Pale fire, by Vladimir Nabokov

I wish I could say I loved this book as much as the person who recommended it to me obviously does – we plan to discuss it together and he came equipped to suggest it to me with a pile of different editions of it that he owns.  I recognized one cover as that of the copy I once owned and never did read.  It is funny in parts, and the central poem is well done.  The book is unique and very, very clever.  Perhaps its overwhelming cleverness is my problem with it.  It consists of four parts, three ostensibly written by one Charles Kinbote, a friend and fellow academic of the poet John Shade at Wordsmith University, which located somewhere in “Appalachia.”  Kinbote, an émigré from the small kingdom of Zembla, oversees the posthumous publishing of Shade’s long poem, Pale Fire, which is the centerpiece of the book.  Kinkote writes a short preface, then comes the poem.  Following are a couple hundred pages of Kinkote’s line by line “commentary” on the poem.  It quickly becomes clear that Kinbote has completely inserted himself as the subject of the poem, despite virtually no evidence to support this in the actual work.  In many ways, I enjoyed the last part, a crazy index to the complete work, the most.  Kinkote may or may not be the escaped King of Zembla, who has fled for his life from revolutionaries, and he has spent months telling his story to Shade under the impression that his history is the subject of the poem Shade is writing.  Unlucky Shade, who not only has to endure his endless babblings about Zembla, but because of Kinbote becomes one.  315 pp.