Pale Fire: Library Edition

from tracyfox

I can't imagine how I missed out on reading Nabokov's masterpiece [Pale Fire] for all these years. I am thrilled to have made the acquaintance of this remarkable text. A shimmering puzzle of poetry and prose, it defies classification. The book purports to be the annotated posthumous publication o...

from the_awesome_opossum

I couldn't say whether Pale Fire should be read as the ravings of an unstable, narcissistic, paranoid schizophrenic, or as Nabokov's satire of academics and their treatment of texts. Maybe they're one and the same. Pale Fire is ostensibly an extraordinarily bad autobiographical poem by a poet nam...

from araridan

Pale Fire is one the funniest books I have ever read. The book is structured as a foreword, a poem, commentary, and an index. I personally don't like poetry very much, but the poem was so bad that I'm pretty sure Nabokov was making fun of poetry and poetry analysis in general. As I started readin...

from Meredy

Six-word review: Difficult, dazzling fictional coup by virtuoso. Extended review: No one with a shred less intellectual and literary confidence--even, I would say, arrogance--than the likes of Lolita's Nabokov would have dared to construct a 999-line verse that is at once brilliant and brilliantl...

from dulac3

This is the book that let me see that 'post-modern' fiction can be fun and rewarding at the same time that it is challenging and subversive; it doesn't all have to be literary wanking. The story unfolds in the guise of a collection of poems by character John Shade with an accompanying commentary ...