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 slainBy the false azure in the windowpane;I was the smudge of ashen fluff--and ILived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.And from the inside, too, I'd duplicateMyself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glassHang all the furniture above the grass,And how delightful when a fall of snowCovered my glimpse of lawn and reached up soAs to make chair and bed exactly standUpon 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.

Pale Fire -- Vladimir NabokovIt is arguable, and debatable, whether this title or Lolita is Nabokov's masterpiece, but what is certain is that Pale Fire is once of the tightest, best-structured books of the 20th century.Pale Fire is laid out in three parts: a Foreward written by Charles Kinbote, a Poem written by John Shade, and Commentary, also written by Kinbote.What is prefigured in the Foreword and then made explicit in the Commentary is Kinbote's strange relationship with Shade and his equally strange past. The story is told completely through the device of the Foreword and Commentary, and in them Kinbote paints himself as a refugee from a despotic regime in a faraway land known only as Zembla. He takes up residence in New Wye, right across the street from professor and poet John Shade.Once settled in New Wye, Kinbote embarks on an obsessive, mutedly homoerotic relationship with his poet neighbor, courting him when they are together and spying on him the rest of the time. Although Kinbote has fled his native Zembla, he dearly loves his homeland with the pain of one who knows he can never return to the land he has forsaken, and it is his dream that Shade will immortalize Zembla in a poem.But just as Kinbote reaches for Zembla, so does Zembla reach for Kinbote. In the Commentary Kinbote brings forth a character called Gradus, who is an assassin sent from Zembla to search him out and kill him.If the Foreword and Commentary tell the story of Kinbote, then the Poem tells the story of Shade. In only 999 lines, Shade paints a vivid picture of his past, taking us through his idyllic life in New Wye, its sudden destruction one night by death of his daughter, and his subsequent coping. In more ways than one it is the ideal complement to Kinbote's text, providing a clear, beautiful counterpart to Kinbote's unsteady rants and digressions.However, what takes this book from mere postmodern game and transforms it to a dynamic, engrossing title is Kinbote's unreliability as a narrator and the questions surrounding who the real author of the Poem, Foreword, and Commentary is. Does Zembla really exist and has Kinbote really fled it? Is Gradus's climatic appearance the result of a government plot against Kinbote, or just another of the strange coincidences that pervade Pale Fire? Finally, is Shade's poem really Shade's, or has Kinbote written it for his own purposes? Vice versa, is Kinbote the real creative force behind the Foreword and Commentary, or is it the work of some different, other-worldly presence?Nabokov masterfully spreads the information needed to answer these questions throughout Pale Fire, yet he does so in such a way that nothing is ever made completely explicit. Just as in all of Nabokov's best books, it is up to the reader to make that final conceptual leap, to take that final step after being carried along by Nabokov's poetic narrative.Thus, Pale Fire is not a book that should be read only once, or quickly. It is a book that hides hints in the strangest of places (more than a couple appear in the Index), and one which cannot be completely understood the first time through. That is not to say that the first reading will not be satisfying, as Nabokov does give us a suspenseful, well-drawn narrative, but that as the reader peers back into Pale Fire she will see the book growing deeper and deeper as new items begin to pop up, like stars in the sky as evening fades to night.

Pale Fire is, I think, a brilliant parody of Literary Criticism. However, it's barely a novel and it hardly warrants it's 200 pages, so I don't think it should make the list.The structure of Pale Fire is unique. It contains a long poem by "John Shade" & then 200+ pages of commentary on the poem by "Charles Kinbote". Kinbote emerges as a complete lunatic over the course of his commentary, reading meanings into Shade's work that are obviously unsupportable.Nabokov, thus, shows that critics bring such a subjective perspective to the works they critique, that they can hardly be considered an appropriate prism through which to view the original work. I heartily agree with the point, but it becomes somewhat labored when stretched to this length.GRADE: B

This book grabbed me from the very start. Do NOT read the introduction, like most introductions it spoils the actual read. Funny, engaging, great

Am I the only person that really tried to follow the directions such as "See notes to line 193"? At one point I found myself trying to read while having 3 fingers stuck in the book so I wouldn't loose my place. If you are going to attempt this perhaps you should buy 2 copies like Charles suggests. I enjoyed the book a great deal and laughed out loud often. I gave up trying to follow the "see note" directions when I started running into sections I had already read. Did you notice poor Charles kept changing the color of shorts one of the "lads" was wearing. A nice book to read in the hammock.