Pale Fire

...there is nothing pale about this one. Igor Stravinsky "pushed the edge on the envelope" with pre-World War I orchestral works such as "The Firebird" and the "The Rite of Spring." The latter literally caused a riot when it was first played in Paris in 1913. As Richard Rorty notes in the Introduction to "Pale Fire" (and perhaps my only complaint about this particular edition is that Rorty's Intro should have been an "Afterword") the critical reception greeting this book when it was first published in the early `60's was mixed to negative. Dwight MacDonald, a "high priest" of culture, and author of Against the American Grain (A Da Capo paperback) as well as others, called the work "unreadable." Mary McCarthy, of The Group fame, on the other hand was far more enthusiastic, recognizing that Nabokov was making a "dent" in the orthodox "reality" of acceptable literature, just as Stravinsky did in the musical field, half a century earlier.There is no question that you have to be at "the top of your reading game" to tackle this work, and then, STILL, the "bookmarks will measure what you lost." McCarthy called it a "centaur-work," half poem, half prose. It is that, but it is also far more akin to a game of three dimensional chess, as Nabokov plays (and you can sense his joy in writing this) along numerous planes, vectors, and assorted intersections. The author is a master of allusion and illusion.Nominally there is the 1000 line poem (or is it only 999?) written by John Shade which his wife has bequeathed to his somewhat friend and academic colleague Charles Kinbote for safekeeping, editing, and eventual publication. The rest of the book takes the form of a meandering "Commentary" by Kinbote on the poem, and much else about life. The poem itself is dense and rich, rhyming couplets commencing with what will now always be memorable for me: "I was the shadow of the waxwing slain, By the false azure in the windowpane..." Before the poem turns back upon itself, at line 1000 (or is it 999?), there are ample eschatological musing, including an unloved daughter who takes the Ophelia exit. Yes, Nabokov anticipates that the reader is familiar with Karamazov, and how Marat died, for literary and historical allusions abound. There are also "svelte stilettos" and "And our best yesterdays are now foul piles, Of crumpled names, phone numbers and foxed files..." As with much of Nabokov, both the poem, and the commentary can serve simply as a vocabulary builder.Matryoshka is that unique Russian art form: nested dolls, one inside the other. Nabokov writes in a similar fashion, with one story inside another. He has created (or is it a character's imagination?) the Kingdom of Zembla, a mythical northern European country where a coup occurred, and the King has had to flee for his life. There are the inevitable petty rivalries in academia (of which Nabokov must have had much first-hand experience). There is a section involving the secret passages of youth that seemed to be straight from The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes) (Penguin Classics).There is his playful approach towards language; no doubt one of the reasons why MacDonald says that he is "self-indulgent." Consider from the poem: "A proud and happy linguist: je nourris, Les pauvres cigales - meaning that he, Fed the poor sea gulls! Lafontaine was wrong..." and as Kinbote states in his commentary on this passage, refreshingly so, that generations of translators have mistranslated "cigale" as "grasshopper" in the tale of the Grasshopper and the Ant. Even more astonishingly, Nabokov cites a translator's dilemma of in the confusion of a misprint between "mountain" and "fountain." Then, in a virtual statistical impossible thrice, between the English "crown-crow-cow" and the Russian "korona-vorona-korova." "Self-indulgent" may be the last defense of the threatened academic in the face of such humbling erudition. For the rest of us though, we can simply enjoy and be amazed, and even learn a bit.As with all excellent literature, there are numerous penetrating insights into the human condition, from the personal behavior of an assassin on his "mission" to the snubs and counter-snubs in academia. If one is not invited to a party, where else is it appropriate (and understood) to give the host a Pleiades edition of Proust's most famous work, with a similar passage bookmarked?Speaking of publishers, "Everyman's Library" has produced an outstanding edition, complete with the cloth bookmark, which serves to supplement your own, as you flip back and forth between poem and commentary. And it will easily make it through the obligatory re-read. In the meantime, beware of the false azure in a windowpane. 5-stars plus.

This review is for the reader who shares my high opinion of the novel and wants to know if it is safe to buy the Kindle edition. There are several reviews, all a few years old, saying that the Kindle formatting is unacceptable. I can only say that as of May 2015, the formatting is fine. Of course, as you would expect, the poem wants to be read in landscape mode and not too large a font to preserve the integrity of the lines. And you should realize, as perhaps some of those early readers did not, that not all note references or line numbers are supposed to be hypertexted. In fact, none of the numbers in the text of the poem are footnotes, only line numbers, and you aren't supposed to be able to click on them. Then, when you get to the commentary, and see something like "Lines 1-4: I was the shadow of a waxwing slain, etc." on a separate line by itself, you aren't supposed to be able to click on that either. Basically, you're meant to review a big chunk of the poem at one go, lay down a bookmark, and then go back to your Commentary bookmark and read the notes for that chunk before going back to your last poem bookmark, pretty much the way you would read it as a paper book.[If you've read the book on paper, you know this is true: The poem is no more as accessible with the footnotes as without, and much easier and more pleasurable to follow with no wildly irrelevant interruptions for them. And strangely enough, the commentary is no different -- once you've begun it, you have enough work ahead of you teasing out its story without constantly flipping back to the _almost_ irrelevant poem, and in fact, despite my suggestion of reviewing it in chunks, you might not reread the poem at all during the commentary. I'm sure many admirers of the book do not.]Now, _within_ the commentary, Kinbote presents additional notes that would take you out of this order of reading (under the note for Line 1-4, for instance, he says at one point "(see Foreword)" and at another ("See also lines 181-182.") _These_ notes are hypertexted for your convenience, so that you can click on them, jump to their referents, and return to place with the Back key. Those are the only kind of notes it's useful to have in hypertext, and although I think a few -- a very few -- have been missed, in all other cases, what you should want in hypertext _is_ in hypertext.Remember, this is not like a normal annotation-by-editor, where you might want to see hyperscripts all through the poem and be able to click on one to read the handy little note associated with it (like the meaning of a French phrase or something) and then click right back to the poem and keep going. None of _these_ notes are actually handy or useful for understanding the poem and you would never want your first reading of the poem to be interrupted by any of them. The whole commentary is a madman's interpretation of the poem which has to be appreciated in a second reading. For that purpose, the little excerpts from particular lines that start off each of these crazy comments are all that you need, you won't need or want to go back and re-re-read additional lines of the poem at that point, Kinbote has already told you what he is referring to.Now, I'm not going to argue that getting around the Kindle edition is as easy as reading a cheap paperback you can dog-ear the pages of, but it's not _hard_ to bookmark and read (easier on some models of Kindle than others, I imagine) and -- more to the point -- it is not true that the editors have made it harder by mis-formatting it. I am glad to have one of my favorite novels on the Kindle, and if you love the book and love your Kindle, don't be afraid to try it.