Pale Fire has been my favorite book for a long, long time, ever since I read it as part of a course in university. After all these years I haven't read a better, more intricately-constructed book.
It was suggested to me to read the intro first, then skip the poem and read the endnotes start to finish, then to go back and read the poem. The index is part of the fiction and must also be read.
I think the keys to really enjoying Pale Fire are 1) to realize that while the subject matter is ostensibly serious, Kinbote is really a comic figure, and you're meant to be laughing a lot of the time; and 2) the great puzzles to unravel are who is John Shade, who is Charles Kinbote, are any of them even real, and who wrote the poem? The book is so beautifully written that it can be argued that none of those questions have definitive answers - and thinking about them, and how Nabokov threads clues and possibilities throughout the novel, without any of them seeming to be contradictory, is the pleasure.
Shade's diminished excitement for evidence of the afterlife after meeting "Mrs.Z" was a surprisingly funny moment in the poem (even before he discovered the misprint of mountain to fountain). So much so that I wasn't sure if I was misinterpreting the poems content.
But if (I thought) I mentioned that detail
She’d pounce upon it as upon a fond
Affinity, a sacramental bond,
Uniting mystically her and me,
And in a jiffy our two souls would be
Brother and sister trembling on the brink
Of tender incest.
I will limit my criticism to saying that this is a trope adopted very often these days and it is not one to which my personality is suited. I like mysteries but I do not like treadmills, running without arriving.
It seems to be more common now than it used to be. Many pieces of media, whether written or televised, seem to use it as an excuse to avoid committing to a narrative. It's as if they expect people will simply make up whatever headcanon is most entertaining and therefore the media will appeal to a greater number of people than it would otherwise. Or they've written themselves into a corner and rather than rework the plot to make sense, they simply go "Well what do youuuu think happened?" I hate it.
I always saw Pale Fire as somewhat of self-parody, which made me enjoy it more.
Seven years before Pale Fire came out, Nabokov was working on his translation of Eugene Onegin. Often, people argue that a translated novel should have no end/footnotes, because a "good translation" should read "naturally" to a reader. Nabokov disagreed, and wrote an article that included the phrase:
> "I want translations with copious footnotes, footnotes reaching up like skyscrapers to the top of this or that page so as to leave only the gleam of one textual line between commentary and eternity." [1]
Quite a fun image, and one he took somewhat seriously, as his endnote commentary for Onegin is more than twice as long as the translation itself! [2]
So, for me personally, I can't imagine a world where he didn't reflect on his own zeal here, and realize "I think there's a novel idea in here somewhere!"
[1] "Problems in Translation: Onegin in English." Partisan Review 22, no. 4 (1955): 512.
I saw it as Nabokov's celebration of his own genius and the power it gave him. Quite "the flex" as the young peuple say. He was expert in setting chess problems, lepidoptery, French and Russian cultural and literary arcana, linguistics, politics - especially of the academic kind, psychology, and a few others I am undoubtedly missing. According to what I've read, all that and more is in "Pale Fire."
At that point in his life, I think he knew well that a work like this would be devoured by his fans and vivisected by academics. He alone knew how deep the maze went and the layers of arcane tricks he was pulling. For example, see:
I read Pale Fire on the plane recently. Picked it up randomly, knew almost nothing about it. It is absolutely riotous. Most of the references probably went over my head, but I was immediately annoyed, then grinning about how annoyed I was, then tearing into the next page to try to unwrap just who the hell is Kinbote. About 10 pages in you will discover that you're never going to fully figure it out, and then the question is where the hell is this character going to take you. To the fractal depths of his soul, turns out.
I read it randomly, too, having found it in a summer vacation house. Found it hilarious, once I finally caught on, and went back and re-read it over the summer. Isn't most "great" literature best read if you discover it yourself? Much more fun than university seminars on Tolstoevsky, не так ли?
The connection between Pale Fire and hypertext was stated soon after its publication; in 1969, the information-technology researcher Ted Nelson obtained permission from the novel's publishers to use it for a hypertext demonstration at Brown University.
