Pale Fire

Rating:
Summary: Probably Nabakov's best
Review: Nabakov was undoubtedly one of the best authors ever to live and grace us with his prose, and Pale Fire is the (or maybe one of the) pinnacles of his career. I'm sure the plot (so to speak) has been summarized many times, so I'll let that sit, but what I think is most noteworthy about this novel is its format. Nabakov has separated himself from straightforward plot, yet through the "footnotes" to the poem Pale Fire, we still get a complete picture of two men's lives. Pale Fire is something like the bridge between the internal investigations of Virgnia Woolf and the literary technique of the more recent post-moderns, and yet has all the signature Nabokov touches--brilliant wordplay, fascinatingly sad characters, and unapproachable beauty.

I would certainly recommend this novel simply for the joy of reading it, but it has value beyond the amazing abilities of the author, and that value is the insight on the human mind in modern times and how we all have come to work internally. This is truly high literature and art and I will be surprised if it doesn't become a world classic.

Rating:
Summary: It's all about me, baby
Review: It's amazing how disturbing Nabokov books can be. In this and Lolita we get to read the memoirs of extremely disturbed minds, and it can be very scary. It makes one wonder just where Vladimir gained this psychotic insight. Speak, Memory doesn't answer this.
Anyway, this may well be the most bizarre, inventive, and deliriously pleasurable and funny book in existence. It requires way too much thought, but that's a good thing.
Interesting how the poem itself is fairly simple to understand. It is obviously an autobiographical statement, and it's amazing how Charles twists beyond all recognition to being about him. Scary, but people do this in real life.
One of the rare books that demands multiple reads for a full (or even partial) understanding. So do so. You may even have to buy two or more copies like Charles suggests. That'll make the publisher happy.

Rating:
Summary: don't follow directions
Review: Am I the only person that really tried to follow the directions such as "See notes to line 193"? At one point I found myself trying to read while having 3 fingers stuck in the book so I wouldn't loose my place. If you are going to attempt this perhaps you should buy 2 copies like Charles suggests. I enjoyed the book a great deal and laughed out loud often. I gave up trying to follow the "see note" directions when I started running into sections I had already read. Did you notice poor Charles kept changing the color of shorts one of the "lads" was wearing. A nice book to read in the hammock.

Rating:
Summary: Inventive, but tired
Review: Yet another inventive novel by Nabokov. It's written in the form of a study of a poem by the late American poet John Shade called "Pale Fire". The writer of the study is the character Charles Kinbote. The novel comprises a foreward by Kinbote, the text of Shade's poem and an extended commentary by Kinbote.

Kinbote's commentary takes up the vast majority of the novel, and in it there unfolds not only Kinbote's increasingly eccentric and illogical criticism of the poem, but also the story of the exile of the King of Zembla, and the pursuit of the King by the assassin Gradus. Thus the reader is presented both with a picture of Kinbote's unbalanbced mind and a sub-plot (but does it remain a sub-plot, and who exactly is Kinbote?)

This is clever stuff from Nabokov, and as usual with Nabokov you have to persevere right to the end to get the full effect of the story - even then, I found I was not really sure of what was supposed to have happened.

The central puzzle of the novel is the relationship of Kinbote's commentary to Shade's poem - it really cannot be said to be a commentary as such because it fails to illuminate the poem. Rather, it sheds light on how disturbed Kinbote is. I wondered if this could have been intended as a satire by Nabokov on such commentaries, and upon literary interpretation in general - that it destroys the impact of the original work by placing a third party interpreter between the author and the reader (so much for reviews!)

In all, the novel is imaginative, but by now I've found that I've become so familiar with Nabokov's works that I've come to expect that. Clever though his plot devices are, I've found that a lot of Nabokov's style of writing has become depressingly familiar - frequent references to chess, lepidoptery, over-use of the adjective "limpid" and, of course pederasty (in this book of the homosexual variety). As such, the I felt this book was by an inventive author, but a tired one.

Rating:
Summary: Nabokov's Pale Fire
Review: I found reading _Pale Fire_ as labyrinthian an experience as the escape passageway to a theater, going through the palace of King Charles of the "mythical" country of Zembla. I also felt that _Pale Fire_ was a work of great imagination, originality, and humor. The humor is most apparent in Kinbote's foolish efforts to spy on the poet and English literature professor John Shade and his wife and in the evil Gradus' various inept attempts at assassination.

Charles Kinbote wrote the forward, commentary, and index to the novel. Each of these three parts is related by Kinbote in a first person narrative form. The centerpiece of the novel is a 999 line epic poem called _Pale Fire_, which was written by the late John Shade shortly before he died. Kinbote is a colleague of Shade's at Wordsmith College and also a self-styled "friend" of Shade's. Kinbote relates that at the time when Sybil, Shade's wife, very recently became a widow, he wrangles her into agreeing to sign a contract to give Kinbote the right to publish Shade's opus. Kinbote is extremely egocentric: in his evening walks and conversations with Shade he strongly urges Shade, in his poem, to tell about the northern European kingdom of Zembla, from which Kinbote emigrated to the United State years ago.

The poem _Pale Fire_ ,itself, is wistful, very romatic and beautifully written. It is about John Shade's life long love affair with his wife and about the tragic death of their daughter. Shade also muses about the possibility of an after-life. The poem brought tears to my eyes. But, in Kinbote's commentary and to his great chagrin, Shade only mentions Zembla once in his poem.

