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    Pale Fire
    Pale Fire
    Pale Fire
    Ebook313 pages4 hours

    Pale Fire

    By Vladimir Nabokov

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    A darkly comic novel of suspense, literary idolatry and one-upmanship, and political intrigue from one of the leading writers of the twentieth century, the acclaimed author of Lolita.

    "Half-poem, half-prose...a creation of perfect beauty, symmetry, strangeness, originality and moral truth. One of the great works of art of this century." —Mary McCarthy, New York Times bestselling author of The Group
     
    An ingeniously constructed parody of detective fiction and learned commentary, Pale Fire offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures, at the center of which is a 999-line poem written by the literary genius John Shade just before his death. Surrounding the poem is a foreword and commentary by the demented scholar Charles Kinbote, who interweaves adoring literary analysis with the fantastical tale of an assassin from the land of Zembla in pursuit of a deposed king. Brilliantly constructed and wildly inventive, Vladimir Nabokov's witty novel achieves that rarest of things in literature—perfect tragicomic balance.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKnopf Doubleday Publishing Group
    Release dateFeb 16, 2011
    ISBN9780307787651
    Pale Fire
    Author

    Vladimir Nabokov

    Vladimir Nabokov (San Petersburgo, 1899-Montreux, 1977), uno de los más extraordinarios escritores del siglo XX, nació en el seno de una acomodada familia aristocrática. En 1919, a consecuencia de la Revolución Rusa, abandonó su país para siempre. Tras estudiar en Cambridge, se instaló en Berlín, donde empezó a publicar sus novelas en ruso con el seudónimo de V. Sirin. En 1937 se trasladó a París, y en 1940 a los Estados Unidos, donde fue profesor de literatura en varias universidades. En 1960, gracias al gran éxito comercial de Lolita, pudo abandonar la docencia, y poco después se trasladó a Montreux, donde residió, junto con su esposa Véra, hasta su muerte. En Anagrama se le ha dedicado una «Biblioteca Nabokov» que recoge una amplísima muestra de su talento narrativo. En «Compactos» se han publicado los siguientes títulos: Mashenka, Rey, Dama, Valet, La defensa, El ojo, Risa en la oscuridad, Desesperación, El hechicero, La verdadera vida de Sebastian Knight, Lolita, Pnin, Pálido fuego, Habla, memoria, Ada o el ardor, Invitado a una decapitación y Barra siniestra; La dádiva, Cosas transparentes, Una belleza rusa, El original de Laura y Gloria pueden encontrarse en «Panorama de narrativas», mientras que sus Cuentos completos están incluidos en la colección «Compendium». Opiniones contundentes, por su parte, ha aparecido en «Argumentos».

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    Reviews for Pale Fire

    4/5

    1,647 ratings61 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Nabokov is a fantastic author, somewhat similar to JL Borges. I really liked the character development in Pale Fire. Kinbote? character is unbelievable, and I still don't know what to make of him. It becomes increasingly clear that he has some issues w delusion as the story progresses, esp at the end of the story.

      Other themes I enjoyed were the colors and butterflies, though I don't really understand their significance. I also found the sub theme of Hazel. Goethe's erl king concept was very interesting, as I never heard of it before. Want to read the story at some point.

      Definitely a book that I would take to a deserted island and reread many times. Would like a good annotated edition
    • 3/5
      I was looking forward to this given its reputation, and was disappointed - undeniably clever, literary, and innovative, it is nevertheless missing something... Soul? Heart? Significance? It feels like a book written for intellectuals buried deep in the English Department, and by all accounts it is excellent fodder for them.
    • 2/5
      I read the thousand-line poem and began on the commentary ... and just got bored. So I read about 30% of the book, and I didn't care for it.
      People with a better background in English, poetry or philosophy might find it fascinating & great.
    • 5/5
      I just finished this and wanted to get down some of my thoughts before reading any criticism. There is a severe thunderstorm passing through and a strange blue light is flashing on my street and I thought I saw sparks jump from a neighboring rooftop.

      I've been sick and bedridden all day which afforded me the time to read. This novel is meant to be a puzzle. Is Kinbote insane? Is Zembla real? What kind of literary graffiti has the narrator sprayed all over John Shade's poem? Where is Nabokov in all of this? Is he closer to the egomaniac "king" or the staid poet?

