Pale Fire (1962)

I first read Pale Fire more than 25 years ago when it seemed wonderfully clever and amusing. Andrea Pitzer's marvellous study, The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov, led me back to read Pale Fire again. It hasn't worn well. The immense body of exegetical scholarship which it has accumulated over the years seems only to make the faults more painfully apparent. The book is certainly a puzzler's delight and it has some interesting implications with respect to the decline of Nabokov's powers as a novelist after Lolita. Neither of these interests is sufficient to redeem Pale Fire.
It is unnecessary to recapitulate the structure or plot of the novel. Other reviewers have done so with admirable brevity. My comments will be mostly negative. First: Kinbote, the deranged critic/commentator who will occupy most of the reader's time, is a repellent creation and, far worse than that, he is consistently obtuse and almost always trivial. Nabokovian prose and a diverting set of word and plot puzzles aren't sufficient to place Charles Kinbote among the emotionally or intellectually engaging characters in the literary pantheon. Nor can Kinbote be defended as some kind of hilarious, biting or penetrating portrait of some recognisable variety of critic or commentator. He is too silly, too consistently wrong or obtuse. Second: John Shade's poem, from which the novel takes its title, sags terribly in its final canto. Even Kinbote concedes that Canto 4 is a failure. It begins with false grandiloquence: 'Now I shall spy on beauty as none as spied on it yet...&' and declines thereafter into the bathos of Shade shaving in his bathtub. What interest the last canto has derives from the reader's foreknowledge that it will never be completed and that Shade will be the unintended victim of the assassin Gradus or Grey.
Three stars for the remnants of Nabokov's craft as a prose stylist. And, too, for the heart-searing pain of Canto 2 of Pale Fire, which recounts the life and suicide of John Shade's poor ugly duckling daughter, Hazel. Here, the cruelty of the novelist as creator goes hand in hand with his compassion for the suffering which he inflicts on his creations. ( )

I think it's best to ignore all the scholarship and just read this one, if you haven't. You can read that stuff later if you like. If you know English departments and the world of literary criticism, or just have some familiarity with the world of high-powered hypocritical academia, that certainly helps.

It is hysterically funny, and creepy, subtle and theatrical, and the only experimental novel I know of whose form is truly intrinsically tied to its function. Many novels with strange forms could have been told in a more straightforward way. Not this one.

You can just read it cover to cover. But I would strongly recommend reading it with two bookmarks, and following every endnote and cross-reference. ( )

Six-word review: Difficult, dazzling fictional coup by virtuoso.

Extended review:

No one with a shred less intellectual and literary confidence--even, I would say, arrogance--than the likes of Lolita's Nabokov would have dared to construct a 999-line verse that is at once brilliant and brilliantly bad and then append to it a novel in the guise of scholarly annotations.

I read my first Nabokov novel (it was Despair, his characteristically unorthodox contribution to Doppelgänger literature) in the 1960s and immediately became a fan. I read his novels one after another, his autobiography, his criticism, his lectures. At one time I loved Ada above all other novels. I was dazzled by the author's erudition and his fierce, unforgiving intelligence. I was in awe of his command of our language, not even his native tongue, in which he moved as through a tesseract, inhabiting dimensions that most of us could not even conceive. He played with English like Thor playing with thunderbolts, handling them like toys, but never, ever in the absence of absolute control.

And yet when I tried to read Pale Fire in about 1969 or 1970, I bogged down early and just could not push myself through it.

Pale Fire sat on my shelf--or actually a considerable succession of shelves in two states--until a few weeks ago. After reading Danielewski's House of Leaves and finding myself stymied in my attempt to write a review, I became aware that I could not accomplish that feat without first knowing Pale Fire. And so at last I read it.

Now I find myself oddly compelled (a) to give it five stars and (b) to not recommend it.

There is something almost embarrassing about the spectacle that this work presents, as if we were accidentally to espy the speaker fondling a ladies' silken undergarment and realize a moment too late that we ought to look away.

And yet we know that he knows we're watching, and catching us in the act of involuntary but fascinated voyeurism seems to be exactly his intention. We are the Biter Bit.

Not that I would say to anyone "Don't read it." I think it's a great work and continues to merit major attention. But it possesses such a quality of autonomous self-sufficiency that it seems indifferent to opinion and makes fools of us for trying to express one: as if we were to emerge, speechless, from a stunning performance of an operatic masterwork and overhear a bumpkin behind us gush, "That guy wrote really good music." How dare we judge it?

