Rating: 
Summary: Nabokov outsmarts himself. I think.
Review: Once upon a time, a judge named Goldsworth who lived in the college town of New Wye, Appalachia, sent a homicidal maniac named Jack Grey to an Institute for the Criminal Insane. But Grey escaped, and set out to find Judge Goldsworth and take revenge on him. When Grey arrived in New Wye, Goldsworth was away on sabbatical. Unfortunately, Goldsworth's nextdoor neighbor, a famous poet named John Shade, resembled Judge Goldsworth a bit. At the very moment Jack Grey arrived at the Goldsworth house, Shade was on his way there. Thinking Shade was the judge, Grey opened fire on the unfortunate poet, killing him instantly with a bullet through the heart. The reason Shade was at Goldsworth's house was that the man who was temporarily renting it while the judge was away, a Russian emigre named Vseslav Botkin, had lured him there with promises of liquor. (Shade was on the wagon, or at least trying.) Now this Vseslav Botkin was insane. After leading a dismal life of pederasty and persecution he had retreated into a desperate fantasy in which he imagined himself to be Charles the Beloved, last king of the kingdom of Zembla. In Botkin's paraniod world, the extremists had taken over Zembla and King Charles was forced to flee to America, where he changed his name to Charles Kinbote and found a teaching job at Wordsmith University, in New Wye. Botkin believed that Grey was actually an incompetent assassin sent by the extremists to murder King Charles (i.e., him), but who murdered John Shade by accident. The fantasies of this lunatic might be of little interest to the rest of the world, except for one thing. Botkin had been confiding his Zembla fantasies to John Shade in the hope that Shade would bring them to life in an epic poem. And in fact, Shade had been hinting to Botkin that he was writing a long poem, which Botkin crazily assumed would be his Zembla poem. On that fateful afternoon, Botkin had induced Shade to bring the almost-finished manuscript of the poem to Goldsworth's house, where Botkin (as he believed) would finally see his Zembla come to life. When the police had left and Botkin was alone at last with "his" poem, he was horrified to find that it had nothing at all to do with Zembla. It was an autobiographical poem addressed to the poet's beloved wife, whom Botkin despised, as he despised all women. The poem was very personal, containing many intimate details of the poet's marriage. It is doubtful, in fact, whether Shade ever meant to publish it. Undeterred, Botkin absconded with the manuscript to a motel room in a mountain town in the far west where he proceeded to write a long series of notes to the poem in which, taking off from a phrase here and a word there in Shade's poem, he detailed his "Zembla" fantasy. He even managed to find an unscrupulous publisher. The resulting book -- Shade's poem "Pale Fire" together with Botkin's preface, table of contents, notes and index -- comprise the novel _Pale Fire_, by Vladimir Nabokov. It is an artifact of the fictional world of Nabokov's novel, created by two of Nabokov's characters, that has somehow escaped from the fictional world into our "real" world. With the possible exception of a copy of _Alice in Wonderland_ autographed by Alice Liddell herself that I once held in my hands, it is the strangest book I have ever seen in my life. It is also filled with puzzles and paradoxes. From something as simple as the location of New Wye (somewhere in the hills of western Virgnia, judging from the butterflies that fly there), to whether the kingdom of Zembla actually exists in the fictional world of the novel (apparently not -- only where did that little Zemblan translation of Timon of Athens come from?), to the identity and motives of Shade's murderer, nothing in _Pale Fire_ is easy or obvious. Things get so complicated, in fact, that you start to wonder if maybe Nabokov didn't outsmart himself in this one. I still don't know. I do know that _Pale Fire_ is a masterpiece that deserves all the praise it gets.
Rating:
Summary: Better than Lolita
Review: I'm sorry, but Pale Fire is Nabokov's greatest work. It is funnier, more troubling, and ultimately a more satisfying read than any of his other works. While it gets off to a slow start, this book just builds up steam until you can't put it down. In the process, you have a front row seat to the spectacle of Nabokov's amazing command of the English language. This really is a special book that should be read at least once by every student of literature.