      What I love about this is that this seems to be a highly self-conscious act of the writer and professor unpacking what these jobs, these roles mean. The poem "Pale Fire" is itself, moving and elegiac. The stanzas about Shade's daughter's suicide are heartrending. Of course, Kinbote is not interested in the Shades' family drama.
    • 5/5
      i read the notes first, then stanza. if there were references to other notes in that note i jumped to the referred note and read that. suffice to say i was jumping around quite a bit. pretty fun.
    • 3/5
      It took me years to finish this novel. I started it several times but would never make it past the first twenty pages or so. I'm no stranger to postmodern literature, but this is such an oddly shaped novel: a poem and a series of footnotes to it. Even now it's unclear to me whether the poem is supposed to have any artistic value (although, now that I've read the whole book, I'm not sure it matters), and the footnotes don't serve their intended purpose; that at least was clear from the beginning.

      This time, I told myself that I'd finish the book no matter what, and I'm glad I did, because it quickly won me over. It is filled with allusions and references, both to itself and to other works, and that was initially very disruptive, but it becomes acceptable. It also helps that different parts of the book "rhyme" thematically with each other. Once the weirdness of the format fades away I could find a great deal of humanity in the main characters. John Shade, who tragically lost his daughter (and then his own life); Charles Kinbote, who is generally very disagreeable but also a tragic figure on his own right; and Gradus, who despite how negatively the narrator describes him I found some sympathy for (perhaps because of his extreme incompetence). Overall I was not too impressed, though. Given the complexity of the text I'll probably revisit in the future.

      The book is a bit of a puzzle box and invites theorizing on what's real in it and what's not, and who actually wrote it. I'm not very interested in solving the puzzle myself but there's a lot of good online essays on it. It's funny that Nabokov himself has given some views on the matter of authorship. I wonder if he did that to complicate the question even more. (The Death of the Author was published five years after Pale Fire).
    • 5/5
      ...I’m still chuckling! Nabokov must have enjoyed writing this clever novel. It consists of 4 parts: Forward, 999 line poem in 4 Cantos, Communentary, and Index, all written by a mad, unreliable narrator. You can read each part separately or you can flip back and forth from the poem to the commentary, occasionally consulting the index. Neither will spoil the enjoyment.
    • 5/5
      Read this book (audio) by Nabokov as part of TBR takedown challenge in 2019. I do think that this is a book that would be nice to have both audio and print book because it is a book with a unique structure. Written in 1962. It is about a poet and his 999 line poem with 4 cantos and his academic neighbor who writes the forward and commentary, so it is about two authors.
      Characters:
      Slade: the poet who wrote the poem Pale Fire (a title from Shakespeare).
      Kinbote: the self appointed editor of Slade's poem.

      There is a plot here and the reader can glean that from the comments my Kinbolt which really are not that much about the actual poem.

      Structure:
      Metafiction A form of literature where the reader is constantly aware of reading a work of fiction.
      poioumenon: literature that relies on narrative technique
      An example of hypertext.

      Plot; Shade's poem describes many aspects of his life.
      Canto 1 includes his early encounters with death and glimpses of what he takes to be the supernatural.
      Canto 2 is about his family and the apparent suicide of his daughter, Hazel Shade.
      Canto 3 focuses on Shade's search for knowledge about an afterlife, culminating in a "faint hope" in higher powers "playing a game of worlds" as indicated by apparent coincidences.
      Canto 4 offers details on Shade's daily life and creative process, as well as thoughts on his poetry, which he finds to be a means of somehow understanding the universe.

      In Kimbote's story we have 3 stories, one about himself, second story deals with King Charles II, third story is that of Gradus, an assassin dispatched by the new rulers of Zembla to kill the exiled King Charles

      Tite: title of John Shade's poem is from Shakespeare's Timon of Athens: "The moon's an arrant thief, / And her pale fire she snatches from the sun" (Act IV, scene 3), a line often taken as a metaphor about creativity and inspiration.

      There is debates about whether this is an actual story or a elaborate word play by Nabokov on literature and other social commentaries.

      The book (the poem) starts with these lines;
      I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
      By the false azure in the window pane

      I really liked this opening as it is so real. So many birds have been slain by my own windows. There are also references to his Lolita and Pnin. There are many references of culture, nature, and literature. So many, too many to list really.

      I will have to get me a paper copy of this book. It is too fantastic not to have it on the virtual shelf.
    • 4/5
      The ending was kind of a let down, I already knew the twist, I doubt Nabokov planned it to be a surprise, but that's not the problem, it lacked something, maybe more emotion, I don't think it was necessary to make it so obvious that Botnik was in fact crazy and all the story was a sham, the specific recalling on how he convinced Gray to lie for example, I don't know, the way it was written it felt forced, like Nabokov really needed to drive the point home and it had to be right now and very clear so nobody gets confused, ok?

