Pale Fire (Vintage International)

Media:	Paperback
Author:	Vladimir Nabokov
Publisher:	Vintage
Release date:	23 April, 1989
List price:	~~$13.00~~
Our price:	$10.40 that is 20% off!

Pale Fire (Vintage International)

Average rating: Stars

Helped me on LSAT and GMAT

I studied on my own for the LSAT and GMAT with very little success. Gave up in frustration and picked up Pale Fire. It is an intimidating book, especially for those whose exposure to poetry consisted of some Shakespeare in highschool. I thoroughly enjoyed the mental exercise of reading through Pale Fire and believe it gave me the confidence to tackle the LSAT and GMAT again. Wound up in the top 99% for GMAT and top 96% for LSAT. I can't draw a perfect connection, but I have never done that well on standardized tests until I read Pale Fire. Highly recommend it for pleasure reading as well as for those who need a difficult novel to challenge and expand their intellectual horizons.

Pale Fire (Vintage International) - Vladimir Nabokov

A quadruple bank shot within a quadruple bank shot...

Regarding "Pale Fire":

A narrator, Charles Kinbote, who may or may not be a deposed king in hiding, proffers the reader an elliptical, line-by line commentary to an extraordinary 999 line poem, the centerpiece of the novel and itself entitled "Pale Fire", said to be authored by another character, the otherwise taciturn John Shade. Kinbote's lengthy commentary (he urges the reader to buy two copies of the book so that he may more easily refer to the poem while reading the annotations) concerns little of the actual poem but focuses instead upon an exotic northern nation, Zembla, and an evolving revolutionary conspiracy, both of which may or may not be anything more than the elaborate imaginings of his deranged mind. Meanwhile, almost disguised amongst a great variety of fantastical and artistic wanderings, one stumbles across the numerical and emotional centerpiece of the poem. These lines concern Shade's overweight teenage daughter who, rejected by a blind date, decides to go ice-walking and plunges forever into the freezing black depths of Lake Omega. Just after finishing his poem (which Kinbote fervently strains to interpret as Zemblan-inspired, but is more apparently an exquisitely prolonged biographical musing on the nature of life and death) Shade is murdered by a man who is either Gradus, an assassin attempting an ill-aimed regicide upon Kinbote, or an anonymous lunatic exacting revenge upon a judge, mistakenly thought to be Shade, who had sentenced him to a facility for the criminally insane.

Finally, in the last paragraphs, with this intricate narrative edifice on the verge of total collapse, Nabokov brutally rips down the literary proscenium, abruptly revealing his labyrinthine construct as the product of a "healthy, heterosexual, Russian professor" who muses upon his next move before signing off for good, but not before supplying us with an annotated Index.

The first lines of the poem read thusly:

"I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff--and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.
And from the inside, too, I'd duplicate
Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:
Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glass
Hang all the furniture above the grass,
And how delightful when a fall of snow
Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so
As to make chair and bed exactly stand
Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!"

Fascinating in and of itself, it is equally absorbing to speculate upon the numerous ripples of post-modernist thought Pale Fire might have generated within intellectual circles of the early sixties. For example, is it possible that Nabokov had an impact upon the visual arts? The sculptor Robert Smithson published a short piece entitled "The Crystal Land" in "Harper's Bazaar" in 1966. From another Smithson piece, written about the same time, comes the following excerpt:

"Each framework supports the reflections of a concatenated interior. The interior structure of the room surrounding the work is instantaneously undermined. The surfaces seem thrown back into the wall. "Space" is permuted into a multiplicity of directions. One becomes conscious of space attenuated in the form of elusive flat planes. The space is both crystalline and collapsible. In the rose piece the floor hovers over the ceiling. Vanishing points are deliberately inverted in order to increase one's awareness of total artifice."

Nabokov: The exquisite pleasures of the quadruple bank shot within a quadruple bank shot. The haunting impossibility of a single frame of reference, and the death of direct experience. But what a gorgeous thing he creates in their stead.

Vladimir Nabokov - Pale Fire (Vintage International)

First impressions: a personal review

Vladimir Nabokov has always been one of my favorite writers. I've read "Lolita" twice and think I'm not quite finished yet with this book. Since I like his writing and ideas so much, I thought I should try his "Pale Fire", a book that has been highly recommended to me by many people, and that looks difficult and challenging enough for me devote my time. It turns out these impressions weren't wrong.

"Pale Fire" is brilliant, certainly one of the best books ever written in English. It is difficult. Nabokov's language, approach and style are labored enough to drive any experienced reader insane. And, despite the fact that I can't say I totally understood the book, I'm willing to tell that I loved it. Why? Because every word sounds brilliant and placed in the right place where it is supposed to be. Because his style and structure were demanding, and as a reader this is what we should look for: something different from the usual, something that would challenge our minds.

The writer toyed with the idea of hypertext much before it was a trend. Compound of a poem and its comments, reading "Pale Fire" makes the reader goes back and forth to follow the poem and its interpretation. But, this is not the only hypertext structure, in the comments, every time the writer mentions another line etc.

However strange it may sound, "Pale Fire" still has a plot. Actually many plots -- like any good many-layered book. One of the plots deal with the "Pale Fire" poem writer and his relationship with his neighbor, who happens to be the writer who is annotating the poem. There is something sick going between these two and their tacit dispute to see who is more brilliant. On another level, there is another story -- something a little magical, a little political-- involving a king.

Due to its complexity and brilliance, Nabokov's "Pale Fire" is a book (it is tempting to say `a novel', but it is not really a novel -- it is more a book of literary critic or something) that deserves multiple reading. I'm sure that every time we read this superb book we'll find something new that only proves what a genius this magnificent writer is. His words prove that he says, "True art is above false honor". "Pale Fire" certainly is one of the truest forms of art possible, and I'm willing to reread it in a couple of years.

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