afterlife, most of the commentary is on the surface about Kinbote’s attempts to befriend Shade and have him weave Kinbote’s fantasies into a poem. The fantasies are of the last Zemblan king: his youth; the death of his father, mother, friend Oleg; his impossible doomed marriage to Disa; his captivity after the Zemblan revolution; and his colorful escape to America. Another figment of Kinbote’s imagination, the King’s would be assassin, Gradus, is weaved in after the fact.

The poem and commentary unite in the non-existent Line 1000.

In The Art of Literature and Commonsense, Nabokov writes, "Lunatics are lunatics just because they have thoroughly and recklessly dismembered a familiar world but have not the power---or have lost the power---to create a new world as harmonious as the old." Was that the genesis of Kinbote? He is a lunatic and an artist, and ironically his artistry is sharpened by his madness. His created Zembla is a vivid and harmonious world. His powers are equal to Shade’s (how could they not be?); so much so that the variants are indistinguishable from Shade and I believe lines 609-616 were created by Kinbote and inserted by him into the poem---I mean, if literary characters were real people and thereby capable of such behavior.

Lizst remarked that Shakespeare held up the mirror to Nature; Nabokov does the same, but his Nature is a great deceiver. Typically puns, charades, multiple languages, puzzles, unreliable narrators and a vocabulary beyond the usage of Mr. Parr, are his devices for deceit. Bombycilla, luciola, ingle, inenubilable---my word processor shows these all as misspelled. But there is an artistic method to it: Nabokov can hide his meaning in plain sight like a evolutionarily adapted bug. If you don’t know French or are too incurious to heft a thick dictionary, you lose. Nowadays, even the laziest person can google, though, can’t they? The copious allusions are another device that add to the themes while still keeping them secret (did you read Timon of Athens or Pope’s disastrous Essay on Man?).

By his art, noticing the connections, Shade and I think Nabokov, hope to escape from Time, Chance and Death. This doomed attempt to see the world as “fantastically planned, richly rhymed” can make even a prickly, disagreeable fellow like Nabokov seem sympathetic. That humans can take two unrelated things and relate them as in an Eisensteinian montage, is simply a consequence of how human brains have evolved, not proof of a Grand Designer that is connecting the things for us to discover later. Anything can be endlessly redescribed, endlessly recontextualized, endlessly connected to other things. But this is a work of art, and even Kinbote’s wild, idiosyncratic connections are planned and fit in with Shade’s. Thus, concerning his own work, it is best to let the artist have the last word.

Afterthought #1. If the reader imagines the pretty, skipping deer as a child then The Nymph complaining for the death of her Faun becomes a poem of profound unbearable grief. I dont know how Sybil Shade could have made her way through it without a mental breakdown. Incidentally, it is the connection made in the note to Line 678 that introduced me to Andrew Marvell’s genius.

Afterthought #2. Charles X telling Disa he did not love her was another extremely moving and sad part of the novel. Even Charles is haunted by something. ( )