Funny to think that we're this far into the "information era", and your choices for consuming this book are either physical paper, or general (non-hypermedia) ebook.
Once upon a time people thought hypermedia solved some problem of publishing but didn't realize IP was the real hurdle (until OpenAI etc "solved" that by embedding the novels in NLP token weights).
This is hilarious. I bought the book after watching Blade Runner 2049. There's a scene where some of book was being recited as part of the protagonist's anti-empathy test and I figured it had to have a deeper importance to the writers so I grabbed it on a whim. It's been sitting on my shelf. Now I'll have to move it up the list after seeing this.
The book is also in the film - joi offers to read it to k in their first scene I think. Another cool reference there is K’s ringtone is Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf which every soviet kid should recognize from their childhood
Sounds absolutely fascinating. I just started the second Hyperion book, but I might have to put it down to prioritize this. It does seem like somewhat of an investment though; as if reading it in bed might not be the most optimal way to enjoy the experience. It might require some more dedicated reading sessions from what I'm seeing in the other threads.
If you are going to read Pale Fire, get it on paper. I tried to read it on my Kindle and the UI is not up to task of lots of flipping back and forth between the poem and the prose sections.
I can't imagine trying to manage this on an e-reader. If the notes popped up in a window over the text it would be an ideal way to experience the book, but every epub reader I've ever used makes jumping around a pain and I have a really hard time even hitting the index links on a touchscreen.
I think some sort of hypertext format would be perfect for being able to go back and forth or separate windows open for poem and prose, similar to what others are suggesting with two copies of the book.
The e-reader UI is generally so much better than paper, if a book is not available for kindle, I'll usually find something else to read. Pale Fire is a special case book where you want two have bookmarks where you are currently working. I read Chuck Palahniuk's Diary on paper, and an e-reader would definitely have ruined it.
Technical books with a lot of charts, diagrams, monospaced code examples, etc can highlight the weaknesses of e-readers. PDFs are almost always better on a tablet.
But for like, words-in-a-row novels that don't mind being re-wrapped, there is no comparison, for me. e-Reader every time.
Yes, they are fine for books with no features but body text and no important formatting or layout, and that the reader progresses through entirely linearly. Those are the sorts of books they’re best-suited to.
> Those are the sorts of books they’re best-suited to.
Which is 98% of novels. e-Readers are even great for books with lots of end notes or foot notes. It's great for flipping between those. I had no problem reading Infinite Jest, for example.
I guess if my copy of Pale Fire had hyperlinked all the poem line mentions, I would have been fine. :)
Now I'm wondering if I could write a quick script to annotate mine thusly...
I prefer paper as an experience, but there are absolutely ways that (e.g.) a Kindle can be superior.
* Control of text size
* Weight
I forget what it was, but at some point I was excitedly reading a new hardback -- and found it so heavy to read in bed that I bought the Kindle edition in addition to the paper one. This also applies for travel, doubly so.
I'm the kind of reader that goes back and forth when reading a novel. I like to go back and re-read when a character was introduced, or simply go back a few pages.
The UI of the Kindle sucks for this. It excels at finding a specific sentence, of course, but not for the kind of flipping pages I enjoy doing.
I read Infinite Jest on my Kindle without any problems. So long as the end notes are linked, it works pretty well. If I had a copy of Pale Fire where the poem line references were linked, it would probably be fine too.
Some readers say that paper sucks too. The right scheme is to get two copies that advance together. So they could be either Kindle or paper or a mixture.
Keyword search is a big win for eReaders. (This is a bit ironic in a discussion of _Pale Fire_ where the trad index is a big part of the game.)
When you mix in the weight and the other issues with paper, it's not just inconvenient.
I'm happy to say that compared to eReaders, paper sucks. I just don't buy paper copies any more -- and I can access any new ebook in my library from any vacation hammock.
