Book #52: Pale Fire
This is one of the strangest, most fascinating books I’ve ever read.
Essentially, Pale Fire is a poem inside a novel inside a novel. Follow? Probably not. It’s still a little confusing to me, and I’ve read it.
Vladimir Nabokov, famed author of Lolita, frames the novel around a 999 line poem written by fictional poet John Shade. The poem, which is a story in itself, is the launching point for a literary critic (who claims to be Shade’s neighbor) to provide a couple of hundred pages of commentary—through footnotes—about the poem.
The problem is, our fictional commentator (Charles Kinbote), appears to be a crazy man who stalks John Shade, and who claims to be a former king of a land called Zembla. This guy is certifiably nuts, and it’s hard to know how much he is telling is truthful and how much is purely delusional. Toward the end of the book, you may even begin to question if Kinbote just made the whole thing up entirely.
But that’s part of the fun. Pale Fire is entertaining because Nabokov basically allows you to be a detective as you try and figure out how much of what Kinbote is saying is true, a lie, an honest mistake, or just plain crazy.