      Taking that aside I really enjoyed the book, I loved Botnik's cluelessness about things like Sherlock Homes and biclycle-made luminiscates, he was so out of touch with the world, the way he needed to make everything about himself, many times just making a note to a word, not a verse, a word, that would tie nicely to whatever he wanted to say, he interpreted the poetry however it pleased him and had no interest at all really in Shade, just in the idea of him.

      I also want to mention that even though there are references to secrets at the beginning I thought they were talking about him being gay or something like that, and in retrospect I can see that it was always about him being the king and I love that, there must be so many things like that that I can't recall now but rereading would surely make me notice.

      I loved the book but still I couldn't recommend, except for someone that already likes Nabokov or this type of literature, it's a weird and resembles a puzzle at times and I greatly enjoyed it but it's not an easy read.

      More seriously the book one for a kind, an entire novel told in the commentary of a poem, I doubt there are many writers out there that could pull something like this, and with such care, and so beautifully written, there is beauty in the poem, and in the footnotes and it's a very different kind of beauty, they don't sound alike at all, Nabokov didn't pour all he had on the commentary and that's that, no, the poem is also perfectly written, in a way that serves the purpose of the commentary but doesn't have to sacrifice anything and can still be read as a stand alone, the last canto is weak that's true but it's also a work in progress and this shows too, it's amazing.
    • 5/5
      I feel like in order to really get everything out of this book, you probably need to read it more than once. There is so much detail and nuance that I must have missed some things.

      Everyone says (because it's true) that Nabokov is a master of language. Seriously, the man is (was) totally brilliant. So many quotable passages, so many incredible ideas, and a few heart-wrenching emotional parts as well.

      You have to read slowly and patiently and pay attention to detail. There's a lot going on and it pays off if you give it the proper time and attention.
    • 5/5
      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 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.
    • 4/5
      Nabokov is known for being the king of unreliable narrators and I still fell for this one. I love metatextual books like S. and House of Leaves, so of course when I found out that this was in the same vein it had to become my first Nabokov. An engrossing story told via commentary on the last poem by an aging poet - the ways in which the two have nothing to do with each other is fascinating. The Introduction in the Everyman's Library edition I have is excellent, too, and not only because it warns you ahead of time not to read the Introduction before you've read the book.
    • 5/5
      This beautiful and complicated novel rewards the reader on several levels, and that's just on first reading. It is elegantly structured. The first level looks simple enough -- an introduction of a poem, the poem itself, and then a series of notes on the poem -- but this explodes into complexity when you begin to understand just how unreliable a narrator we are dealing with, and just how wild are his beliefs about the poem (and about everything?) That makes it into a bit of a mystery. Who is the narrator? what is his real relation to the poet. The language of course is gorgeous (this is Nabokov, after all). Finally the whole thing is terribly funny, as an examination of delusion and as a takedown of the American liberal arts college. I plan to re-read the book, and to read a book of criticism about it ( Brian Boyd's "'Pale Fire': The Magic of Artistic Discovery"). After that I may revise the review, but for now I can only say how glad I am that I finally read it.
    • 4/5
      Pale Fire is a parody and a commentary wrapped in suspense. There are two central characters, poet John Francis Shade and self-appointed editor of Shade, Charles Kinbote. Right away there is a foreboding air about Kinbote. Something about him doesn't seem right. He asserts only one line is missing from the poem, the last one - line 1000. How does he know this after being Shade's neighbor for only five months (from February 5th, 1959 to July 21, 1959)? He admits that twenty years earlier he tried to translate Shade. The word tried implies he was unsuccessful. Why was that? When Kinbote first moved next door he wasn't invited into the Shade household. He was reduced to spying through the hedges and trees; an "orgy of spying" he admits (p 68).
      But, the poem nor Kinbote's relationship are the real focus of Pale Fire. Kinbote's commentary allows him to tell a fantastic story of an assassin from the fictional land of Zembla set out to kill a fictional king. I agreed with New York Times critic George Cloyne in that Pale Fire can't be read straight through with any satisfaction. It's a tale to be dipped into from time to time. Despite it being only 289 pages long it took me forever to finish.
    • 4/5
      Pale Fire, another "academic" novel by Vladimir Nabokov, is a fun romp. "Pale Fire" is the name of a long poem (not unlike "Eugene Onegin") by the poet and university professor John Shade, who dies very quickly after completing it. His neighbor, Charles Kinbote, also a professor and huge fan of Shade, manages to obtain the poem and writes the definitive line-by-line commentary to the poem, which is published together as the book "Pale Fire". As the commentary progresses, the reader learns of a nefarious plot hinted at in the poem, and fully explained by the commentator. Nabokov was having fun with the whole business of literary interpretation, and maybe forewarning the future readers of his own commentaries on "Eugene Onegin".

