(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 ...
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(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 Rorty
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The narrator of this novel is one screwed up guy. The character who is narrating this novel purports to be annotating and commenting on a lengthy poem by a dear friend and neighbour. Instead, the narrator has hijacked the poem for his own purposes. The reader has to decide if the narrator is aware and is intentionally subverting the other man's work, or is he so deluded that he actually believes in the hilarious and revealing nonsense he goes on and on about.
This is a very funny book and there is no doubt that the humour is intentional. It is also brilliant.
