Rating: 
Summary: Still Unrivaled
Review: Most of the fiction I read falls squarely into two categories: the cannon and the experimental. Among the former I would count Graves, Garcia-Marquez, Flaubert, O'Connor, Faulkner, Wilde, Wharton et al. Into the latter I'd put Selby, Wallace, Barth, Coover, Delany, Hoban et al. But Nabokov, more than a hundred years after his birth, would fall comfortably into either, and there's no better example of that than Pale Fire.
Pale Fire's structure--a literary parasite annotates his dead friend's 999-line poem--allows the story to defy conventional storytelling by allowing temporal and narrative shifts sans cluttering expositions and transitions. Kinbote's commentary does give us literary insights into Shade's poem, but he also tells the story of his failed attempt to befriend Shade, Shade's uneven family life, and an exiled king's narrow escape from a communist coup. A sub-textual story of a schizophrenic struggling to avoid reality may or may not be occurring as well. The device never feels contrived, and frankly hasn't been improved upon in the 40 years since the book arrived.
It is true that the book may lack sentiment, but that shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who's read much Nabokov. A composer of chess problems, Nabokov wrote books that were the equivalent of Rubik's Cubes. Layer upon layer gives way to the careful reader, anagrams abound (did Odon really not accompany his master to America?), and someone better-read than me may find allusion in every line.
But more than the games, Nabokov loved stories themselves, and that's apparent too. More than few time I muttered aloud "wow" or "god, he's good" at some particularly elegant phrasing or exhilirating passage . The story is a modern mystery, a fairy tale and a lunatic's diary. Reading it is a rich, rewarding experience you'll want to repeat.
Rating:
Summary: Simply a Masterpiece
Review: Regarded by discerning readers as the greatest novel of the 20th century, Pale Fire is a dazzling masterpiece, a multi-faceted jewel whose fascination increases on re-reading.
Rating:
Summary: Masterpiece
Review: An original and one-of-a-kind art form. The story occurs not mainly in the text, but in the "notes," and not so much in what is told, but in how it is told. The commentator/annotator, Kinbote, is obsessed with telling his story -- but the keys are in the manner and craziness of how he tells it. "Pale Fire" is a wonderful and transporting journey.
Rating: 
Summary: An amazingly original achievement
Review: Reading Nabokov, it is impossible not to get the impression that this is an author who knows that he is 100 times smarter than his readers. Not only that, he also feels no shame in making that abundantly obvious with every sentence that he writes. Reading Pale Fire is the literary equivalent of turning around in circles until you get so dizzy that you fall over, punch drunk and hysterical. You feel sick and disorientated, but you also get the sense that the process was somehow fun and - dare I say - worth it.Whether you like this book or not - and personally, I can't say that I loved it - it is hard to deny what an amazing achievement it is. Nabokov first writes a 999-line poem - the equivalent of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, in length if not in quality. He then writes a foreword to the poem, and a line-by-line commentary, as if the poem were written by someone else. And by means of the commentary he weaves an imaginative, suspenseful adventure that is so obviously fictitious that it immediately becomes real. There's no denying that this is brilliantly creative and original writing.
Rating:
Summary: Nabokov's Best Ever?
Review: Pale Fire -- Vladimir Nabokov It is arguable, and debatable, whether this title or Lolita is Nabokov's masterpiece, but what is certain is that Pale Fire is once of the tightest, best-structured books of the 20th century. Pale Fire is laid out in three parts: a Foreward written by Charles Kinbote, a Poem written by John Shade, and Commentary, also written by Kinbote. What is prefigured in the Foreword and then made explicit in the Commentary is Kinbote's strange relationship with Shade and his equally strange past. The story is told completely through the device of the Foreword and Commentary, and in them Kinbote paints himself as a refugee from a despotic regime in a faraway land known only as Zembla. He takes up residence in New Wye, right across the street from professor and poet John Shade. Once settled in New Wye, Kinbote embarks on an obsessive, mutedly homoerotic relationship with his poet neighbor, courting him when they are together and spying on him the rest of the time. Although Kinbote has fled his native Zembla, he dearly loves his homeland with the pain of one who knows he can never return to the land he has forsaken, and it is his dream that Shade will immortalize Zembla in a poem. But just as Kinbote reaches for Zembla, so does Zembla reach for Kinbote. In the Commentary Kinbote brings forth a character called Gradus, who is an assassin sent from Zembla to search him out and kill him. If the Foreword and Commentary tell the story of Kinbote, then the Poem tells the story of Shade. In only 999 lines, Shade paints a vivid picture of his past, taking us through his idyllic life in New Wye, its sudden destruction one night by death of his daughter, and his subsequent coping. In more ways than one it is the ideal complement to Kinbote's text, providing a clear, beautiful counterpart to Kinbote's unsteady rants and digressions. However, what takes this book from mere postmodern game and transforms it to a dynamic, engrossing title is Kinbote's unreliability as a narrator and the questions surrounding who the real author of the Poem, Foreword, and Commentary is. Does Zembla really exist and has Kinbote really fled it? Is Gradus's climatic appearance the result of a government plot against Kinbote, or just another of the strange coincidences that pervade Pale Fire? Finally, is Shade's poem really Shade's, or has Kinbote written it for his own purposes? Vice versa, is Kinbote the real creative force behind the Foreword and Commentary, or is it the work of some different, other-worldly presence? Nabokov masterfully spreads the information needed to answer these questions throughout Pale Fire, yet he does so in such a way that nothing is ever made completely explicit. Just as in all of Nabokov's best books, it is up to the reader to make that final conceptual leap, to take that final step after being carried along by Nabokov's poetic narrative. Thus, Pale Fire is not a book that should be read only once, or quickly. It is a book that hides hints in the strangest of places (more than a couple appear in the Index), and one which cannot be completely understood the first time through. That is not to say that the first reading will not be satisfying, as Nabokov does give us a suspenseful, well-drawn narrative, but that as the reader peers back into Pale Fire she will see the book growing deeper and deeper as new items begin to pop up, like stars in the sky as evening fades to night.
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