      [On an almost entirely unrelated note, I've had this paperback for many years, but never read it. When I opened it, I found a receipt from when I bought it around 1979 from a used bookstore called "Fahrenheit 451" in Laguna Beach. 'Pale Fire'? 'Fahrenheit 451'? Just a coincidence? I think not. :-) ]
    • 4/5
      Pale Fire is an experiment that cannot hide its actually conventional tendencies. It starts out with an introduction by the fictional Charles Kinbote followed by a 999-line poem by also fictional John Shade, after the poem are notes and commentary again by Charles Kinbote and then an Index apparently written by Kinbote, too. The commentary section is by far the biggest of these and as you read the notes you come to realize there is an over all plot although you sort of have to piece it together if you jump around as the notes reference other notes in the book.

      I don't think I'd count myself as Vladimir Nabokov's greatest fan having read his most famous book, Lolita. That is actually fairly strange because I do love puns and wordplay and Nabokov is very clearly one of the great foreign practitioners of English. I guess I find that his books have too much filler in them even though they aren't that long compared to say Leo Tolstoy or James Joyce's late masterpieces.

      Pale Fire is ultimately a worthy experiment and I commend Mr. Nabokov for having undertaken it. That being said I wouldn't rate it as highly as equally-if-not-moreso experimental At Swim-Two-Birds, which stands as a personal favorite of mine. I guess where I stand is Nabokov is intellectually stimulating enough and wants to be fun, but he isn't that fun. I don't know why. Maybe it's that his characters are ultimately rather blurry as opposed to vivid. He does a lot of telling with regards to them but he doesn't do enough showing, something James Joyce excelled at and which Flann O'Brien perhaps self-consciously self-skewered about. If there is a Nabokov train out there, I guess I've simply missed it.
    • 4/5
      Though I’ve seen Kubrick’s Lolita, and Nabokov is hardly a name unfamiliar to me, I’d never actually read any of his books. So I’m always on the look-out for copies of his novels in charity days. Except he doesn’t seem to be an author whose books are discarded much. But I did find Pale Fire – in Harrogate, no less – so of course I snapped it up. The back-cover copy makes quite a meal of descrbing Pale Fire as “an extraordinary, uncategorizable book”, which might well have been true in 1962 but feels a bit like over-selling in the twenty-first century. The story is told in the form of an introduction to a narrative poem, then the poem itself, and followed by copious (more than copious) notes on the poem. The author of the introduction and notes is not the author of the poem, but claims to have been the poet’s closest friend in the year leading up to his murder. Two things occurred to me as I read the book: a) the poem is actually complete doggerel, and b) the narrative voice reminded me throughout of Adam Roberts’s prose (there’s a particular line, “The crickets cricked”, which felt like it could have come from any random Roberts story). Threaded throughout the notes is the commentator’s own history, which involves some sort of Mittel-Europa principality whose monarchy was violently overthrown. The Appalachian academia and the Ruritanian adventure make for interesting bedfellows, and the prissy prose fitted the story extremely well. I liked it a lot and I plan to read more Nabokov.
    • 4/5
      A strange experience by any measure, Pale Fire also managed to upend my relationship with Nabokov.

      On one hand, his work is undeniably beautiful—full of sensory detail and keenly written sentences. But on the other hand, it's oddly un-evocative. The emotions ring hollow and perfunctory, constrained by wedding himself (twice now, counting Lolita) to the first-person voice of deranged protagonists. Maybe I'm too old for cleverness for cleverness' sake; Pale Fire has it in spades, but it ends up turning back on itself and adding to the emotional emptiness.