I love Nabokov. In fact, I named a stray cat after him who has since abandoned me. Or I, him. If you want a more approachable book of his to start off (pale fire is tremendous but daunting) I would recommend Laughter in the Dark. It is short and moves effortlessly. The characters are charming and evil. The plot reads like a suspense thriller. It is a wicked, wicked delightfully wicked book.
It's a good book that I've read a couple of times but a tiring one. Nabokov puts so many traps and misdirections in it that it becomes a cryptic crossword in a distant language. He is a very smart and clever guy and never tires of reminding the reader of it. He lampoons academia while enabling many an academic career in the process. There are professors aplenty specializing in Nabokov and some in Pale Fire itself.
For s&g I read "Nabokov's Pale Fire : The Magic of Artistic Discovery" by Brian Boyd, one of the aforementioned. It was interesting at first to see how literary criticsm and analysis work but eventually I had a Shatner moment.
Saturday Night Live sketch circa 1986. He's at a Star Trek convention in a small town and finally snaps at the trivia-mad, stalkerish fans telling them to "Get life, will you people?!"
I was excited to read Pale Fire after reading what I consider to be one of the finest novels ever written, Lolita. The protagonist is a monster, but the writing is so eloquent - and not even in the author's original tongue! Pale Fire was simply boring to me. I am not extremely literary, so a lot of it probably went over my head, but I was rather disappointed it didn't shine like his 1955 masterpiece.
To be fair, he spoke English from a very young age, he was raised trilingual and read and wrote English before Russian. I think there's a case to be made that being able to read 3 distinct languages with native fluency contributed to his lexical dexterity and mastery of metaphorical imagery.
While I don't think you need to be 'extremely literary' to enjoy it, Pale Fire is strong stuff, and challenging in surprising ways -- as the linked review expounds on, at some length.
Lolita is probably Nabokov's most accessible book, or at least the most accessible of his I've read, but I bet part of what you liked there is that you, the reader, don't interact with Humbert Humbert in quite the same way that Humbert thinks about himself, or might expect you would interact with him. Nabokov is profoundly good at this sort of authorial/editorial/linguistic misdirection.
On those terms, Pale Fire is a sort of 3d chess version of Lolita. Obviously the topic is different, at least, the surface topic is different. Obsession is still very much a topic.
Anyway, you might enjoy reading more Nabokov! Don't give up on him! To my mind he's one of the literary gifts from the 20th century. And you might enjoy Pale Fire on a re-read, but I'd recommend something else by him (or a few palate-cleansing/getting deeper on the Nabokov vibe choices) if it left you cold. It left me a little cold, too. I've been re-reading Ada or Ardor recently which I'd say is really outstanding, if longer and more florid than Lolita.
I also found myself thinking “wait he can’t be serious about this poetry it’s not good”. And upon googling found that readers are split many many people think the poetry is seriously good.
Pale Fire is, without a doubt, my favorite thing Nabakov ever wrote. I've been through it at least 5 times but I don't feel as if I've ever fully read it cover-to-cover like other novels. It's just a rough draft of an epic poem (of specious quality) and a bunch of publisher's notes, but it's always intriguing and surprisingly funny.
When people recommend Russian literature I'm always curious what they think about the other great Russian literary works. Because I find unnecessary complexity unbearable. I have no desire to read literature with 100+ named characters, unreliable narrators and Escher-like chronology. For some people narrative complexity is a draw but if I can't put a book down and come back to it two weeks later without having to start from the beginning it's just not for me.
There's a certain literary canon of "men of genius" and often Nabokov is recommended from this reference frame; people rightly react to its invocation. "Don't be terrified of Pale Fire" frames "Pale Fire" as an impenetrable manifestation of the essence of genius, implying that if you were at the right level you'd get it, but—condescendingly—it's still "okay" if you don't get it! That framing is nonsense. It's a thing that's fun for some people, and a certain kind of lit-bro mistakingly believes that what they like is what's genuinely Good and what every smart person should like. I expect your aversion is actually to that voice which takes for granted that "smart-sounding" is equivalent to literary merit for everyone else, too.