While reading Nabokov's novel and also afterwards, I could not help compare the character Kinbote to the narrator of Dostoyevsky's _Notes From Underground_. Dostoyevsky's great novel was done as a stream of consciousness in its first part and as a first person narrative in its second part. However, it is clear in _Notes_ that the narrator is a severely neurotic and disturbed man. Nabokov leads us to believe the same of Kinbote, but I am not quite so sure of that. Kinbote's egotism and efforts to steal Shade's poem are plain. But is Kinbote's story of Zembla a crazy man's hallucinations (as we are lead to believe) or is he relating actual events of a real country in which a series of monarchs were assassinated and in which the last king, the Beloved Charles, may become the latest victim? Also, who is Charles Kinbote? One of the instructors of his college indicates a strong resemblance of Kinbote to a photograph of a prominent individual published in a current newspaper. These are some of the questions I asked myself while reading Nabokov's puzzling, but fascinating, book. My only regret in reading this novel is that it had to end.

Rating:
Summary: Senseless and Unenjoyable
Review: I agree with the reveiwer who branded Pale Fire as brillinat but empty. I found no humour in it whatsoever, just an artist trying to make sport of his readers.

Rating:
Summary: A fictional literary critique that entertains on many levels
Review: This novel is a brilliantly conceived profile of two humorous literary characters, one whom we never meet but know only through a 999-line poem called "Pale Fire" he composed in the last twenty days of his life, and the other his unwelcome colleague, an eccentric man with delusions of grandeur and persecution mania, who annotates the poem. Although the novel consists of only the poem and the commentary, rest assured there is a plot, but its development is quite unconventional.

The poet is a reclusive college professor named John Shade, and his colleague is another professor named Charles Kinbote, who comes from a fictitious northern European country called Zembla. Kinbote, long an admirer of Shade's work, had rented a house adjacent to Shade's five months prior to Shade's death. Kinbote has a voyeuristic obsession with Shade, spying on his house with binoculars and prying into his work. Convinced that he and Shade had some kind of exclusive rapport during Shade's final months, Kinbote believes that much of the text of "Pale Fire" refers to information he had disclosed to Shade about recent political events in Zembla, when it is obvious that Shade's poem is strictly personal, expounding on important times in his life: his childhood, his courtship with his wife, the death of his daughter, his heart attack.

The "narration" of the novel takes place a few months after Shade's death, with Kinbote living in a motel room disturbed by noisy neighbors and writing his commentary about the poem. His commentary tends to go off on comical tangents about the political intrigue in Zembla. We learn that the last King of Zembla was imprisoned in his palace during a quasi-Bolshevik Revolution but managed to escape via a secret passage and travel incognito to America, where he was given a new identity. After the escape, the King was stalked by a heavily aliased assassin who resourcefully discovered his quarry's whereabouts, resulting in a confrontation whose outcome did not go exactly as planned.

The plot construction is diabolically clever in the way Nabokov reveals information little by little throughout Kinbote's commentary; you may have to read the book twice to see which details you missed the first time, but Nabokov's prose is so colorful and ebullient that doing so is a pleasure. Even more interesting is the doubt established by Nabokov as to whether Kinbote's revelations are reality or delusions; his sanity is questionable. Every now and then I come across a book that's so wildly creative and so much fun that it reminds me why I love to read -- "Pale Fire" is easily one of those books.

Rating:
Summary: brilliant but empty
Review: After you get the joke, so what? Nabokov always beats the same drum--dull reality can never match the glittering world of "art." Ordinary people are robotic drones good only for fixing radios "with their stubby fingers." Nabokov is a minor writer usually more interested in playing tiresome games than dealing with human life and suffering.

The final irony of Nabokov's work is that the political and social world he claims to transcend with his "art" is precisely the reality he is obsessed with and can't leave alone. His father's assassination by Bolshevik thugs is the subtext of everything he wrote. His fiction seems dated (and I've read every word he wrote, except the plays and Ada), with his incessant potshots at long-exorcised ghosts: soviet commissars, repressive governments, censorship, and so on.

As far as wit and wordplay, Anthony Burgess was Nabokov's superior in both, and Burgess grappled honestly with the horrors of the 20th century. "Earthly Powers" beats anything Nabokov wrote.

Rating:
Summary: PALIDO FUEGO EN ESPAÑA
Review: Me ha encantado el comentario de "A reader from Switzerland and Cagnes-sur-Mer, France", y estoy de acuerdo con él en todo, además su exposición me parece muy clra y lúcida. Por mi parte, espero que escribir en español no sea un impedimento para enviar un comentario. Todo lo de Nabokov me gusta muchísimo y lo único que lamento es no poseer los suficientes conocimientos de inglés como pra poder leer fluidamente a un escritor cuya prosa es tan complicada. Lo que sií me gustaría es poder comparar el original inglés del poema "Pálido fuego" con la traducción al español que tengo. ¿Habría alguien tan amable que me lo enviara? Un saludo muy cordial a todos los nabokovianos

Estrella

Rating:
Summary: difficult but rewarding
Review: Pale Fire is, I think, a brilliant parody of Literary Criticism. However, it's barely a novel and it hardly warrants it's 200 pages, so I don't think it should make the list.

The structure of Pale Fire is unique. It contains a long poem by "John Shade" & then 200+ pages of commentary on the poem by "Charles Kinbote". Kinbote emerges as a complete lunatic over the course of his commentary, reading meanings into Shade's work that are obviously unsupportable.

Nabokov, thus, shows that critics bring such a subjective perspective to the works they critique, that they can hardly be considered an appropriate prism through which to view the original work. I heartily agree with the point, but it becomes somewhat labored when stretched to this length.

GRADE: B