Vexcrog

Speak Memory is a tour of the slides of the author's memory projected onto the screen of the novel page. As Vladimir Nabokov is an utter master of the prosaic art, the image of his memory is wonderfully preserved in the medium of print. Nevertheless, despite the beauty of the slides preserved by Mnemosyne, the affair does at times feel like a family gathering in which your own grandfather unveils his antiquated slide projector and shares photographs of rather mundane moments in his childhood and youth. No one can deny Nabokov had a very interesting life, but whilst reading one cannot help at time but feel like one of the grandchildren looking on with respectful boredom.

There was a time in my demented youth

When somehow I suspected that the truth

About survival after death was known

To every human being: I alone

Knew nothing, and a great conspiracy

Of books and people hid the truth from me.

Upon the course of life, we consume various pieces of art, and naturally we are made to react to them in various different ways. Such is the beauty of art. Whether we dislike, enjoy, become infuriated, feel disgust or joy; we are allotted some emotional reaction towards the artistically crafted. Occasionally, be it once or twice in the stretch of our lives, we find something so transformative, so immaculate, and so masterfully crafted that it feels like the artist re-wrote the neural paths in one's brain, and shaped the man into a new person. Pale Fire is one of those works of art for me, in fact, I would call it my favourite piece of art ever. The utter mastery of Nabokov's craft of the English language has created a creative, thought provoking, engaging, funny, beautiful work of utter genius that has transformed me.

Pale Fire's structure is unlike anything else I have ever seen, and pioneered the art of meta-fiction. Pale Fire is presented as a poem with the selfsame title, with a forward and commentary much like any other. However, the genius is that the forward and commentary are as fictitious, and both describe the events around the fictitious poet, John Shade, as he write Pale Fire in the last days of his life. The forward and commentary are provided by the equally fictitious editor and friend of Shade, Charles Kinbote, who the reader is quick to find isn't completely sane, and will switch almost on a dime to from genuine analysis of Shade to rambling about a seemingly unrelated story about exiled kings, revolution and murder. All of this comes together beautifully at the end, and makes the experience of reading unforgettable.

Though Nabokov disliked analysis of his stories, it is necessary to talk about the themes of Pale Fire. Pale Fire invokes many wide ranging themes, sometimes even with the delicate subtlety of a falling snowflake, and tackles them exceptionally. At the surface level, it deals with loss, fear of the afterlife, religion. When you dig deeper into the narrative, and meta-narrative, you also find themes about mental illness, identity, and the nature and originality of art. Pale Fire presents a beautiful poem full of these themes, and allows you to come to your own conclusion about them. Such themes gives one a buffet of literary meat to feast upon, and extenuate the already exalted work to new empyrean heights.

Nabokov's prose makes for the best advertisement for the English language. Though he was a native Russian, his use of the English lexicon can only be compared to the Sistine Chapel with words. The line of his poetry and the text of his stories punctuate far past the skin of most authors, and resonate inside of the reader. Take this excerpt from the prosal half of the book: "If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece". Nabokov paints beautiful paintings with words, and one cannot help to get oneself completely absorbed in his oil and canvas.

Pale Fire is a transformative masterpiece, and never before has anything blown my mind to the level that it has. I could continue this review for an indefinite length simply gawking at it's marvel, but I am not equipped to do so. If I could give it 6 stars, I would. It has been endlessly debated, adored and praised ever since it came out in 1962, and I think that in the future it will only crescendo into being recognized as one of the greatest work of our language.

Heart, head--everything.

Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita,

Lolita. Repeat till the page is full, printer.

Seldom few books reach Lolita(1955)'s level of infamy among even the most uninitiated of readers. Many a person would seem to think of Nabokov's novel as a erotic work presenting an illicit romance between a pubescent girl and her middle-aged guardian. However, this is a very common misconception, and turning the pages of the novel will reveal a much darker tale about a mentally disturbed man and his manipulation and molestation of a defenceless 12 year old girl.

Nabokov brilliantly answers the novel's horrific subject matter with the dialect of the most beautiful prose ever written in the English language. The main character and narrator, Mr Humbert Humbert, is a well educated, cultured and intelligent man who's exquisite writings can't help but allure the reader to sympathize with him and insert themselves in the story in his position. However, this is where the genius of the novel comes into play. H.H. is not a reliable narrator, not only with the possession by his monomaniacal attraction to Lolita skewing her behaviour towards her in his mind and thus the novel, but the book goes out of it's way to state explicitly that he spent multiple stays in various sanatoriums around the country. We must acknowledge that not everything in the novel is as Humbert said it was, and simple innocuous actions taken by Lolita might be interpreted by Humbert, and by extension the novel, as flirtatious and sexual. Even with this glamour of a brilliant, cultured writer, the rot of his manipulations seep through his biased lense of the novel's events and we can see his monstrous behaviour towards an innocent girl and the effects of his awful actions on her life.

The narrative presented by Nabokov is thrilling, with it's honest depictions of suburban Americana in what was arguably the greatest period in that nation's history interwoven into it's settings. The first half is a brilliantly paced slice of life, for lack of a better term. We see Humbert try to integrate himself into the home life of one Charlotte Haze, and her daughter, Dolores, to whom he gives the titular moniker Lolita. We see him struggle both externally and internally to keep his insatiable lust under control as to not get noticed by the residents of his small, suburban town. This character study is brilliant, and makes Humbert all the more compelling protagonist. The book itself even seem to bend to his mental state, as some parts ring are as clear as the Atlantic, while parts where Humbert is more stressed come off as more fragmentary and erratic.

Lolita as a whole is a seminal masterpiece, one which not even the late Stanley Kubrick could bring justice on the big screen. It completely deserves it's spot as one of the greatest books of the 20th century, and has sparked in me what will indubitably become a life-long love affair with Nabokov's work.

I picked this one up, since I both loved Hyperion and am interested in Hindu mythology and metaphysics. Suffice it to say, while this book does have some brief flashes of greatness that transfixed me to the page; most of it was mediocre. I can't hold it against Simmons considering this was his first full length novel, but you won't lose much by skipping out on it.