Pale Fire

Ostensibly an academic dissertation, the footnotes begin to reveal a far wilder and manic story happening to the writer.

There are trilingual puns, verbal pratfalls, and all the wild humour that Nabokov is known for throughout this book. Of all the metafiction I have ever read, this book made me feel as if I’d been given something rather than just had a big literary joke played on me.

This was my third reading of Pale Fire. It is one of the great literary masterpieces of the 20th century. It is essentially an exegesis of an extended narrative poem, the latter a masterwork in its own right.

The narrative line of the book at large is carried by several characters, each of which reveals in his telling who he is. John Shade himself is the protagonist—the name is a clue to the book’s climactic murder (or is it a suicide?)

It leaves, last standing and validates him as a real existent, as opposed to a Charles Kinbote, a… show more.

Nabokov’s novel is not about a book per se, and it is definitely not your typical novel, either. A 999-line poem by fictional author John Shade provides the lift-off here. But the bulk of Pale Fire is a series of footnotes by Shade’s neighbor, professor Charles Kinbote, an academic buffoon, who, while supposedly annotating the poem, unfolds three bizarre storylines and exposes himself as a deranged egotistical madman (sorry if that’s redundant!). The result is a metafictional wonder that explodes the parameters of the “traditional” novel and takes a giant satirical pot-shot at academics.