Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov

Penguin Classics, 2000, softcover, 248 pages, condition: as new.

The American poet John Shade is dead. His last poem, 'Pale Fire', is put into a book, together with a preface, a lengthy commentary and notes by Shade's editor, Charles Kinbote. Known on campus as the 'Great Beaver', Kinbote is haughty, inquisitive, intolerant, but is he also mad, bad - and even dangerous? As his wildly eccentric annotations slide into the personal and the fantastical, Kinbote reveals perhaps more than he should be.

Nabokov's darkly witty, richly inventive masterpiece is a suspenseful whodunit, a story of one-upmanship and dubious penmanship, and a glorious literary conundrum.

Part of a major new series of the works of Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita and Pale Fire, in Penguin Classics.

 Review of: Pale Fire By Vladimir Nabokov
'reality' is neither the subject nor the object of true art which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average 'reality' perceived by the communal eye

Nabokovs Pale Fire is at once a comedy of errors, and a biting satire on politics, literary criticism, as well as Nabokovs own life and colleagues. Through the foreword and commentary of a fictitious poem, Nabokov stays impressively in character as Charles Kinbote as Kinbote misinterprets John Shades poem and imposes his own life story as the true underlying message of the poem. Through misdirection, intentional fallacies, wordplay and wit, as well as a vast array of allusions to his own works and life, Nabokov has created a parody of epic comedic proportions.