In fact, Pale Fire is quite a straightforward story, with a creative form with some puzzles to decipher if you feel like it. Or you can brush past them; the suspicious presence of contradictions is a delight in itself. It was fun for me at 22 but at 33 I would not go back and read it—I don't recall it being particularly deep, but it was a good time. I'm more interested in the other Russians now. Not that Nabokov, Tolstoy, or Dostoevsky have anything to do with each other. One would never think to group them at all if they hadn't written in the same language.
You could maybe tie Nabakov's humor to Gogol or Bulgakov, but he doesn't tell complex stories like Tolstoy or the longer Dostoevsky books. Maybe Pale Fire is like Notes from the Underground or Crime & Punishment in a way, but his work isn't really traditional Russian Lit.
Nabakov's got as much in common with Joyce & Pynchon as any Russian writers.
> I have no desire to read literature with 100+ named characters
Personal share ... I had the same hesitance about getting into Tolstoy. I read The Death Of Ivan Ilyich -- it's short and has few characters. Absolutely loved it. That sealed the deal so I'm working through Anna Karenina now. I'm reading the Rosamund Bartlett translation and it's just superb so I don't really care about the torrent of names and characters. It's worth it IMO.
+1 for The Death of Ivan Ilyich, it's a marvelous example of an author depicting something you (probably) haven't experienced and nonetheless convincing you that's what it's really like.
You might try some of the shorter ones. e.g. from the 19th century: Gogol's short stories, Dostoevsky's "The Double", Turgenev's "Fathers and Children". They weren't all baggy monsters!
While I understand your point of view, and even share it from time to time, if art were limited to those works that were easily accessible, the world would be much poorer for it.
Think of how different the world would be if all Beethoven composed were Für Elise-type pieces, and he never composed anything as complex--and inaccessible--as his Grosse Fuge.
In my experience, my favorite books have been the ones that required me to work a little.
Admittedly The Brothers Karamazov has a lot of characters, but, it does run linearly! And it's not so hard to refer to the Wikipedia article for a character list as necessary.
I think the problem is some people expect to not have to do any work when reading literary novels.
I find that literature that requires work does not provide more food or insight into the human condition or a sense of wonder (or whichever benchmark you choose) than simpler and more accessible works. If complexity is not what makes the work valuable, what purpose does it serve? I posit that for some people complexity for the sake of complexity _is_ the appeal.
I made no such universal statement. Some people enjoy hard things simply because they are hard. My claim is that this can also result in people thinking some literature is better than it is, because people draw satisfaction from the effort itself.
The point you might be missing is that some people might enjoy hard things not only because they are hard, but because only through their laborious efforts is the true brilliance of the work revealed.
For me it's not even that, it's simply that The Brothers Karamazov and other novels like it have historicity and depth to them in a way that modern-style light popcorn novels never do. The hardness therefore is more incidental than the means to an end in itself.
And for what it's worth, there's plenty of modern-style "hard" novels that I've enjoyed immensely as well, including House of Leaves, Infinite Jest, Shogun, The Pillars of the Earth, and [pick any Neal Stephenson novel published this millennium].
Off the top of my head, every book I can think of that provides deep insight into the human condition does require putting in some work. Let's take as an example "Night" by Elie Wiesel, a book that is written so simply it is typically assigned in middle school (that's when I read it). Well, it was assigned in school for a reason -- there's a lot of work to put in to learn more about the history of the Holocaust, concentration camps, and specifically the death marches, as well as the actual full biography of the author (the novel is an autobiography but it only covers one early part of his life).
Exactly - if a work really was so simple that it required no work to understand it, what insight could it possibly give into the human condition? Plenty of "simple" works are reliant on the reader already having done work to grasp it, from growing up in the right country/culture/subculture to learning the right things in school.