Rating:
Summary: Dead-accurate parody of academic critics
Review: "Pale Fire" is indeed a book which repays return visits. I recently picked it up again, and noted two new aspects of interest. First, the nutty Kinbote interpreting Shade's poem as "really" all about Zembla, or, more particularly, as all about the assassin Gradus! The poet Shade was totally unaware of Gradus and makes no reference to Zembla at all. But does this pattern of behavior remind you of anyone? It sure reminds me of a professor of mine, who spent weeks lecturing us on "Romeo and Juliet" as the summit of Christian symbolism! (Any extended experience of Shakespeare will convince you that Santayana was right, in noting Shakespeare's rather abnormal ABSENCE of religion.) Or another professor who dissects Hamlet in terms of his Freudian theories. Or present-day "deconstructionists" whomping on Homer in terms of their deconstructionist theories. In all cases, these academics with an axe to grind manage to overlook the actual work of art completely, while bending it to fit the Procrustean bed of their theories. No better parody of this tendency exists than Charles Kimbote's loony "commentary" on the poem "Pale Fire." If you want to see how to do literary criticism right, take a look at Nabokov's "Lectures on Literature" or his "Lectures on Russian Literature." Second: a remarkable number of similarities between Kinbote and Nabokov. Kinbote is the exiled king of Zembla, Nabokov was a nobleman exiled from Tsarist Russia. Kinbote's colleagues know nothing of Zembla, and Nabokov's colleagues were astonishingly ignorant of Russia. Zembla was taken over by Extremist revolutionaries, Russia was taken over by Communist revolutionaries. The assassin "Gradus" -- sent to assassinate Kinbote -- may seem melodramatic until you realize that Nabokov's father was in fact murdered by two Communist thugs, in Berlin. The Communists actually sent executioners after Nabokov's father, and they shot him dead when Nabokov was just 23. Needless to say, this was a critical point in Nabokov's life.
Rating:
Summary: Hilarious parody of academic literature
Review: On the most obvious level, "Pale Fire" is a hysterically funny parody of the literary life in academia. In the real world, a timid professor might issue an edition of a poem, say Wordsworth's "Prelude," with a lengthy preface and profuse footnotes. Well, "Pale Fire" is that book done by Laurel and Hardy, or the Three Stooges. The poet is a hugely fat, sloppy drunkard named Slade, "discovered" in Appalachia by our professor, allegedly named Charles Kinbote. The "preface" to the poem contains huge amounts of irrelevant detail, and the "notes" (over two hundred pages of them!) manage to be "all about Charles Kinbote" -- while revealing virtually nothing about the poem they are annotating! For such a parody to work, it also helps that the poem itself, titled "Pale Fire," is the worst sort of pretentious verse, self-absorbed, jumping idly from one subject to another. BUT (ho ho!) the rhymes and the language are just good enough that they might deceive an academic committee. And, anyway, how many GOOD modern American poets are there? And then the fun begins. Kinbote is (or imagines himself to be) the King of Zembla, and is a passionate pursuer of handsome young men -- he reveals this passion in a number of hilarious passages. But I'm going to stop right here, in the hopes that I will have encouraged you to read this for yourself. One former teacher at Chiang Mai University used to break into hysterical laughter whenever reading this book. Highly recommended!