      Are these generally Nabokovian issues? Unsure, both if they are and whether I want to try another novel to find out.
    • 5/5
      This is a clever, wide-ranging and humorous novel. It purports to be an academic edition of a thousand line poem, the last work of the poet John Shade, with an introduction and critical notes by his fellow academic, friend and literary executor Charles Kinbote. As the book unfolds, Kinbote's impartiality and plausibility slip. He is revealed as a self-serving unreliable narrator whose only interest is his country, the "northern kingdom" of Zembla, and he is determined to present the poem as his own story, despite all the evidence. An elegant literary puzzle.
    • 5/5
      Nabokov's superb satire on literary criticism and academic politics. The story takes place in the footnotes where a competing and jealous poet attacks the creator's work in his editorial. It is also a commentary on state politics. A fascinating character study, with a unique narrative style. After you read Pale Fire, you never look at footnotes quite the same way again - they will always seem to be pretentious grand-standing. Which is what Nabokov makes a great deal of fun of.

      Highly recommended to anyone who has ever suffered through a literary research paper. Or has a career in academia.
    • 5/5
      An interesting meta fiction puzzle with a great poem at its heart. A shadow (shade) cannot exist without an object to cast it (kinbote) and a light source aimed at it (gradus). Not sure the invented places were necessary...perhaps Nabokov wanted another layer between reality and the pale fire image thereof.
    • 5/5
      How is Mr. Nabokov not one of our national heroes? I know he's Russian born, asswipe, but he loved, and wrote in, English. This guy blows my mind. I'm not going to review it. Others have done it better than I ever could, but you need to read this. It is important and funny and deep and has the best unreliable narrator I've come across so far.
    • 4/5
      A very unique style -- using the form of literary criticism to tell the story of 3 men whose lives intersect very briefly. The ostensible main character, the American poet & academic John Shade, gives his story in the form of a poem in 4 Cantos (written in a style somewhat reminiscent of Longfellow). The actual main character, the Zemblan exile Charles Kinbote, gives his story in the form of literary commentary on Shade's poem. Kinbote also includes in the commentary the story of the 3rd man, Jacob Gradus, who is also from Zembla & is on an assassination mission to kill the former King of Zembla.

      Nabokov doesn't deviate from the format of literary criticism one jot -- no subtle winks or nudges that this is all a big joke. He even includes a detailed Index at the end!
    • 5/5
      The Eccentric Professor Kinbote,(1)
      Was a king, or perhaps he was not,(2)
      He annotates Shade,(3)
      but his meaning betrayed,(4)
      Kin’s completely missing the plot.(5)

      (1) A professor at Wordsmith College, neighbor and friend to recently deceased lauded Poet John Shade. He is the protagonist among a cast of amusing characters in this non-linear metafictional work.
      (2) The story of the flight of the King of Zembla, a distant northern land in Europe, from his home and pursuit by an assassin is told amongst the other threads. It is unclear what Kinbote is that king in disguise, or just a Zemblan scholar.
      (3) Allegedly Kinbote is annotating John Shade’s poem about his life and the suicide of his daughter, but the notes are very distant from the text.
      (4) In his commentary Kinbote prefers to tell the story of his interactions with Shade, and attempts to read in his influence on the poem’s creation. He had been trying to convince Shade to write a poem about the flight of the King of Zembla.
      (5) Kinbote is both the most unreliable of narrators, on account of possibly being nuts, and is unable to actually discuss the poem in his annotations. It’s amazing, read Pale Fire.
    • 4/5
      Gets bonus points for a creative structure that didn't feel gimmicky. Probably requires another reading.
    • 5/5
      This is an amazing book, a feat of style and form and, just because of that, no the easiest read. yet, it is rewarding and interesting. Not exactly satisfying, mind you, but I find Nabokov never is. I could only read it in the mornings. Before bed, my brain would go into overdrive if i attempted more than 10 pages. Yet, there is enjoyment in this book, there are poetic moments, divine details and wonderful revelations. The introduction - poem - commentary - index format is difficult to pull without looking gimmicky, but Nabokov does it with grace and elegance. Shade, Kinbote and Gradus will stay with me for a long time.
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      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.

    Book preview

    Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov

    Pale Fire

    A   POEM   IN   FOUR   CANTOS

    CANTO ONE

        1  I was the shadow of the waxwing slain

    By the false azure in the windowpane;

    I was the smudge of ashen fluff—and I

    Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.

    And from the inside, too, I’d duplicate

    Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:

    Uncurtaining the night, I’d let dark glass

    Hang all the furniture above the grass,

    And how delightful when a fall of snow

      10  Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so

    As to make chair and bed exactly stand

    Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!

    Retake the falling snow: each drifting flake

    Shapeless and slow, unsteady and opaque,

    A dull dark white against the day’s pale white

    And abstract larches in the neutral light.

