By Erick Kelemen
If you like games and notes and close reading, then Vladimir Nabokov’s novel, Pale Fire, is the book for you. Pretending to be an edition of a poem called “Pale Fire,” the Foreword, the Notes, and the Index do not provide so much a frame, commentary or background for that poem as constitute an unrelated narrative, one with the most unreliable of narrators, to the point that it is impossible to tell what can be accepted as true within the fictional world of the novel.
Is the murderer a convict escaped from a mental asylum? Or is he an incompetent assassin on a mission to kill a deposed king in hiding? The novel inhabits this world of craziness so thoroughly and so artfully that it invites a kind of crazed scholarship, tinged with conspiracy-theory paranoia. I won't even go into the theory that the dead poet's long-dead-daughter's ghost inspired the narrator. For that you can go to Wikipedia.
Continue reading ""The Moon's an Arrant Thief:" Notes, Games, and Nabokov" »