Rating:
Summary: The "shadow of the waxwing slain"
Review: Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire is a jewel. John Updike was spot on decades ago, describing Nabokov as the grandmaster of English prose. The story in Pale Fire, no linear tale, is told by Charles Kinbote during the course of a commentary on the poem of a renown writer, "close friend" and next door neighbor, John Shade. Shade's poem, Kinbote's commentary assures us, is about Kinbote's beloved Zembla, something of a fictional asylum posing as a nation-state. Kinbote is residing in the United States while Shade is composing the 999 lines of the four cantos of Pale Fire. On the faculty of Wordsmith College, and living at least physically proximate to Shade, Kinbote cherishes every encounter with the master poet, convinced that he, Kinbote, is implanting the grand design of what would become Pale Fire. There is just no substitute for letting Nabokov speak for himself. Almost any page will do: "The Goldworth chateau (the home at which he was staying) had many outside doors, and no matter how thoroughly I inspected them and the window shutters downstairs at bedtime, I never failed to discover next morning something sly and suspicious-looking. One night a black cat, which a few minutes before I had seen rippling down into the basement where I had arranged toilet facilities for it in an attractive setting, suddenly reappeared on the threshold of the music room, in the middle of my insomnia and a Wagner record, arching its back and sporting a neck bow of which silk which it could certainly never have put on all by itself. I telephoned 11111 and a few minutes later was discussing possible culprits with a policeman...It is too easy for a cruel person to make the victim of his ingenuity believe that he has persecution mania, or is really being stalked by a killer..." The perfect touch. Freud acknowledged that even paranoids can have real enemies. Nabokov's Kinbote fits the bill. Kinbote finds conspiracies in every event, meaning in each line. And that is surely one of the lessons of this masterpiece: No line is without meaning because, as Nabokov shows, we are so very good as instilling meaning in every line, finding a design in every image.
Rating:
Summary: Please please read Pale Fire
Review: Oh, there is no fanatic like a convert. And Nabokov's writing in the English language bestows his found tongue with rapture. This is Nabokov's finest (I suppose in this 21st century, I just don't find Lolita shocking! shocking! the way its rookie readers must have) and one of the top ten novels of the 20th century. Surprisingly, you'll find that this book composed of a 999-line poem and the commentary written on that poem by a colleague, has a plot. It is ingenious, twisted, brilliant. One of the most finely crafted works of art ever. I've picked up the word "replete" in relation to art from Steven Pinker, and this work is repleteful. The words, the language, the structure, the social criticism, and most of all, the beauty, as I contemplate and re-contemplate this work, grow ever more replete. I love this poem. "I was the shadow of the waxwing slain/ In the false azure of the windowpane" and its delicate rhymes and trips and footfalls are savored with every single re-reading. He brings an outsiders perspective to the language with rhymes we don't "see" but hear: "Come and be worshipped, come and be caressed / My dark Vanessa, crimson-barred, my blest" and it sometimes feels like he's introducing you to a new English language. So who wouldn't like this book, I suppose, should be a question the reviewer should try to answer. Well, I just can't imagine anybody that's ever bought a novel not liking this one, so I suppose if you're a pure non-fiction reader, this ain't for you. And Nabokov is a bit bloodless at times, you won't find the wild, sloppy joy of a Kerouac, or the brawny aggressiveness of a Hemingway, but finely finely crafted and turned and polished words delivered impeccably, perfectly. Please, please, read Pale Fire. The more of us that carry Nabokov's masterwork in our hearts, the more he will have "lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky"
Rating:
Summary: Read it, but don't read the jacket
Review: Jump right in. Don't read the other reviews, don't read the jacket cover - if you do, you lose the sense of discovery inherent in this book. See, Nabokov is a nut, and it takes a good 100 pages before you even realize this thing is a novel, who the characters are, and where it's going. And when you do, the jokes get funnier, and you want to go back to read the first half again. This is great later Nabokov.
Rating:
Summary: Nabokov's Brilliant Followup
Review: I'll start off by saying staightout that this book is not for everyone, and if it is your type of book, it should not be your first by Nabokov. The man is a literary genius, and anybody that reads his quick descriptions, vast vocabulary, and poetic phrases cannot deny that. This novel- for I am sure that most of you know the plot already- is not a novel at all, and as much as you may try to read it as one, the plot actually comes between the lines. By the end of the book, nothing is clear, nothing is explained by the author, and yet we understand the truth perfectly.