    And then the gradual and dual blue

    As night unites the viewer and the view,

    And in the morning, diamonds of frost

      20  Express amazement: Whose spurred feet have crossed

    From left to right the blank page of the road?

    Reading from left to right in winter’s code:

    A dot, an arrow pointing back; repeat:

    Dot, arrow pointing back … A pheasant’s feet!

    Torquated beauty, sublimated grouse,

    Finding your China right behind my house.

    Was he in Sherlock Holmes, the fellow whose

    Tracks pointed back when he reversed his shoes?

    All colors made me happy: even gray.

      30  My eyes were such that literally they

    Took photographs. Whenever I’d permit,

    Or, with a silent shiver, order it,

    Whatever in my field of vision dwelt—

    An indoor scene, hickory leaves, the svelte

    Stilettos of a frozen stillicide—

    Was printed on my eyelids’ nether side

    Where it would tarry for an hour or two,

    And while this lasted all I had to do

    Was close my eyes to reproduce the leaves,

      40  Or indoor scene, or trophies of the eaves.

    I cannot understand why from the lake

    I could make out our front porch when I’d take

    Lake Road to school, whilst now, although no tree

    Has intervened, I look but fail to see

    Even the roof. Maybe some quirk in space

    Has caused a fold or furrow to displace

    The fragile vista, the frame house between

    Goldsworth and Wordsmith on its square of green.

    I had a favorite young shagbark there

      50  With ample dark jade leaves and a black, spare,

    Vermiculated trunk. The setting sun

    Bronzed the black bark, around which, like undone

    Garlands, the shadows of the foliage fell.

    It is now stout and rough; it has done well.

    White butterflies turn lavender as they

    Pass through its shade where gently seems to sway

    The phantom of my little daughter’s swing.

    The house itself is much the same. One wing

    We’ve had revamped. There’s a solarium. There’s

      60  A picture window flanked with fancy chairs.

    TV’s huge paperclip now shines instead

    Of the stiff vane so often visited

    By the naïve, the gauzy mockingbird

    Retelling all the programs she had heard;

    Switching from chippo-chippo to a clear

    To-wee, to-wee; then rasping out: come here,

    Come here, come herrr’; flirting her tail aloft,

    Or gracefully indulging in a soft

    Upward hop-flop, and instantly (to-wee!)

      70  Returning to her perch—the new TV.

    I was an infant when my parents died.

    They both were ornithologists. I’ve tried

    So often to evoke them that today

    I have a thousand parents. Sadly they

    Dissolve in their own virtues and recede,

    But certain words, chance words I hear or read,

    Such as bad heart always to him refer,

    And cancer of the pancreas to her.

    A preterist: one who collects cold nests.

      80  Here was my bedroom, now reserved for guests.

    Here, tucked away by the Canadian maid,

    I listened to the buzz downstairs and prayed

    For everybody to be always well,

    Uncles and aunts, the maid, her niece Adèle

    Who’d seen the Pope, people in books, and God.

    I was brought up by dear bizarre Aunt Maud,

    A poet and a painter with a taste

    For realistic objects interlaced

    With grotesque growths and images of doom.

      90  She lived to hear the next babe cry. Her room

    We’ve kept intact. Its trivia create

    A still life in her style: the paperweight

    Of convex glass enclosing a lagoon,

    The verse book open at the Index (Moon,

    Moonrise, Moor, Moral), the forlorn guitar,

    The human skull; and from the local Star

    A curio: Red Sox Beat Yanks 5-4

    On Chapman’s Homer, thumbtacked to the door.

    My God died young. Theolatry I found

    ¹⁰⁰  Degrading, and its premises, unsound.

    No free man needs a God; but was I free?

    How fully I felt nature glued to me

    And how my childish palate loved the taste

    Half-fish, half-honey, of that golden paste!

    My picture book was at an early age

    The painted parchment papering our cage:

    Mauve rings around the moon; blood-orange sun;

    Twinned Iris; and that rare phenomenon

    The iridule—when, beautiful and strange,

    ¹¹⁰  In a bright sky above a mountain range

    One opal cloudlet in an oval form

    Reflects the rainbow of a thunderstorm

    Which in a distant valley has been staged—

    For we are most artistically caged.

    And there’s the wall of sound: the nightly wall

    Raised by a trillion crickets in the fall.

    Impenetrable! Halfway up the hill

    I’d pause in thrall of their delirious trill.

