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Feb 21, 2011

Manny rated it:

I (1) liked (2) this book (3), especially the poem (4).

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(1) When I use the first-person singular pronoun, I am here referring to my normal persona. I have also, at various times, maintained other personas. For example, between 1999 and 2001, I used to play chess regularly on the KasparovChess site under the handle "swedish_chick".

I find this a strange example of what makes people believe More...

15 comments like (45 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Zulieka rated it:

Whoop-dee-doo, five stars to Mr. Nabokov. Do you also feel silly clicking on the ratings? You throw gold stars into Pale Fire and the vanity of star-ratings is exposed.

We here are a community trying to reclaim our authority over writers who for pages have manipulated our thoughts and beings. Generals get stars, good students too, and my 2-year-old every time she uses the potty. Only the higher-ups get to hand them out, but c'mmon, is there a higher-up for Nabokov? Whoever can, More...

3 comments like (30 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Nick rated it:

I loved this, especially as my copy of the book seemed to operate on a meta-meta-meta-meta-level.

The book initially appears to be an unfinished poem, 'Pale Fire', by a dead writer named John Shade, together with a foreword, detailed commentary and index by a friend of his, Charles Kinbote.

But Kinbote is less interested in the poem than he is in discussing the country of 'Zembla' and its flamboyantly gay, deposed King. It's more or less apparent, as the book progresses, th More...

3 comments like (30 people liked it)

Mar 21, 2009

John rated it:

Pale Fire is ostentatious, high octane genius, almost as if Nabokov were trying to squeeze a complete showcase of his novelistic virtuosity in just over 200 pages of text (an epic poem within a story within a larger story, all of which may very well be the complete fabrication of the annotator/narrator, who is quite convincingly insane). Among other things, this is a portrait of insanity and perversity on par with Lolita, but with more literary/metaliterary pyrotechnics.

10 comments like (9 people liked it)

Sep 11, 2011

Mariel rated it:

Now I shall spy on beauty as none as Spied on it yet.

I read Pale Fire under the bed. I didn't roll around in the sheets and get sweaty and come at the same time like all of the sex scenes on HBO tv shows. I hid under the bed and I didn't look first to see who the bed belonged to. So long as it wasn't mine... Another sweaty body did the dirty on top and I could feel the springs pushing into my back down below. Paranoid body on top and apprehensively hopeful body below. Just below, me. More...

8 comments like (24 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

David rated it:

There really isn't any other word to describe "Pale Fire" other than brilliant. How else can you describe a novel whose story takes place almost entirely outside its own text?

In the end, I can't decide whether I'm supposed to even like the poem, which I did. I can't decide whether Nabokov even wanted me to consider this a great work of fiction or whether this is a bitter satire of readers and critics? Should I be offended? Or do I detect a hint of self-disgust? Should I la More...

1 comment like (9 people liked it)

Jan 26, 2009

Nikki rated it:

After reading 'John Shade' for a time, I
Can not help but think in rhyme. Gray
Cat sits on a sunken chair; Full of
Spite and covr'd with mangy hair.

Was that the phone? I listen at the door.
Pause. Nothing. I resume vaccuming
Once more. And there's the wall of
Sound, that nightly wall. Frogs
Croak, the 'Yotes howl and frighten all.

What torture and yet splendid pain, Nabokov
Has inflicted on my brain! Ludricous,
I say; tha More...

4 comments like (13 people liked it)

Feb 09, 2012

Conor rated it:

I couldn't write, or didn't want to write, a review after reading this. I think a couple of years on, a couple of cloth-bound versions given away to lovers as gifts, and I'm ready.

The first thing that should be noted for anyone approaching this book is that it's a commentary on editing and a novel with extremely odd form. If you're not down for that, or you don't like the idea of reading a poem, then stay away.

That said, it's still jaw droppingly amazing what this book is More...

0 comments like (5 people liked it)

Jun 27, 2008

Dusty rated it:

A novel in the form of a work of criticism. After the death of the renowned poet John Shade, his neighbor and colleague Charles Kinbote gets hold of the 999-line autobiographical poem he'd been writing; what we read are Kinbote's foreword to Shade's poem, the poem itself, and then more than 150 pages of Kinbote's commentary on the poem. Oh, and an index. What makes the text readable like a novel (and ultimately what saves Pale Fire from being merely a fun exercise in pomo intertextualities) is t More...

