Pale Fire
The American poet John Shade is dead; murdered. 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 -...
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The American poet John Shade is dead; murdered. 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. Nabokov's darkly witty, richly inventive masterwork is a suspenseful whodunit, a story of one-upmanship and dubious penmanship, and a glorious literary conundrum.
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9780141185262 (0141185260)
Publish date: May 1st 2010
Publisher: Penguin
Pages no: 272
Edition language: English
I enjoyed the book, and loved the depiction of the crazed Kinbote, but maybe I just had higher expectations from the 4.2 star average rating that this book has. Probably more like a 3.5.
bookshelves: winter-20122013, tbr-busting-2013, dodgy-narrator, poetry, published-1962, amusing, satire Read from February 25 to 26, 2013 Half poem, half prose.Read by Marc Vietor & Robert BlumenfeldBlubs: [Like Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire is a masterpiece that imprisons us inside the m...
This really is a fiendishly clever novel. It falls into two parts: a long poem entitled Pale Fire by the fictional poet John Shade, and the equally fictional commentary on that poem written by the fictional commentator Charles Kinbote. It quickly becomes clear that, at best, Kinbote is an egomaniac,...
SpoilersLolita is one of my favorite books of all time, but for some reason I've never read any more Nabakov. I've been debating about reading this book for months and I finally did it. I'm kicking myself that I waited so long. This is a fantastic, wonderful book.It is a comedy, something I did n...
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 by ...
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