I am not really well read on Russian literature (work in progress), but my impression is that they are all over the place in terms of complexity and accessibility. There's rube-goldberg contraptions of genius like Pale Fire, and at the same time short stories that are boiled down to the bare essence of a feeling like Chekov's In the cart. And Tolstoy can write a tome like War and Peace, while also writing Master & Man which approaches Hemingway in its brevity and efficiency.
Nabokov's stories and reputation are intimidating, but if you drop your anxiety over missing the point, he's still a very entertaining, passionate writer. I definitely missed a lot when I read Pale Fire, but I still enjoyed it a lot, even being naive and taking everything at face value.
Pushkin’s short fiction is often great (if uneven, especially the early stuff) and doesn’t (can’t) do the 1,000 characters and complex chronology thing.
Recently read “Pale Fire” for the first time. It’s insanely good. Another review I read made the comment “Nabokov spoils you for other books.” It’s funny, with beautiful sentences, engaging, and the overall format is a welcome break from the normal narrative form.
In Pale Fire, Nabokov coins a couple of great collective nouns when he writes "... an anthology of poets and a brocken of their wives ..."
The Brocken is the highest peak in the Harz mountains of Germany and is where witches are said to gather on Walpurgis Night. So it was quite a subtle dig.
Much like a "skier's mountain" or a "band's band," is this the kind of book that only appeals to a narrow audience that likes to pick apart the mechanics of a book?
Or is this a book like Harry Potter, which was panned by the critics, but otherwise is awesome popular fiction?
The 'hook' of Pale Fire is this: ostensibly you're reading a long-form poem with a foreword and footnotes and editing by a friend of the poet (a poet of some eminence), but it soon becomes apparent that the editor is trying to jam his own life story into those footnotes.
If you like that idea, I think you'd like the book.
Other books I know of that play with part or all of the text itself being an artifact of the fiction:
- The Third Policeman, Flann O’Brian. Fictional scholar of a fictional esoteric philosopher weaves his commentary on same philosopher into an account of his… journey.
- If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Italo Calvino. You(!) embark on an adventure to find the book you believed you purchased, which was If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino.
- The Princess Bride, William Goldman. This has a very different framing narrative from the film, and is very much worth a read.
_House of Leaves_, Mark Danielewski. This one has at least two layers of meta story. The body of the text is a long-form analysis written by a blind man of a fictional film. The extensive footnotes are of the guy who found the manuscript after the blind man died.
S. by Doug Dorst and J.J. Abrams is a book called Ship of Theseus with hand-written back and forth marginal notes from two college students who take turns borrowing it from a library. It comes with loose pieces of literature stuck in the pages. It's not on the literary level of Pale Fire or anything but it was definitely enjoyable.
Other good book series that put the book into the story, by one of my favorite authors, Gene Wolfe:
The Book of the New Sun
Soldier of the mist
In both, the author presents himself as a translator for a text he came across which was written by the main character of the story. In the first, the text came from the distant future. In the second, ancient Greece. They are both incredible.
Book of the New/Long/Short Sun were absolute masterpieces at telling a story within a world where the books and authors themselves exist.
Gene Wolfe really outdid himself, it's always incredible to me to reread the series and find that the books are written in a way that's not only engaging and interesting on a first read through, but equally captivating and enjoyable in new ways when you reread them and appreciate all the subtleties.
I'm reminded of Canada's first weird tale (probably), 'A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder' by James De Mille.
The narrative structure of Strange Manuscript is that of a story within a story. The frame story has four characters. Lord Featherstone, a British aristocrat, has fled the boredom of society to cruise the south seas in his yacht. He is accompanied by Dr. Congreve, a medical doctor who is knowledgeable in such fields as geography, botany, and paleontology; by Noel Oxenden, a Cambridge scholar who is an expert on philology; and by Otto Melick, "a littérateur from London". The four are becalmed in mid-Atlantic when they discover a copper cylinder containing a letter and a manuscript written on an unusual material which the doctor later identifies as papyrus. To while away the time, they take turns reading the manuscript aloud, pausing between turns to discuss its contents and debate its authenticity.