0 comments like (5 people liked it)

Dec 04, 2007

Amy rated it:

Pale Fire is one the funniest books I have ever read. The book is structured as a foreword, a poem, commentary, and an index. I personally don't like poetry very much, but the poem was so bad that I'm pretty sure Nabokov was making fun of poetry and poetry analysis in general. As I started reading more of the "commentary" it seemed pretty clear that it really had very little to do with the poem, although each paragraph or couple of pages were supposed to refer back to a certain set of More...

1 comment like (4 people liked it)

Jun 28, 2008

Ellenyo rated it:

A perfect book in every way, and absolutely hilarious. I rarely laugh out loud when reading, but I laughed out loud most of the way through this. I was amazed at the audacity of the writing as well as delighted by the constant puns and jokes. What skill it took to pull this off. This is no ordinary novel, and it could have gone so wrong, or remained an interesting experiment worthy of reading just for the sake of paying homage to a popular writer of his time. But this is so much more. Nabokov go More...

1 comment like (6 people liked it)

Jan 15, 2012

Soo rated it:

It is poetry? Insanity? A novel from start to finish? It's more like a journal that takes place in snippets of time but you have to pay attention to figure out if the snippet is real, imagined or a mix of the two. The book is an interesting stream of consciousness of a quixotically, delusional man named Charles Kinbote aka several other figures within that you should figure out for yourself.

There are brilliant lines and phrases in the story that create vivid imagery and instant emotio More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Sep 23, 2011

Richard rated it:

It took me two months to get through this book. I finally had to finish it because I had exceeded my limit for renewing it at the library. "Pale Fire" took me a long time to read because I could only read it when I wasn't tired, when I wasn't in the middle of a project and when I wasn't distracted. It required my full attention just to follow what was going on.

It's funny that I read this book when I did. I have been reading books on literary theory and how a conventional no More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Sep 07, 2011

Laura rated it:

I admit that I don't feel smart enough to write a proper review of Nabokov's book, but I'm unashamed at my lack of brains; like a "waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane," said brains have been dashed against the pages of an unbelievably slippery and amusing book that defies any genre I know.

"Pale Fire" is the name of a 999-line poem in four cantos by the famous poet John Shade (a creation of Nabokov). After Shade's death, Charles Kinbote (also fic More...

9 comments like (1 person liked it)

May 03, 2009

Mark rated it:

On the one hand, I agree with D.J. Enright, who called this sort of thing "farting a tune through a keyhole" -- very clever, but is it worth the effort? I only "got" about a third of the trilingual puns and paleo-Baltic in-jokes -- and I'm certain I have no idea which unreliable narrator hiding behind which curtain is the "real" author of this work -- I still grooved on Vlad's trickster erudition and cinematic (or rather GIS) eye for space and place.

Is More...

3 comments like (9 people liked it)

Aug 21, 2008

Ryan rated it:

This is the third Nabokov book I've read (the Defense and Lolita being the others) and maybe because of it's formal inventiveness, the remark I've seen about hearing the clatter of surgical tools in Nabokov's prose seemed more apt here. And compare that metaphor with Nabokov's own description of Dickens in 'Lec on Lit' -

"All we have to do when reading Bleak House is relax and let our spines take over. Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between our More...

0 comments like (8 people liked it)

Mar 01, 2010

Matt rated it:

1/2010: I think I'm converted to the Rothian interpretation of PF in light of RLS's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." In this interpretation, Shade, Kinbote and Gradus are all the same person; rather, each is a different personality residing in the same body. However, the novel is still populated with 'real' people -- i.e., people other than the diffracted personalities. I'm still mulling this over, though; but I'm open to it.

The author's son, Dmitri, singled out this novel More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Apr 07, 2008

Dfordoom rated it:

Pale Fire takes the form of a long poem, supposedly written by a respected recently deceased American poet called John Shade, and an even longer commentary on the poem. The commentary is supposedly written by Dr Charles Kinbote, a neighbour and a close friend of the poet in the last part of his life. Kinbote is an exile from Zembla, a mythical Scandinavian country whose king is on the run after being deposed in a revolution. Kinbote tells the story of this exiled king to the poet, and believe More...

0 comments like

Mar 03, 2008

Jessica rated it:

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 masterpi More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Apr 26, 2008

Joseph rated it:

This book is pretty ridiculous. In the parlance of our times, Pale Fire falls into the genre of "meta-fiction." I feel dirty just mentioning that in reference to Nabokov but it does apply. The novel begins with a long poem, entitled Pale Fire by John Shade. Actually, I'm incorrect; it begins with a foreward that is part of the novel (so don't skip it, you foreward haters). Post-poem, and the bulk of the book, is an analysis of the poem by the foremost Shade scholar and ostensibly his g More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 16, 2008

Jason rated it:

I have read every Nabokov novel besides his last, but Pale Fire still remains my favorite, as it continues to cast its shadow on everything I write myself (perhaps too strong of a shadow...). In a close run for second is "Ada or Ardor", followed by "Invitation to a Beheading", and perhaps "The Defense".

