Pale Fire in Never too Late to Read Classics

Jul 29, 2011 Yair Ben-Zvi rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

As has probably been said before, this is a deceptively deep work. Nabokov juggles literary ideas and allusions and makes it look supremely easy...which makes the work seem all the more impossible anyway. The pictures he creates through words are haunting and beautiful, odd and bizarre but at times wonderful. Reading it, even only once (and this is definitely a novel that deserves more than a cursory read through) and i think you'll feel as i felt reading it, being lost in a lovely maze. Now, th ...more

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Jan 16, 2015 Suzan (Suus Leest) rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Originally posted on my blog

I don’t like writing reviews about novels that disappointed me greatly. That’s why this review will be short.

The premise is interesting: There’s a poem, but the real novel actually consists of the commentary written by someone other than the poet.

Then you start reading the poem. It’s quite interesting and follows the author’s thoughts about his recently lost daughter. After a while, though, you start to wonder whether you should perhaps flip back and forth, between th ...more

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Mar 31, 2022 Jeffrey rated it liked it

Shelves: modern-library-100, peterman-society

Update
With so many great books out in the world that I haven’t read, it’s rare that I’ll open up the same book twice in twelve months, but a few old friends and I were inspired to form a book club inspired by a seminar a few of us took back in college and so The Peterman Society was formed. I didn’t want to spend so long picking books that we never got around to starting things up, so when Pale Fire was thrown out there I said ‘Absolutely – let’s get going’.

Besides, I remembered giving the book ...more

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Mar 11, 2014 Nadine rated it really liked it

Shelves: group-reads, read-in-2014, ebooks-2014

Das Buch bewegt sich auf mehreren Ebenen. Zum einen das 999zeilige Gedicht des fiktiven Autors John Shade, der im Gedicht unter anderem den tragischen Tod seiner Tochter verarbeitet. Zum anderen wird ein Kommentar zum Gedicht nachgestellt, den der ebenfalls fiktive Charles Kinbote verfasst hat. Darin analysiert er das Gedicht, fügt wissenswertes über das Privatleben seines Freundes und Nachbarn Shade ein, aber er läßt es sich auch nicht nehmen, die Geschichte eines Königs aus einem fiktiven, abe ...more

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Jan 25, 2017 Caitlin Channer rated it really liked it

Shelves: fiction

I really liked this. The concept was clever (a novel hidden in the footnote commentary of a poem to make fun of "literary types"), and Nabokov's narrator is thoroughly unreliable. It skips around because of the format, but I enjoyed it anyway. ...more

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