Story. The story. All right. It's a first-person narrative by one Charles Kinbote, putative professor of literature at a fictitious American college, who asserts a claim to the intimate friendship of a recently deceased poet by the name of John Shade. Kinbote takes it upon himself to publish a heavily annotated version of Shade's last work of verse. The annotations constitute not only an autobiography of Kinbote, whose personal history as a refugee from the fictitious European kingdom of Zembla is rife with political and sexual intrigue, but a catalogue of personal grievances by a self-avowed victim of endless private and public injustices. Converging paths lead to murder and leave the fate of John Shade's final opus in the hands of the quintessential unreliable narrator.

As the layers of self-revelation unfold and coy hints become an ever-broader trail of clues, we are led to wonder whether there is any narrative truth to be found in this deeply paranoid fantasy whose self-delusion appears from the first moment, with expressions of abject admiration for a poet who writes such lines as this (183-194):

=====(Excerpt begins)

The little scissors I am holding are
A dazzling synthesis of sun and star.
I stand before the window and I pare
My fingernails and vaguely am aware
Of certain flinching likenesses: the thumb,
Our grocer's son; the index, lean and glum
College astronomer Starover Blue;
The middle fellow, a tall priest I knew;
The feminine fourth finger, an old flirt;
And little pinky clinging to her skirt.
And I make mouths as I snip off the thin
Strips of what Aunt Maud used to call "scarf skin."

=====(Excerpt ends)

Nabokov knows exactly how banal this is, and yet he carries off the banality with such audacity of style and such intermittent exhibitions of genius that we cannot doubt he strikes precisely the note he means to sound.

The first of many puzzles that the reader must solve is simply how to read this multidimensional work to which there is no such thing as a linear approach.

I read it using two bookmarks, often with my fingers in several pages at once, and rereading sections in overlapping sequence while also following cross-references forward and backward. From foreword to index, I read every word, because every word from the beginning of the foreword to the end of the index is part of the story.

When I reached the end, I felt both satisfied and mystified, as though I had dived into the depths and seen strange creatures not of land--but also sensed the merest fraction of the depths not yet attained.

And those depths, if I could but see into them--I'm certain they'd be mocking me. ( )

A book in two parts: a 999-line poem in four cantos by the fictional American poet John Shade, and the "commentary" to the poem by narrator Charles Kinbote (or Charles the Beloved, last king of Zembla - or Charles the insane). The commentary has little to do with the contents of the poem but instead consists mostly of the commentator's - i.e. Charles' - autobiographical story of his royal life in Zembla, his escape and journey to America, and his "friendship" with his neighbor, the poet John Shade. The commentary also contains the story of Gradus the assassin as he makes his way from Zembla across Europe to America, and concludes this journey by assassinating the wrong target. Certainly, a unique structure for a story.

The house itself is much the same.
(line 58, p. 35)

Life is a message scribbled in the dark.
Anonymous.
(lines 35-36, p. 41)

All doors have keys.
(crossed-out, commentary, p. 94)

He, too, is to meet, in his urgent and blind flight, a reflection that will shatter him.
(commentary, p. 135)

"Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one."
(John Shade, commentary, p. 225)

"That is the wrong word," he said. "One should not apply it to a person who deliberately peels off a drab and unhappy past and replaces it with a brilliant invention. That's merely turning a new leaf with the left hand."
(Shade, commentary, p. 238)

We must assume, I think, that the forward projection of what imagination he had, stopped at the act, on the brink of all its possible consequences; ghost consequences...which have no effect whatever on his real moves...
(commentary, p. 276) Here the narrator/commentator Charles Kinbote refers to the assassin Gradus (Jack Grey). It is an interesting observation about fixation upon an object or goal; the concentration on this object obscures logical thought and precludes thinking through consequences or results that may occur at a point in time after the goal has been accomplished.

( )

This is the book that let me see that 'post-modern' fiction can be fun and rewarding at the same time that it is challenging and subversive; it doesn't all have to be literary wanking. The story unfolds in the guise of a collection of poems by character John Shade with an accompanying commentary by stalker-fan Charles Kinbote.

As we read through the poems, and especially Kinbote's commentary (which is more about himself and his own delusional pre-occupations than the poems it professes to expound upon), we begin to see the outlines of a harrowing story of fannish self-absorption and tragic genius. Nabokov's unreliable narrator is once again present and we must carefully sift through everything told to us in an attempt to discover what really happened to John Shade, just who is Charles Kinbote, and what, if any, meaning resides in the poetry of 'Pale Fire'?

An excellent and challenging read that ranks among Nabokov's best. ( )