Rating: 
Summary: Extremely well written
Review: This is probably the most well-written book I've ever read. While not the best story I have ever read, it is still among the best. Very clever and amusing.
Rating:
Summary: A fantastic literary overture!
Review: Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov has an absolutely marvelous sense of humor that is unbecoming a professor of literature at Harvard. Good for him! The humor of this book is unmistakable & is transparent to even the most naive of Nabokov's readers. That this gentleman can write a book that is hilarious and at the same time a work of depth and genius is awe inspiring. "Pale Fire" is the tale of a pedantic, psychotic, misogynistic literary critic who attempts to write an overly-elaborate critique of a poem written by a recently deceased scholar. What is so amusing is how this academician commits so many undergraduate fallacies such as reading too much into a poem and saying "the poet must have had me in mind when he wrote this." He catches erudite allusions only to miss the most obvious references. In the meantime, he also grapples with the demons of his hypochondriac unconscious which make him think that someone or something is "after" him. This is a wonderful book that has very few peers. For those other reviewers who found that it lacked depth, I would suggest that they read it again. If they still don't find profundity, I would recommend that they read it a third time....a fourth time, etc. until they see what is really "going on" and that the book may be all fun and games, but is fun and games centered around a recondite maze of allegories. A book for the more daring spirits amongst us (and for those who have been waiting a book that makes fun of literary critics......)
Rating: 
Summary: A good read
Review: This book grabbed me from the very start. Do NOT read the introduction, like most introductions it spoils the actual read. Funny, engaging, great
Rating: 
Summary: Brilliant, but perhaps not worth the effort
Review: No one reading this book carefully could doubt Nabokov's genius. However, the novel is so dense and frustrating that I nearly gave up before finishing it. There are infinite puzzles to be worked out here, and frankly I felt the puzzles overshadowed the story itself. I loved Pnin, but this one took it too far. I reccomend the poem in itself though-- a beautiful work.
Rating:
Summary: Artistic and Intricate
Review: Pale Fire was a fascinating novel to read, though difficult to interpret. I found the explanation in Nabokov's big 2-part biography to be the best. It was fun to puzzle though this novel, flipping pages back and forth. However I must reiterate a position I made earlier in my review of ADA. Nabokov did not "love" many of his characters. Nabokov detested the characters of both Humbert and Van Veen (or for that matter, the narrator of "Despair" and "King, Queen, Knave". And clearly, Kinbote, to the extent that he existed was an insane man and a bad man. Nabokov assumed that you the reader could judge these characters immoral yourself, and that despite their narratorial efforts, you would not be fooled by their delusions of self-worth. Nabokov's best readers avoid getting suckered by his suspect narrators because the real moral message of his books lie underneath this confused surface.
Rating:
Summary: Genius
Review: This book is a work of genius. Inasmuch as everyone has already said what I would have liked to say, I would like to note that there are several authors who have been heavily influenced by Nabokov and other writers of his ilk, whose books might be of interest to those who like Pale Fire. First and foremost, Stepan Chapman's The Troika has the same unique approach to narrative. Also the work of the author of the Dictionary of the Kazars, as well as some work by J.G. Ballard, and the work of the little-known author Jeff VanderMeer, whose Dradin, In Love recalls Nabokov's narrative flurries.
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful, heartbreaking, inenubilable, and perfect.
Review: This is a beautiful, heartbreaking, inenubilable and perfect novel. Its only flaw is that I did not write it. It is a novel that makes one demand that all great novels make of the reader: that you approach the book with intelligence, imagination, and attention to detail. If you do, you will find its core of humanity in the buried stories of Charles Kinbote, the grief of the Shades for their lost daughter, and the yearning for physical and artistic immortality. The reviewers who found the book lacking in heart, or to be no more than a literary funhouse, should reread the novel. Try, this time approaching the novel from the index - the funniest part of the book (Shade, Sybil, passim) - and try to figure out why the index descriptions, such as the one where Kinbote refers an index entry about a person who "betrays a noble heart" to a commentary that discusses a green-jacketed shadow. Try to follow the trail of Kinbote's heartbreak and madness, and then tell me that there is no heart to this book. Oh, and the reviewer who felt that Nabokov did not love Kinbote as he loved Humbert Humbert and Van Veen should reread those books.
Rating:
Summary: Yes, yes, brilliant. but...
Review: This is a fantastic book. Of course. The wordplay is dazzling, the games intricate, the scope both ambitious and fully realized. It will ever earn five stars on Earth. That being said, in some alternate universe (Terra, perhaps?) where Steven King is Vladimir Nabokov, I would only give it four stars. It isn't as good as Ada, Pnin or Lolita, despite being technically superior to the latter two. Why? Because Nabokov doesn't love Charles Kimbote - and hence, we don't (contrast Van, Timofey and Humbert). And - I know - with circumspection, Pale Fire can be viewed as a triple-joke - being about John Shade after all, to whom Nabokov is much more kind. Or even that Shade and Kimbote are one and the same, etcetera ad nauseum. But, in my final analysis, for all it's technical intricacy, ambition, and florid prose, this book fails to move my heart as well as dazzle my mind. Or maybe I just don't get it. Regardless, I highly recommend it. Right behind Ada.
Rating:
Summary: The luminescence of a torch in a hall of mirrors...
Review: For a metaphor: 'Pale Fire' is a sea-bed - almost invisible, the wonders it witholds are glimpsed only through the parting of the frenzied seas, when a light of sanity can pervade the diffraction provided by the watery madness. Interesting comparisons might be made with Faulkner's 'The Sound and the Fury'.
Rating:
Summary: One of the best books I've ever read
Review: This a dizzyingly entertaining work of art that defies description. One note I'll add to the reviews already here is that this book had a huge influence on , and is alluded to in, the best X-FILES episode of all-time, "Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space'" (3rd season - '95/'96), an episode written by the brilliant Darren Morgan (who won an Emmy for an earlier episode that same season).
| 
