Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Not his best, but one of his strangest…
The novel is clearly a little masterpiece of ingenuity. Shade’s poem itself is charming. The gradual self-exposure of Kinbote’s insane mind is skillful. There is even some comic suspense and excitement, as the assassin approaches, suffering from diarrhea, and as the maniac escapes to the mountains clutching the precious poem. The prose style is that lavish pate-terrine de foie gras which is Nabokov’s specialty, interlined with truffles, cloves, parsley, salt, pork, mace, black pepper, and one or two bay leaves. …
—Thomas Karshan comments about Nabokov, “In his enormous English edition of Eugene Onegin, he unearthed the gargantuan root-system of poetic allusion that feeds Pushkin’s novel in verse. He (Nabokov) mocked and celebrated the elephantine pedantry of that edition in his novel Pale Fire, which is composed of a 999-line poem by imaginary poet John Shade, and a textual apparatus written by a crazed scholar, Kinbote”—click image for source…
(see link at end)…Many think Pale Fire is Nabokov’s greatest novel. At its heart beats a 999-line poem, penned by its fictional hero, John Shade. This first-ever facsimile edition of the poem shows it to be not just a fictional device but also a masterpiece of American poetry, albeit by an invented persona.
In the novel, Shade’s mad neighbor, Charles Kinbote, absconds with the poem, compiling an ostensible line-by-line commentary that largely ignores Shade’s text and heeds only his own egotism. Kinbote’s commentary, the bulk of the novel, is an insane comic triumph of would-be romantic self-celebration that cannot quite mute its undertones of desperation….Read More:http://www.gingkopress.com/09-lit/vladimir-nabokov-pale-fire.html
—Chiasson is not wrong about the prank-like quality of “Pale Fire”—the book tricks us into thinking it’s one thing (a poem, loaded down with the usual academic appurtenances) before we realize it is in fact something else altogether (a novel!)—but pranks were something Nabokov took very seriously. Indeed, practical jokes of one kind or another abound in his work (see, for example, the first chapter of “The Gift,” which is structured around a deeply cruel April Fool’s Day prank). “All art is deception,” Nabokov once said in an interview, “and so is nature; all is deception in that good cheat, from the insect that mimics a leaf to the popular enticements of procreation.”—click image for source…
…Both his poet and his philologer love words: they play a fine game called “word golf”; and the pages of the book glitter with such verbal gems as “comedo,” “fatidic,” “iridule,” “lemniscate,” “preterist,” “stang,” and “stillicide.” One might say that such an author does not work by the customary parameters, and if his epigrams were less glochidiate one might suspect him of deliberate steganography. The phrase “an undeodorized Frenchwoman” is amusing in itself; and a skyscraper at night is well described as a “luminous waffle.”
The point of the book? It has several, as the best fictional satire should have; and it is best understood by comparisons with other Nabokov novels. Like Lolita, it is a study in obsessional insanity, particularly in its power to systematize the indeterminate, to make a gruesome work of art out of random and even mean elements. The arch and cloying sentimentality of the male homosexual is elegantly spoofed.
Like Nabokov’s Pnin, it is a satire on the European intellectual in America, who feels himself an aristocrat rudely jostled by the lower-middle class. Like his The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, it is the reconstruction of a dead author’s life through a study of his work and milieu. ( to be continued)…
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