Pale Fire (Everyman's Library Classics & Contemporary Classics)
by Vladimir Nabokov
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Book Summary Information
Author: Vladimir NabokovEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1992-03-10
ISBN: 0679410775
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: Everyman's Library
Book Reviews of Pale Fire (Everyman's Library Classics & Contemporary Classics)
Book Review: When Inmates (Think They) Run the Asylum
Summary: 5 Stars
Nabokov's PALE FIRE provides some highly entertaining reading but also leaves me wondering what more I should have gotten from it. There is so much to this multifaceted author that I always fear to be missing some allusion, some inference, some idea beyond my ken as I read his creative prose. PALE FIRE, of course offers more than creative prose for it also offers up a very meaningful poem, the first poetry I've read by Nabokov, and I am most impressed by his skill as a poet in addition to that as a novelist.
The inclusion of the poem is, of course, vital to the structure of the novel since the book is built on the comments of Kinbote, who is annotating and explicating the poem for the rest of us, yet the poem could stand by itself with hardly any difficulty at all. For the most part, the poem presents us with the forlorn thoughts and ruminations on the possibility of an afterlife by John Shade, who has lost his beloved daughter to suicide, quite a different theme from what follows in Kinbote's commentaries. The fourth canto, however, has left me wondering. Its language, tone and tenor are different from those of the first three cantos. It sounds less developed and less polished than the others, and it includes a metaphor to "Old Zembla's fields," and Zembla is the imagined country of which Kinbote thought himself king! That is not Shade speaking. Has Kinbote rewritten the fourth canto is his own words? This is an example of what I said above about not quite grasping the full significance of some of Nabokov's writing. There is a change of focus (and author?) in the last fourth of the poem whose significance I cannot entirely comprehend. I must get Meyer's interpretive book FIND WHAT THE SAILOR HAS HIDDEN: VLADIMIR NABOKOV'S PALE FIRE. Her vision of Nabokov's creation is likely much clearer than mine.
The majority of pages, of course, present us the thoughts and explanations of Charles Kinbote, but we are not really meant to understand Shade's poem through those thoughts. Instead, we are meant to understand the warped mind of Charles Kinbote, who imagines himself the exiled king of Zembla. This technique is precisely the one that Nabokov uses in LOLITA, in which we come to understand the delusions of Humbert Humbert. In that novel, we see, interpret and understand the entire world through the eyes and brain of a pedophile. In PALE FIRE, we see Kinbote's self concept and his relationship with the poet John Shade through the eyes and brain of a delusional, egocentric fellow, not as damaging to others as Humbert but just as unrealistic in his expectations and interpretation of the outer world.
In another parallel between Kinbote and Humbert, we see Kinbote blaming perceived sleights by his poet friend on obstructions raised by Shade's wife, just as Humbert saw everyone in the world--except for the nymphets, of course--as misshapen and repulsive. Each man is interpreting the rest of the world as he believes or wants it to be, not as it is, and perhaps this is as good a definition of insanity as anything else, for insanity is certainly the topic of the book.
"Pale fire," of course, refers to moonlight, which is, after all, stolen from the sun. I spent a great deal of time trying to comprehend parts of the novel in terms of this thievery but eventually concluded that the title refers to the lunatics (literally, those made insane by the effects of moonlight) in the book rather than thievery--although, in a sense, Kinbote does "steal" Shade's poem at the end in order to annotate and publish it with his own commentary, so perhaps both meanings are indeed present. Kinbote is the primary lunatic in the novel, although Jack Gray, escaped from the asylum and metamorphosed into the regicide Gradus in Kinbote's mind, qualifies as well. Between them, they manage first to destroy the poet and then to purloin his work.
The treatment of poor, misguided Kinbote, who understands little of Shade's poem and who orients all of his commentary toward his own personal objectives and sees everything in terms of his own delusions, makes me think that perhaps Nabokov is tweaking literary critics in this book as well. After all, his contemporary critics were not especially kind to him, and PALE FIRE can be read, at least in part, as a commentary on their sanity, critical, yet expressed in such a humorous manner that those on the receiving end of the verbal bodkin do not realize that they are being skewered until the deed is done.
