Pale Fire

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.

I LOVED this book. Good grief. I am such a sucker for an unreliable narrator.

Pale Fire is an unfinished Poem by the recently deceased John Shade, and is presented here with an introduction, commentary, and exhaustive index by his friend, Charles Kinbote.

Or is it? Who knows.

I was aware that this book was held in very high regard but I had no idea how funny it would be! The pompous and witty Kinbote keeps us entertained throughout with his unbelievably far reaching footnotes and his direct appeals to the reader to do his research for him because he just doesn't have the time or the resources. I particularly enjoyed his bizarrely detailed discourse on committing suicide ‘successfully'.

This has been in my bookcase for years and I just never got around to it. Having now (finally) read it, I'm sure it was bought as a post-HoL recommendation because there is definitely an air of the House about it. I was also very much reminded of A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro, and Poor Things by Alasdair Gray throughout.

I will be absolutely amazed if this book isn't in my top five at the end of the year.

Five stars. No, six! Ten!