The author seems to have been a rather cool dude
Among the books from his library presented by the family to Dalhousie College are hymnologies of the Greek Church, a beautiful set of Euripides, works in modern Greek, Sanskrit, and Persian showing signs of use, as well as French, German and Italian classics with pencilled marginalia, all attesting the breadth of his intellectual interests. Since his death, his best book, A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder has been published by Harper's. It anticipates such romances as King Solomon's Mines, being a tale of wild adventures in an Antarctic Topsy-turveydom where lovers fly about on tame pterodactyls, and utter unselfishness is the chief aim in life of the highly civilised (but cannibal) inhabitants. [...] De Mille was a tall, handsome, dark man, an excellent teacher, a good conversationalist, best in monologue, an amateur musician, an adept at caricatures and comic verses; in short, a most unusual personality.
Another interesting variant of "annotations are the star" is "But What of Earth?" by Piers Anthony. It's an old school sort of sci fi story, but the publisher rewrote it in the publishing process. Eventually Anthony got the rights back and published the first draft with the editor's changes and his commentary on it. I think it was intended to be commentary on the publishing business, but as a way of knowing an author, you come away feeling like you know the guy in a way you don't get from carefully crafted stories.
It's one of those old paperbacks I know I wouldn't have tossed, but darned if I can find my copy to reread. Maybe I loaned it and it found a new home. Maybe you have it.
(Do remember, he is a 55 year old man writing this in the '80s. Some of his world view is… archaic?… in the greater society today.)
You want the Tor version from 1989, not the Laser version from 1976.
Yeah, strangely enough I never connected Pale Fire to House of Leaves until this article and thread. Puts a slightly different spin on House of Leaves for me.
It is an elaborate joke on works with lots of footnotes and editorial commentary. If you are familiar with this kind of text you migt enjoy it. Otherwise it will probably fall flat.
If you like Borges or Gödel, Escher, Bach you will enjoy this.
I think it is more accessible than the mountains of literary analysis would lead you to believe. It's a fun read even if you didn't dig into every single line, it's short, and it's funny.
I love seeing anything Nabokov related pop-up here; all of his books are lessons in how powerful fictional characters can be when crafted well. Read all of his books as soon as you can!
> Let me state that without my notes Shade's text simply has no human reality at all, since the human reality of such a poem as his ... has to depend entirely on the reality of its author and his surroundings, attachments and so forth, a reality that only my notes can provide. To this statement my dear poet would probably not have subscribed, but, for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.
Final exam questions:
1. To what extent did Nabokov agree or disagree with this approach to literary criticism?
2. Did Nabokov personally identify more with Shade or with Kinbote?
Oof, I hate these questions. Nabokov would have hated 1 as a question because Pale Fire is a sort of extended essay about this very thing, written in the voice of a narcissistic obsessive weirdo and providing him with a sort of chorus response as a poem.
2 feels simplistic to me as well, when asked about one of the great masters of characterization. If you ask who did he sympathize with more, then I’d say possibly ‘neither’.
The main thing people who haven't read it need to know is, it's not a difficult read. A great book that's worth reading, but I'm not sure why the reviewer took the approach she did.
For someone who wants to get into poetry and literature, but has never read anything past the elementary school, would Pale Fire be a good start?
I'm not particularly sharp witted when it comes to books, would it be a good idea to read it in parallel with some sort of an analysis or commentary?
Should I read it translated into my native language (Polish)? I could get through it in English probably, by looking up some of the words. I wonder how much is "lost" when a book like this is translated.
I have not yet read Pale Fire, but I loved Lolita and hope to read it soon. Nabokov's writing is so rich, the writing itself (aside from the story!) is worth lingering over and savoring. I've only found a few other writers with a similar quality - Proust, Milton, perhaps Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison. Does anyone know of authors with a similar property? I'm not even sure what to call it, so it's difficult to search for.
