Pale Fire

You basically have two choices when you read Pale Fire: you can spend a few hours trying to puzzle out all the layers of metatextual games Nabokov troweled onto it, flipping back and forth between notes chasing what's "real" and "not real"; or you can just read it more or less straight through and treat the highbrow critical theory stuff as a neat but secondary adornment over Nabokov's typically lovely, erudite, I-can't-believe-he's-not-a-native-English-speaker prose. I mostly took the second path, because, while I always appreciate it when smart authors try to do cool stuff, I found the number of loose ends piling up as the novel progressed to be a little much, and I'm not sure that putting in the extra effort would have been show more rewarded.

I learned from the Wikipedia article that this type of metafiction falls into a sub-category called a "poioumenon", although the ostensible narrator's role in creating the central poem gives it an almost "Künstlerroman"-ish aspect. Then again, Kinbote's parodic professor character also hints at "roman à clef" elements as well. All these non-English terms are giving me a powerful desire to drink a domestic light beer and advocate the bombing of a foreign country, so I'll just cut to the chase. The novel's structure is four simple sections:
- a hilariously overblown Foreword, at the end of which the author, one Professor Charles Kinbote, helpfully advises us to buy 2 copies of the book so that we can better appreciate his marginal notes to a poem by John Shade, a lately deceased colleague/friend of his.
- a 999-line poem in four cantos called Pale Fire, which, while it comes off as deliberately bad, actually sort of grew on me as I was reading it (the opening lines "I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure of the windowpane" makes me smile for some reason).
- a Commentary on the poem by Kinbote purporting to explain the poem's hidden references to the escape of the king of Zembla from his native country, which is by far the longest part of the book and where it gets weird.
- a short Index at the back containing a bunch of jokes at the reader's expense (I particularly liked the definition for Word Golf - "pale fire" itself seems to be playable, if that means anything).

The book's reputation really comes from the conceptual stuff in the Commentary, which is admittedly pretty clever. Before the Commentary really gets going, the default reader behavior is to simply take Kinbote at his word that he's just annotating this poem for his dead friend; if he seems just a little too attached to it, then it's easy to assume he's merely eccentric/obsessive/extremely boring. The town of New Wye that he lives in is obviously fake, but fake in the sense that Superman's Metropolis is fake - a story needs to be set somewhere. "Plausibly fictional", if that means anything. Then he starts really getting into the Zembla stuff, and it becomes apparent that Nabokov has made it very tricky to sort out exactly what's supposed to be "true" within the confines of the story and what's not. Obviously Shade's poem is not, as Kinbote would have it, a coded cipher of the story of the king of Zembla (and in fact seems to bear basically no relationship at all to Kinbote's exegesis), but what really is Shade's relationship to Kinbote, or Kinbote's to the king of Zembla? Maybe Kinbote is the king? Maybe Zembla, and Kinbote himself, don't actually exist at all? Many long academic papers have been written on this, and even though I'm not going to read them, it's somewhat reassuring to know that I'm not the only one who couldn't quite keep the levels of meta straight after one read.

The problem is that, despite this being a cool concept, and Nabokov's impressive abilities to conjure up all these overlapping violations of reader expectations, I found many of the actual pages of rarefied drollery kind of boring. For example, does it actually mean anything that the note to line 408 in the Commentary has the kid wearing four different types of shorts in the span of a few paragraphs ("a leopard-spotted loincloth", "ivy", "black bathing trunks", and "white tennis shorts")? Is the proto-hypertextual linking of the various notes to each other a clever way to dazzle the reader, or just a premonition of the tedious footnote-trawling gimmickry that Infinite Jest would later exploit? What do all of the subtle references to poetry, drama, previous Nabokov works, and so on eventually add up to? Do I really have to pretend that stuff like "In Zembla, where most females are freckled blondes, we have the saying: belwif ivurkumpf wid spew ebanumf, 'A beautiful woman should be like a compass rose of ivory with four parts of ebony.'" isn't sort of beneath Nabokov's talent?

Still, despite myself I did find it interesting to follow Nabokov around in the book. There's some good wordplay, and it doesn't feel bloated like Infinite Jest did. Lolita is a far better book, however. Games are cool, but I like to win them sometimes - I'm not sure there is anything to win after finishing Pale Fire. show less

Reading Pale Fire seems almost as though you're on the defensive end of a game of chess with Nabokov. You're never really centered in the present, one is always thinking of the past and future events taking place within the narrative, and every time you think you've got things figured out old Vlad throws you completely off kilt with his latest move.

