Pale Fire

According to this deranged annotator, he had urged Shade to write about his own homeland--the northern kingdom of Zembla. It soon becomes clear that this fabulous locale may well be a figment of Kinbote's colorfully cracked, prismatic imagination. Meanwhile, he manages to twist the poem into an account of Zembla's King Charles--whom he believes himself to be--and the monarch's eventual assassination by the revolutionary Jakob Gradus.

In the course of this dizzying narrative, shots are indeed fired. But it's Shade who takes the hit, enabling Kinbote to steal the dead poet's manuscript and set about annotating it. Is that perfectly clear? By now it should be obvious that Pale Fire is not only a whodunit but a who-wrote-it. There isn't, of course, a single solution. But Nabokov's best biographer, Brian Boyd, has come up with an ingenious suggestion: he argues that Shade is actually guiding Kinbote's mad hand from beyond the grave, nudging him into completing what he'd intended to be a 1,000-line poem. Read this magical, melancholic mystery and see if you agree. --Tim Appelo

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All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

everyman's decisions, 2008-10-19
Aside from the fact that I had to re-order, the first being damaged, I am satisfied overall except for one rather important point.
Everyman has decided to produce this book using a very delicate ink gradation. This does not cause any undue difficulty in reading, unless there is extremely low light. However, if we were to grade ink from 0 (invisible) to 100 (pitch black), the choice of going with 65 to 70 is an error. I like my black ink to be black, and values under 85 look less than black and worse, you can see in the Pale Fire publication that some of the letters contain tiny white holes where ink viscosity is too sticky and ink coverage of the interior of the letter is not sufficient. With blacker ink this fickle issue is reduced because the eye works less to define the letter's outline. With this lighter black ink, it does require a little more work to make out some letters on some occasions.
Details, details. For a run-of-the-mill paperback, purchased in an airport hanger, I wouldn't care. For a book that I wish to have remain on my bookshelf for sons, grandsons, nephews etc, I am disappointed and will perhaps seek alternatives to the everyman name in future.
This lighter than black ink is a modern trend that is more concerned with aesthetics than readability.
However, it isn't a severe and show-stopping issue. Just my preference, and since I was invited to write a review...
As for something on the work itself, it would be foolish of me to comment on the creator of vain van veen, other than to say that the 21st century has not yet seen his genius and I wish it upon us.


0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Enjoyable at Multiple Levels, 2008-09-01
As someone who reads and interprets American fiction for a living (pity me), this is the first novel I've read in ages that challenged me and then rewards the reader's efforts when the depths of the multiple layers of storytelling started to show themselves. Don't think you've got it solved when you realize that Kinbote isn't who you thought he was. He's not THAT second person either. And there's ghosts -- several of them -- who take possession of the story in various ways. I don't want to wreck your delight by giving away more. I also recommend Brian Boyd's critical work on the novel, _Nabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery_, an amazing interpretation of the novel that blows it wide open.


4 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

Clever, 2008-05-05
A clever construction and master of words in an essentially unreadable work that fails to hold interest either on a character level or, for lack of a better term, plot. This book is like watching a painter work, marveling at what he does with great appreciation, while the actual painting itself is unappreciable.


0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Mind bending!, 2008-03-20
A story within a story, a madman reworking and annotating another's poetry and attributing minute details as if they were secret references of his life. How perfect a story Nabokov has written. A jewel of a book.


1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

brilliant, 2008-03-03
I adore books that change and grow as you read and reread them. Nabokov's Pale Fire definitely fits the bill. This novel really exemplifies the excessive amount of freedom within Nabokov's creative process - it is boundless, performative and very much alive. It's almost as if Nabokov makes his very own strict set of literary rules and then turns right around and breaks them for no other reason then purely enjoying smashing boundaries into infinite pieces and reworking them into a unique masterpiece. It's almost as if he deconstructs his writing himself only to let the act of reading it serve as a creative process in its own right, which then carefully reconstructs his words into something very, very special. Strange disconnects surface more than occasionally, bobbing their heads up and down in the story - yet these are done in such a fluid, effortless manner that the resulting effect is nothing short of awesome(to borrow a favorite word of my brother, Alex). I highly recommend this.

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