Review: Pale Fire

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



It took me a long time to read, because I only read it at bedtime. But this was so much fun . It had been on the back burner for me since the 1990s, but I didn't go get a copy until I saw it was recommended for people who liked Egyptologist and Confederacy of Dunces. It's just so interesting to get swept up in an unreliable narrator's world view, and the back and forth of the notes is an early hypertext thing.

The novel's pretense of being about the poem, which Nabokov also wrote in a style parodying a lot of American verse, was returned to over and over again. The simple imbalance of the commentary compared to the length of the poem made me laugh almost every time I picked it up. Also, this would have been a clear challenge to the New Critics so prominent in Nabokov's time--the idea that an interpreter's schema has far more to do with interpretation than the 'text' and that the text to a fan can become something wholly disconnected from the author--in this case, who is dead since the opening pages.



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