    That’s Dr. Sutton’s light. That’s the Great Bear.

    ¹²⁰  A thousand years ago five minutes were

    Equal to forty ounces of fine sand.

    Outstare the stars. Infinite foretime and

    Infinite aftertime: above your head

    They close like giant wings, and you are dead.

    The regular vulgarian, I daresay,

    Is happier: he sees the Milky Way

    Only when making water. Then as now

    I walked at my own risk: whipped by the bough,

    Tripped by the stump. Asthmatic, lame and fat,

    ¹³⁰  I never bounced a ball or swung a bat.

    I was the shadow of the waxwing slain

    By feigned remoteness in the windowpane.

    I had a brain, five senses (one unique),

    But otherwise I was a cloutish freak.

    In sleeping dreams I played with other chaps

    But really envied nothing—save perhaps

    The miracle of a lemniscate left

    Upon wet sand by nonchalantly deft

    Bicycle tires.

                      A thread of subtle pain,

    ¹⁴⁰  Tugged at by playful death, released again,

    But always present, ran through me. One day,

    When I’d just turned eleven, as I lay

    Prone on the floor and watched a clockwork toy—

    A tin wheelbarrow pushed by a tin boy—

    Bypass chair legs and stray beneath the bed,

    There was a sudden sunburst in my head.

    And then black night. That blackness was sublime.

    I felt distributed through space and time:

    One foot upon a mountaintop, one hand

    ¹⁵⁰  Under the pebbles of a panting strand,

    One ear in Italy, one eye in Spain,

    In caves, my blood, and in the stars, my brain.

    There were dull throbs in my Triassic; green

    Optical spots in Upper Pleistocene,

    An icy shiver down my Age of Stone,

    And all tomorrows in my funnybone.

    During one winter every afternoon

    I’d sink into that momentary swoon.

    And then it ceased. Its memory grew dim.

    ¹⁶⁰  My health improved. I even learned to swim.

    But like some little lad forced by a wench

    With his pure tongue her abject thirst to quench,

    I was corrupted, terrified, allured,

    And though old doctor Colt pronounced me cured

    Of what, he said, were mainly growing pains,

    The wonder lingers and the shame remains.

    CANTO TWO

    There was a time in my demented youth

    When somehow I suspected that the truth

    About survival after death was known

    ¹⁷⁰  To every human being: I alone

    Knew nothing, and a great conspiracy

    Of books and people hid the truth from me.

    There was the day when I began to doubt

    Man’s sanity: How could he live without

    Knowing for sure what dawn, what death, what doom

    Awaited consciousness beyond the tomb?

    And finally there was the sleepless night

    When I decided to explore and fight

    The foul, the inadmissible abyss,

    ¹⁸⁰  Devoting all my twisted life to this

    One task. Today I’m sixty-one. Waxwings

    Are berry-pecking. A cicada sings.

    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;

    ¹⁹⁰  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.

    Maud Shade was eighty when a sudden hush

    Fell on her life. We saw the angry flush

    And torsion of paralysis assail

    Her noble cheek. We moved her to Pinedale,

    Famed for its sanitarium. There she’d sit

    ²⁰⁰  In the glassed sun and watch the fly that lit

    Upon her dress and then upon her wrist.

    Her mind kept fading in the growing mist.

    She still could speak. She paused, and groped, and found

    What seemed at first a serviceable sound,

    But from adjacent cells impostors took

    The place of words she needed, and her look

    Spelt imploration as she sought in vain

    To reason with the monsters in her brain.

    What moment in the gradual decay

    ²¹⁰  Does resurrection choose? What year? What day?

    Who has the stopwatch? Who rewinds the tape?

    Are some less lucky, or do all escape?

    A syllogism: other men die; but I

    Am not another; therefore I’ll not die.

    Space is a swarming in the eyes; and time,

    A singing in the ears. In this hive I’m

    Locked up. Yet, if prior to life we had

    Been able to imagine life, what mad,

    Impossible, unutterably weird,

    ²²⁰  Wonderful nonsense it might have appeared!

    So why join in the vulgar laughter? Why

    Scorn a hereafter none can verify:

    The Turk’s delight, the future lyres, the talks

    With Socrates and Proust in cypress walks,

    The seraph with his six flamingo wings,

    And Flemish hells with porcupines and things?

    It isn’t that we dream too wild a dream:

    The trouble is we do not make it seem

    Sufficiently unlikely; for the most

    ²³⁰  We can think up is a domestic ghost.

