Pale Fire
The urbane authority that Vladimir Nabokov brought to every word he ever wrote, and the ironic amusement he cultivated in response to being uprooted and politically exiled twice in his life, never found fuller expression than in Pale Fire published in 1962 after the critical and popular success...
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The urbane authority that Vladimir Nabokov brought to every word he ever wrote, and the ironic amusement he cultivated in response to being uprooted and politically exiled twice in his life, never found fuller expression than in Pale Fire published in 1962 after the critical and popular success of Lolita had made him an international literary figure.
An ingeniously constructed parody of detective fiction and learned commentary, Pale Fire offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures, at the center of which is a 999-line poem written by the literary genius John Shade just before his death. Surrounding the poem is a foreword and commentary by the demented scholar Charles Kinbote, who interweaves adoring literary analysis with the fantastical tale of an assassin from the land of Zembla in pursuit of a deposed king.
Brilliantly constructed and wildly inventive, this darkly witty novel of suspense, literary one-upmanship, and political intrigue achieves that rarest of things in literature: perfect tragicomic balance.
źródło opisu: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13348248-pale-fire
źródło okładki: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13348248-pale-fire
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Format: papier
Publisher: Penguin
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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