The themes behind this story are plentiful, and thought-provoking. There is something else that I wish to address: The satirical look at all readers of literature and poetry, especially those that attempt to analyze these works extensively. A look at insanity and betrayal and in the end, even some kind of love, if not between a man and a woman, than between a man and ______ (many things).
The characters are great, especially Kinbote who we are convinced is as close a friend to you and I as he was to John Shade himself. I feel that Nabokov has a way of making his readership feel the worst emotion, pity. Kinbote seems to resemble Humbert Humbert of Lolita (also amazing), a man that is [sorry] in nature and worth pitying, but is by no means a Good man.
One of the few books that ever made me read lines over and over and over again with other passages that either made me laugh again and again or say to myself, "What a twisted psycho," about a character that will remain nameless.
Buy it, read it, love it. You will read it again. I know I will.
Rating:
Summary: His Mirror Worlds
Review: Nabokov's strength always lay in creating "mirror worlds" to our own; those mysterious counterparts in which resided our hopes, a little beauty, and danger. His images are striking and evocative of the mirror world. It may not have been in this book, but I remember one image in particular: someone observes, from a bridge across a small pond in the park, a leaf falling into the crystal placid calm of the pond, rushing to meet its etheric double somewhere in between the two worlds of "real" and "mirror". In "Pale Fire", Kinbote's land of Zembla is the mirror-world. And it isn't so much that this mirror world "exists" in the world, but that Nabokov makes it a part of our world through Shade's poem, Kinbote's fantastic stories, and in Kinbote's (our) yearning to find another world in books. This is a brilliant explication of those forces which Nabokov saw in the literary world. Satisfyingly post-modern, hilariously contrived, and with a structure that seems to accomodate perfectly Nabokov's themes, "Pale Fire", I think, proves his old adage that, "Beauty plus pity, that is the closest definition we can have of art." Post Script:
Some have suggested that Shade's daughter is the real focus of the story, by virtue of the fact that she is passed over, swallowed up. I don't know, but it just goes to show that any reading of this book will be a rewarding one. Keep it on your bedside table.
Rating:
Summary: My kind of book!
Review: In Austin I had two good friends who were the most well-read people I had ever met until then. I've spoken briefly in this space about one of them, Mike Godwin, now a staff counsel for the Electronic Freedom Foundation and WELL gadfly. The other was Kathy Strong, who was married to Mike for a while. I briefly shared an apartment with Kathy, and I can easily recall the books lying around the house. It was she (along with Dwight Brown) who piqued my interest in Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe novels. But it is the other books--on tables, chairs, bookshelves, and stairs--that I'm thinking of now, books by Robertson Davies, Italo Calvino, and Vladimir Nabokov. I think back on this and wonder why is it only now that I am reading these books when they were clearly being recommended to me by someone whose tastes in literature I admired. I cannot remember, but did I try these books at that time and was not mature enough a reader to grasp their worth? Were there other authors about that I should remember today? The occasion for these reminiscences is having just finished Nabokov's Pale Fire, which I can only describe as "my kind of book." It is not a novel, although by the end you have pieced together a larger story that would not have been out of place in a novel. Nor is it poem, critical work, or index, although it contains all three of these elements. I guess if one must label it, it is "experimental" fiction. Although the form is most unusual and does hold all appeal for me, the true pull of this work is the character of the narrator, a rogue and totally questionable source of information. His poor victims, the long-suffering poet, John Shade, and Shade's wife Sylvia, one must feel kindly towards, especially knowing the intensity of the dedicated fan. I refrain from talking too much about the actual plot, although it is not necessarily a mystery. Instead I hasten to compare this work with Borges in that the creation of a European kingdom recalls his "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." It also reminds me of that nation that Nero Wolfe is supposed to be from (or was that an actual kingdom? I never checked to see.) This was my first go at Nabokov, and I suppose by my reaction to it, I should not stay too long from his other work. What shall it be: Ada? Lolita? The Collected Stories?
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