Nabokov's Pale Fire is "what a composer of chess problems might term a king-in-the-corner waiter of the solus rex type."Perhaps even moreso than Luzhin Defense, Pale Fire seems to me Nabokov's ultimate ode to the king's game. A kind of post-modern salad of quirks and quizzes, the structure of the "n...
I was dreading reading this book (our Book Club selection for May, 2012) - it looked so complicated, so intimating. Is it possible that I'm not smart enough to "get" this book? The entry in Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Fire) certainly added to my anxiety. I kept picking it up, read...
This is an amazing book, a feat of style and form and, just because of that, no the easiest read. yet, it is rewarding and interesting. Not exactly satisfying, mind you, but I find Nabokov never is. I could only read it in the mornings. Before bed, my brain would go into overdrive if i attempted mor...
"I trust the reader appreciates the strangeness of this, because if he does not, there is no sense in writing poems, or notes to poems, or anything at all."
This was admittedly a tedious read (hence the slim volume taking me so long to finish!) and the narrator is quite possibly the most obnoxious and self-absorbed "protagonist" I have ever encountered. Which, of course, was the point, but it got a bit tiring after a while.The ending, though, blew my mi...
Nabokov at his most creative and ingenious. The book could be read as parody of literary criticism at its worst, and is often screamingly funny. Some critics are a bit like Kinbote and try to make the work fit their thesis, much like the legendary host, Procrustes, who lopped off the arms or legs of...
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