    How ludicrous these efforts to translate

    Into one’s private tongue a public fate!

    Instead of poetry divinely terse,

    Disjointed notes, Insomnia’s mean verse!

    Life is a message scribbled in the dark.

    Anonymous.

                      Espied on a pine’s bark,

    As we were walking home the day she died,

    An empty emerald case, squat and frog-eyed,

    Hugging the trunk; and its companion piece,

    ²⁴⁰  A gum-logged ant.

                             That Englishman in Nice,

    A proud and happy linguist: je nourris

    Les pauvres cigales—meaning that he

    Fed the poor sea gulls!

                                 Lafontaine was wrong:

    Dead is the mandible, alive the song.

    And so I pare my nails, and muse, and hear

    Your steps upstairs, and all is right, my dear.

    Sybil, throughout our high-school days I knew

    Your loveliness, but fell in love with you

    During an outing of the senior class

    ²⁵⁰  To New Wye Falls. We luncheoned on damp grass.

    Our teacher of geology discussed

    The cataract. Its roar and rainbow dust

    Made the tame park romantic. I reclined

    In April’s haze immediately behind

    Your slender back and watched your neat small head

    Bend to one side. One palm with fingers spread,

    Between a star of trillium and a stone,

    Pressed on the turf. A little phalange bone

    Kept twitching. Then you turned and offered me

    ²⁶⁰  A thimbleful of bright metallic tea.

    Your profile has not changed. The glistening teeth

    Biting the careful lip; the shade beneath

    The eye from the long lashes; the peach down

    Rimming the cheekbone; the dark silky brown

    Of hair brushed up from temple and from nape;

    The very naked neck; the Persian shape

    Of nose and eyebrow, you have kept it all—

    And on still nights we hear the waterfall.

    Come and be worshiped, come and be caressed,

    ²⁷⁰  My dark Vanessa, crimson-barred, my blest

    My Admirable butterfly! Explain

    How could you, in the gloam of Lilac Lane,

    Have let uncouth, hysterical John Shade

    Blubber your face, and ear, and shoulder blade?

    We have been married forty years. At least

    Four thousand times your pillow has been creased

    By our two heads. Four hundred thousand times

    The tall clock with the hoarse Westminster chimes

    Has marked our common hour. How many more

    ²⁸⁰  Free calendars shall grace the kitchen door?

    I love you when you’re standing on the lawn

    Peering at something in a tree: "It’s gone.

    It was so small. It might come back" (all this

    Voiced in a whisper softer than a kiss).

    I love you when you call me to admire

    A jet’s pink trail above the sunset fire.

    I love you when you’re humming as you pack

    A suitcase or the farcical car sack

    With round-trip zipper. And I love you most

    ²⁹⁰  When with a pensive nod you greet her ghost

    And hold her first toy on your palm, or look

    At a postcard from her, found in a book.

    She might have been you, me, or some quaint blend:

    Nature chose me so as to wrench and rend

    Your heart and mine. At first we’d smile and say:

    All little girls are plump or "Jim McVey

    (The family oculist) will cure that slight

    Squint in no time. And later: She’ll be quite

    Pretty, you know"; and, trying to assuage

    ³⁰⁰  The swelling torment: That’s the awkward age.

    She should take riding lessons, you would say

    (Your eyes and mine not meeting). "She should play

    Tennis, or badminton. Less starch, more fruit!

    She may not be a beauty, but she’s cute."

    It was no use, no use. The prizes won

    In French and history, no doubt, were fun;

    At Christmas parties games were rough, no doubt,

    And one shy little guest might be left out;

    But let’s be fair: while children of her age

    ³¹⁰  Were cast as elves and fairies on the stage

    That she’d helped paint for the school pantomime,

    My gentle girl appeared as Mother Time,

    A bent charwoman with slop pail and broom,

    And like a fool I sobbed in the men’s room.

    Another winter was scrape-scooped away.

    The Toothwort White haunted our woods in May.

    Summer was power-mowed, and autumn, burned.

    Alas, the dingy cygnet never turned

    Into a wood duck. And again your voice:

    ³²⁰  "But this is prejudice! You should rejoice

    That she is innocent. Why overstress

    The physical? She wants to look a mess.

    Virgins have written some resplendent books.

    Lovemaking is not everything. Good looks

    Are not that indispensable!" And still

    Old Pan would call from every painted hill,

    And still the demons of our pity spoke:

    No lips would share the lipstick of her smoke;

    The telephone that rang before a

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