Once you get past the title page Nabokov's novel becomes the combined work of two fictional authors. There is a posthumously published poem by the famed American author John Shade with commentary and an introduction by his mysterious neighbor Charles Kinbote. Kinbote proves to be quite possibly the least reliable narrator of all time. Throughout the commentary the reader begins to question show more if he really exists at all. Kinbote harbors some resentment towards Shade, as he believed the poem would be based around the epic story of a deposed king of Kinbote's homeland, Zembla. His bitter attitude towards Shade's wife is also some of the funniest material in the book.

An especially tasty bit of humor for me, is that this apparent parody of literary criticism has spawned so many variant readings and arguments among critics since its publication. In all I spent about 2 months on this "short" book (It tops off at about 215 pages). I read and reread. I read straight though, then read again skipping between the commentary and the poem. I still have no idea whether Kinbote is Zembla's king in hiding; if he's a deranged man and his "homeland" is all his own invention; if he is an invention of Shade's, who's own death is mythical as well; if Gradus's poorly aimed bullets spared the king to kill the poet; or if the assassin was just escaped lunatic Jack Grey...

If you want a traditional who-done-it type novel where there are no questions left in the end (in which case I don't know why you'd be reading Nabokov anyway) I'd say skip it. If you have an off-beat sense of humor and enjoy literary games, you'll probably add this to your list of favorites. show less

One man's madness ...
Pale Fire explores the wayward mind of Charles Kinbote, a university teacher brimming with outrageous delusions.
Firstly, he believes himself to be the exiled King of Zembla (Zembla being a "distant northern land" in the vain of Hyperborea or, say, Avalon).
Secondly, Kinbote is obsessed with an old poet named John Shade, who just happens to live across the street near the campus, and it's with Shade's latest and last poem that the novel begins, a poem which Kinote utterly misinteprets as being about his life in the kingdom of Zembla and his daring escape to America from a plot to assassinate him.
The result of all this delusion is a humorous, puzzling, and elegantly imaginative account of one man's insanity, a madness show more that turns out to be strangely endearing, and which during its exposure invites the reader to decipher the truth of what really happened.
Concisely extravagant and weirdly exotic - some say Nabokov's finest novel, some may be perturbed by the foibles of the writer - overall an intriguing mix of fantasy and reality, truth and lies. show less

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. show more 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. show less

People are usually exaggerating when they say this, but I do mean it: I don't believe I've read anything quite like Pale Fire. It's a work that reels you in with the streamlined whimsy of its narrator, Charles Kinbote, but rather than taking you on the expected path, you detour a numerous amount of times through the postmodern landscape of Kinbote's mind, Nabokov's yarn unraveling toward who knows where. This is a book that's unapologetically confusing, reminiscent of the lucid madness found in Poe's stories yet much more volatile and deceptive in its presentation.

Contributing well to the strangeness of the threads of story is Nabokov's writing style, or rather, the style that he instills within Kinbote. There is a practiced lilt show more in-between caesuras; the "fancy prose style" at once believable and constant throughout the novel (and for such a heady brew of prose, it's hard to even believe that the style was maintained to such an immaculate degree, but the book is before us; a testament to negative capability). Here is one of the more memorable bits that stuck with me from inside:

"One's eyes could not follow the rapid butterfly in the sunbeams as it flashed and vanished, and flashed again, with an almost frightening imitation of conscious play which now culminated in its setting upon my delighted friend's sleeve. It took off, and we saw it next morning sporting in an ecstasy of frivolous haste around a laurel shrub, every now and then perching on a lacquered leaf and sliding down its grooved middle like a boy down the banister on his birthday. Then the tide of the shade reached the laurels, and the magnificent, velvet-and-flame creature dissolved in it."

As Borges favored his Chinese boxes, Nabokov too favors the meta technique that has since grown to be sublimated into the mainstream and used by many writers to weave their tales. However, nothing written in Pale Fire is serendipitous nor extraneous; a multitude of poetic expression builds up just enough of the book's world that not a word goes to waste. Nabokov expects nothing and everything of those who read this--to not fully comprehend every wild diversion or outlier, not even the main story in full, but to appreciate and figure out why this work is the way it is. In the wake of Nabokov's dismantling of the conventional, he's picked up the pieces and reconstructed it into fabulation fused with metered deliberation, hiding semblance and clues beneath the distracting veneer of Kinbote's genial wit and gifted speech.

Alas, there is so little time for me to dive into the aftermath of this book--i.e. essays, others' speculation, etc.--that I feel I'm doing it a disservice with such a short review. I'm going to be feeling the itch of this one for a while, for sure. And now, with a foggy head from reaching Pale Fire's end, I depart from this first foray into Nabokov, satisfied and eager to see what else he's penned upon the page. show less

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.

A tour de force of clever narrative structure and allusion and send-up of academic scholarship, I am always staggered by Nabokov's brilliance but often left cold by his characters. So it is here for me.