Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

When it comes to the classics, I struggle with modern and postmodern fiction. I really wish that I  liked novels from those time periods, but truthfully, I just don't enjoy the weirdness and confusion that reading them entails. I like to get lost in a book when I read and just drift with the story. Modern classics don't give readers that luxury. They are often puzzles full of surreal moments that keep their audience guessing about what's real and what's not. It's just not my cup of tea. Despite this, I was sure to put a handful of modern classics on my Classics Club list, including Pale Fire. I always want to challenge myself as a reader, so I refuse to give up on them entirely. Besides, reading a 20th Century classic is usually a Back to the Classics Challenge category (like it is this year), so reading a more modern classic every now and then keeps me covered there.

I came across Pale Fire through my husband, who is a big Nabokov fan. I read Nabokov's most famous novel, Lolita, years ago and was both impressed and nauseated by it. It was a weird mix of emotions to feel while reading. I was interested to see if this novel would serve up another unique experience. It didn't take me long to realize that, yes, Pale Fire is certainly a unique book, but in a completely different way from Lolita. Honestly, I have no idea what I just read. Let me try to explain.

Pale Fire centers around a 999 line poem, its foreward, and its end notes. The poem, titled "Pale Fire," itself is written by a character named John Shade and it details different parts of his life. He discusses topics ranging from his childhood, to his wife, to his daughter. It's a relatively simple, beautifully written poem. The foreward, end notes, and index to the poem are written by a different character named Charles Kinbote. In the foreward, he informs the reader that John Shade was killed on the very day he finished writing his poem. Kinbote, who explains that he was both a fan and friend of Shade, was granted permission to publish this work, along with his notes on it. This is where things really go off the rails.

Kinbote's notes, which form the bulk of the novel, dissect the poem nearly line-by-line, providing additional details on Shade and commentary on the work itself. However, the further you read into his notes, the more you realize that Kinbote's writing seems to have absolutely nothing to do with the poem. Instead, he's twisting Shade's words to tell a story that he wants to tell--that of his distant homeland of Zembla and the escape of the Zemblan king during a political revolution. He cherry-picks words throughout the poem to draw specious connections between Shade's meaning and his own story. In reality, his notes have their own plot and purpose, and that plot has nothing to do with what Shade was trying to convey at all.

Alongside his story about Zembla, Kinbote also details the movements of the man who eventually kills Shade on the day he finishes writing the poem. He includes this man's location throughout the body of his notes, creating suspense as the notes (and the poem) near their conclusions. This man, named Jakob Gradus, is described as being dim-witted, bumbling, and filled with blind devotion to the extremist party that took over back in Zembla. His connection to Shade, and why he ends up killing him, form a central part of Kinbote's narrative.

I have definitely never read anything like this novel. Its unusual structure made the act of reading a bit of a challenge. Right away, I had to decide what order I wanted to read the parts in. In the foreward, Kinbote himself suggests reading his commentary first, then the poem, then his commentary again. I didn't want to do all that rereading though, so I started off reading the poem and the commentary simultaneously. It got annoying flipping back and forth all the time though, so after a little while, I switched to reading a canto of the poem, then reading the notes for it, then going back to read another canto, and continued in that pattern until I reached the end. Reading it either way would work, which was a weird concept to me--the idea of being able to read a book in several different orders and still have it make sense. It was weird, but very unique. I enjoyed the strangeness of it.

The mystery of Kinbote was the main aspect of this novel my mind focused on. All throughout the detailed commentary section, he states several things that cause the reader to doubt his sanity. His apparent obsession with Shade was my first indication that something was off. His relationship with him seemed to go far beyond being friends, as he describes peeking into Shade's windows to watch him write and detailing his belief that Shade's wife was evil and trying to keep them apart. He describes how he would take long walks with him and tell him all about Zembla, fully believing that Shade was going to transform this story into an epic poem. His notes about his home country of Zembla are equally suspicious. I couldn't tell if this was a place that really existed in the confines of this novel, or if it was a place that existed only in his head. It didn't take long before I began to question and examine every single thing he said, looking for the key that would tell me if he was nuts or if his story was based in reality. Of course, as we are limited to Kinbote's narration, the question remains cloudy. 

One thing that is not cloudy, however, is the excellence of Nabokov's writing. His prose is beautiful and easy to read. The fact that he is not a native English speaker never ceases to amaze me. While I don't generally enjoy novels that are a conceptual puzzle, the writing in Pale Fire is a joy to read, and made up for some of the weirdness for me. So ultimately, even though this is exactly the type of novel that I don't normally click with, I didn't have a bad time reading it. For me, this was at a 3/5 star level of enjoyment. If I was rating it based on its uniqueness, or its contribution to the development of postmodern literature, it would be a 5. I would most definitely recommend it to anyone interested in this genre of literature. In my case, I'm just happy that it didn't end of being torture (like Ulysses). I'm going to count this as a success for me. It's probably my favorite experimental/postmodern novel that I've tried so far.


Challenge Tally
Back to the Classics 2019 (20th Century Classic) 4/12 Books Read
Classics Club (#7 on my list): 40/100 

Total Books Read in 2019: 14