If anyone has actually read this far, let me apologize for attempting an explication of the novel rather than just a reader review, for I do not pretend to be qualified to do the former. I am just so overwhelmed at the multiplicity of possible interpretations of this delicious and unusual novel that ideas bubble out of their own volition. PALE FIRE is close to a "must read" category, yet it may not be the best of Nabokov for one to start with. If one wishes to explore the mind of this incredible writer, I suggest beginning with PNIN, continuing with LOLITA, and then enjoying PALE FIRE. The experiences that one has with the first two books will, I feel, be of great help in appreciating this one.
ADDED COMMENTARY TWO WEEKS LATER: Thanks to Interlibrary Loan, I've now read Priscilla Meyer's book FIND WHAT THE SAILOR HAS HIDDEN. Her analysis of Nabokov's themes, allusions, and references, not just in PALE FIRE but in all of his works, is, to say the very least, illuminating. I knew I was surely missing much of what Nabokov embedded in his novel, but I had no inkling of how much I was missing. To glean everything that Nabokov has woven into his writings would require an intimate knowledge of authors and editors from Pushkin to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles of King Alfred, not mention Shakespeare and ancient Norse legends. Meyer's analytical book will, however, give the general reader a much greater understanding of Nabokov's themes, and I highly recommend it to anyone who feels challenged by Nabokov's works and wishes to more fully appreciate them. As to the interpretation of this book's title, "pale fire" alludes to a multiplicity of concepts, including the pale nature of translated literature in comparison with the original and the pale nature of this mortal life compared with the beauty of the afterlife as Nabokov imagined it.
Summary of Pale Fire (Everyman's Library Classics & Contemporary Classics)
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)The urbane authority that Vladimir Nabokov brought to every word he ever wrote, and the ironic amusement he cultivated in response to being uprooted and politically exiled twice in his life, never found fuller expression than in Pale Fire published in 1962 after the critical and popular success of Lolita had made him an international literary figure.An ingeniously constructed parody of detective fiction and learned commentary, Pale Fire offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures, at the center of which is a 999-line poem written by the literary genius John Shade just before his death. Surrounding the poem is a foreword and commentary by the demented scholar Charles Kinbote, who interweaves adoring literary analysis with the fantastical tale of an assassin from the land of Zembla in pursuit of a deposed king. Brilliantly constructed and wildly inventive, this darkly witty novel of suspense, literary one-upmanship, and political intrigue achieves that rarest of things in literature?perfect tragicomic balance.With an Introduction by Richard RortyLike Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire is a masterpiece that imprisons us inside the mazelike head of a mad émigré. Yet Pale Fire is more outrageously hilarious, and its narrative convolutions make the earlier book seem as straightforward as a fairy tale. Here's the plot--listen carefully! John Shade is a homebody poet in New Wye, U.S.A. He writes a 999-line poem about his life, and what may lie beyond death. This novel (and seldom has the word seemed so woefully inadequate) consists of both that poem and an extensive commentary on it by the poet's crazy neighbor, Charles Kinbote.
According to this deranged annotator, he had urged Shade to write about his own homeland--the northern kingdom of Zembla. It soon becomes clear that this fabulous locale may well be a figment of Kinbote's colorfully cracked, prismatic imagination. Meanwhile, he manages to twist the poem into an account of Zembla's King Charles--whom he believes himself to be--and the monarch's eventual assassination by the revolutionary Jakob Gradus.
In the course of this dizzying narrative, shots are indeed fired. But it's Shade who takes the hit, enabling Kinbote to steal the dead poet's manuscript and set about annotating it. Is that perfectly clear? By now it should be obvious that Pale Fire is not only a whodunit but a who-wrote-it. There isn't, of course, a single solution. But Nabokov's best biographer, Brian Boyd, has come up with an ingenious suggestion: he argues that Shade is actually guiding Kinbote's mad hand from beyond the grave, nudging him into completing what he'd intended to be a 1,000-line poem. Read this magical, melancholic mystery and see if you agree. --Tim Appelo
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