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

May 20, 2010

Mara rated it:

(Not a real review, mind you, for I am still staggering, just:
1. How did I not know VN was FUNNY?
2. One suspects all literary critics and annotators are apophenic.
3. There is joy in having to look up words, and more joy when those words seem to have been used only by VN in the last fifty years.. Inenubilable!
4. I am getting better at books that take three bookmarks to read for the flipping back and forth. And I opened Baker's Mezzanine tonight to thrill to the sight of al More...

5 comments like (6 people liked it)

Apr 21, 2008

Joseph rated it:

This was recommended by a co-worker who suggested I check it out. All I can say is that the poem was good. I enjoyed it and it flowed nicely. The Charles Kinbote portion following the poem reads like a critique with strange undertones of insanity. If that's what Nabokov was going for, cool, but reading fictional notes on a poem by a fictional character is not really my thing. Of course, reading notes on what some critic thinks of an artist's work doesn't thrill me either. Perhaps Nabokov was pok More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 06, 2011

Julia rated it:

Fogo pálido é um poema do escritor John Shade publicado postumamente e comentado pelo editor, Charles Kinbote. Só que os comentários nem sempre tem relação visível com o poema, John Shade foi assassinado, e Kinbote pode ser o rei exilado de um país báltico. Ou ainda, Shade pode ter escrito tudo e inventado Kinbote como um artifício, e vice-versa. Não é um livro pra se amar ou odiar, como diz o clichê, mas definitivamente é um livro sobre o qual se costuma ter uma opinião forte. As brigas entre s More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 16, 2009

Alex rated it:

Far be it from my expectations of myself to decipher just what in the hell I read. Did Kinbote invent Shade as a literary device or vice versa? Or were they really two different individuals who happened to live next door to one another? Was Kinbote an exiled king or suffering delusions of grandeur? Does Zembla exist? Obviously we have an unreliable narrator, but does that make his summary of the insane asylum escapee narrative - which he denounces - unreliable as well?

These ques More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Feb 01, 2012

Terry rated it:

My dislike for mostmodernism stems from a deep dislike for using the wonderful as an ingredient in the putrid. Why write a perfectly lovely book only to chop it up and create some work of metafiction? That seemed to me like preparing duck confit and then grinding it down to make sausage. After completing Pale Fire, I have updating my disgust to mere suspicion as Nabokov almost flawlessly executes a book about a book in a book.

Narration - The plot has four strands to it, consisting o More...

0 comments like

Apr 28, 2011

Austin added it

I recently returned to Pale Fire after leaving it unfinished over ten years ago. I returned not least because the sage Robert Alter commended it and quoted from it this brilliant passage on mirrors:

He awoke to find her standing with a comb in her hand before his--or rather, his grandfather's--cheval glass, a triptych of bottomless light, a really fantastic mirror, signed with a diamond by its maker, Sudarg of Bokay. She turned about before it: a secret device of reflection fathered an in

More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Mar 21, 2011

John rated it:

Ok, I need to do a little better job researching books that I read and I am not familiar with. I read Lolita last year and thought it was brilliant, so I wanted to read more Nabokov. Pale Fire seemed to be the consensus as his second most critically acclaimed book. But I was not quite ready for the non-traditional format of the book. In fact I almost bailed on it because it was not what I was looking for. Thankfully I did not.
Although the payoff in enjoyment and appreciation for the More...

0 comments like

Jan 26, 2011

David rated it:

Whenever I read articles by writers, the author they mention the most often as someone they admire is Vladimir Nabokov. Since I'm not really interested in reading Lolita (about a man's relationship with a young girl, for those that don't know), I thought I'd read this, which is actually considered to be his best work. It was great. Nabokov has incredibly poetic and dynamic language and he uses it in a story that is fun and ingeniously constructed. The book is very different from a traditiona More...

1 comment like

Jan 22, 2011

Sally rated it:

I just re-read this for book club, and I'm even more stunned than I was the first time (1998). Nabokov is a freaking genius.

The novel consists of a 999 line poem written by John Shade (one of the characters). The poem is so gorgeous it made me ache--life, death, where is God? This is 4 cantos of perfect RHYMED iambic pentameter--but all the lines are enjambed, so you're not overwhelmed by the rhyme. It's subtle and lovely.

The rest of the story happens within the commentary More...

4 comments like (1 person liked it)

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