Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov
Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov
John Shade's wife, nee Irondell (which comes not from a little valley yielding iron ore but from the French for "swallow"). she was a few months his senior. i understand she came of Canadian stock, as did Shade's maternal grandmother (a first cousin of Sybil's grandfather, if I am not greatly mistaken).
From the very first, I tried to behave with the utmost courtesy toward my friend's wife, and from the very first, she disliked and distrusted me. I was to learn later that when alluding to me in public she used to call me 'an elephantine tick; a king-sized botfly; a macaco worm; the monstrous parasite of a genius.' I pardon her--her and everybody.
Nabakov's second most famous book also features a creepy, unreliable narrator who fools a lot of people into thinking he's someone he isn't. It's also a large literary joke that only hardcore bibliophiles and James Joyce fans will enjoy.
The novel is disguised as a poem with copious scholarly commentary. John Francis Shade, who ostensibly wrote the four-canto poem that takes up the book's first 40 pages, is apparently a fairly normal American poet. Charles Kinbote, who ostensibly presents the poem in published form with an introduction, 180 pages of notes and commentary, and an index, is some kind of nut. He insists that the poem is a veiled illusion to the deposed King Charles of Zembla, whose tragic overthrow and exile, hunted by assassins, is mentioned nowhere in the text of the poem but makes up the majority of the commentary. Eventually, Kinbote's claims about the meaning of "Pale Fire" the poem ring as hollowly as his claims to have been Shade's best friend and a great influence on him. Kinbote borders on stalker behavior, with the distinction that Shade (maybe) doesn't mind the attention. Much of the poem as presented deals with the suicide of Shade's daughter and Shade's struggle to cope with it, and I wondered, but did not see evidence, whether Kinbote had had something to do with the death, that we were supposed to discover through oblique references. I also wondered for a while if the joke was a commentary on The Wasteland, and then decided that, no, it had nothing to do with TS Elliot at all. It's that kind of book.
The big challenge stems from the fact that the "notes and commentary" are extensively cross-referenced, so that you have to keep flipping back and forth between them and the poem and the index in order to get the full impact of the book and discover, for example, what part of Kinbote's narrative is delusional and why the part I quoted above about Shade's wife's nickname for Kinbote is actually pivotal to the circumstances of the book.
This was my first reading of Pale Fire. I can envision myself coming back to it another day and discovering a lot of "easter eggs" that I missed this time around. Recommended for puzzle fans.
John Shade's wife, nee Irondell (which comes not from a little valley yielding iron ore but from the French for "swallow"). she was a few months his senior. i understand she came of Canadian stock, as did Shade's maternal grandmother (a first cousin of Sybil's grandfather, if I am not greatly mistaken).
From the very first, I tried to behave with the utmost courtesy toward my friend's wife, and from the very first, she disliked and distrusted me. I was to learn later that when alluding to me in public she used to call me 'an elephantine tick; a king-sized botfly; a macaco worm; the monstrous parasite of a genius.' I pardon her--her and everybody.
Nabakov's second most famous book also features a creepy, unreliable narrator who fools a lot of people into thinking he's someone he isn't. It's also a large literary joke that only hardcore bibliophiles and James Joyce fans will enjoy.
The novel is disguised as a poem with copious scholarly commentary. John Francis Shade, who ostensibly wrote the four-canto poem that takes up the book's first 40 pages, is apparently a fairly normal American poet. Charles Kinbote, who ostensibly presents the poem in published form with an introduction, 180 pages of notes and commentary, and an index, is some kind of nut. He insists that the poem is a veiled illusion to the deposed King Charles of Zembla, whose tragic overthrow and exile, hunted by assassins, is mentioned nowhere in the text of the poem but makes up the majority of the commentary. Eventually, Kinbote's claims about the meaning of "Pale Fire" the poem ring as hollowly as his claims to have been Shade's best friend and a great influence on him. Kinbote borders on stalker behavior, with the distinction that Shade (maybe) doesn't mind the attention. Much of the poem as presented deals with the suicide of Shade's daughter and Shade's struggle to cope with it, and I wondered, but did not see evidence, whether Kinbote had had something to do with the death, that we were supposed to discover through oblique references. I also wondered for a while if the joke was a commentary on The Wasteland, and then decided that, no, it had nothing to do with TS Elliot at all. It's that kind of book.
The big challenge stems from the fact that the "notes and commentary" are extensively cross-referenced, so that you have to keep flipping back and forth between them and the poem and the index in order to get the full impact of the book and discover, for example, what part of Kinbote's narrative is delusional and why the part I quoted above about Shade's wife's nickname for Kinbote is actually pivotal to the circumstances of the book.
This was my first reading of Pale Fire. I can envision myself coming back to it another day and discovering a lot of "easter eggs" that I missed this time around. Recommended for puzzle fans.