I’d recommend “All the kings men” by Robert Penn Warren. It sounds like a political book but it’s not. It’s more like The Great Gatsby in that the structure is as much about the narrator. Also the writing lapses into “overly poetic” like McCarthy.
Look into Marc Leyner, especially the novel Et Tu, Babe and anything he wrote before that. He specifically set out to create prose where each sentence could stand alone as something beautiful. I think he’s not often taken seriously because he’s simply so extremely funny that he gets pigeonholed as a comic writer. But as his best he crafted English prose at the highest level.
The term you are after, used to describe authors noted for their use of language is prose stylist. Given your examples I think you'll adore Moby-Dick; what Melville pulls off there is astonishing.
I would check out John Crowley, starting with Little, Big. One of the great American prose stylists.
Hilary Mantel is very good. I haven't read the Wolf Hall books, but A Place of Greater Safety is beautiful and deserves to be better known.
I would also nominate Gene Wolfe, especially The Book of the Sun. Fits very well with the subject matter of Nabokov, as it is also a clever metatextual puzzle, albeit a very different kind.
One of my all-time favorites. I loved it so much that I convinced my partner to name our band after the astronomer Starover Blue.
"
The great Starover Blue reviewed the role
Planets had played as landfalls of the soul.
"
Tell me about it. I think it was on the second reading that i figured out it was supposed to be alternate reality science fiction. In the beginning I started reading it because it had footnotes, naively thinking that the footnotes would explain all the bizarre nabakoivsms. Quarter in the way in i was like “these are the worst footnotes ever, they do not explain anything but make things even more bewildering; and why, when the novels characters switch between four languages, dont the footnotes provide translations, at least”. I looked in the back to see who wrote these footnotes, and it was a Russian name i did not recognize. I looked him up on the internet, wondering how this random idiot managed to get these inept footnotes published with he last work of a genius, and sure enough, it turned out it was Nabakov that did the footnotes.
Yeah, nevertheless, the book is great fun and i have read it three times. I read that Pale Fire is even more of a puzzlebox than Ada or Ardor, and i dont think i am ready for that yet. But maybe someday, when i am feeling adventurous.
> I think it was on the second reading that i figured out it was supposed to be alternate reality science fiction
The only reason I knew this was because I read the Wikipedia article after I finished the book. It was a strange experience to enjoy the prose even though I had no idea what was happening.
I suppose it's quite off-topic, but some weeks ago I read a small book by Mary Gaitskill, the writer of the piece.
It's called "Lost Cat".
I highly recommend it. Ironically, it might be an approximate opposite of Pale Fire. It's very short, with simple yet beautiful prose, filled with intense, raw emotions.
> Pale Fire is one of the greatest books I’ve ever read. It is so great it is terrifying to write about. This is not something I would normally confess, but in this case it seems better to just come out and say it, lest the reader feel the awful stammering of suppressed terror quavering through my words without knowing what they are feeling. It is terrifying!
The sentence fragment then means, "I wouldn't have mentioned that it's terrifying to write about, except I worry that the reader could tell that something was wrong by the way I wrote, but not know what."
In music, a refrain is a passage that we return to rather than continuing to progress the song. When we hear refrain as a verb, the metaphor tends to focus on the "abstaining from something else" aspect, but here she's focusing on the "repeated passage" aspect. It's not a common use but it basically works.
It was suggested to me to read the intro first, then skip the poem and read the endnotes start to finish, then to go back and read the poem. The index is part of the fiction and must also be read.
I think the keys to really enjoying Pale Fire are 1) to realize that while the subject matter is ostensibly serious, Kinbote is really a comic figure, and you're meant to be laughing a lot of the time; and 2) the great puzzles to unravel are who is John Shade, who is Charles Kinbote, are any of them even real, and who wrote the poem? The book is so beautifully written that it can be argued that none of those questions have definitive answers - and thinking about them, and how Nabokov threads clues and possibilities throughout the novel, without any of them seeming to be contradictory, is the pleasure.