Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

The Annotated Nabokov: Part I

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov was required reading for the class I took on literature written after 1950. It was the first book to open my eyes to the possibility that narrative, and fictional narrative to be precise, could take on forms other than what we generally accept as being a novel.

Scott Esposito gives a great description of Pale Fire (and also recommends other meta-narrative titles) on his blog, but the basic idea is this: Pale Fire is composed of a foreword, a 999-line poem, annotations for the poem, and an index. It is a faux-scholarly work in which a fictional character, Kinbote, analyzes the poem written by another fictional character. While the poem spans 36 pages of the book, the annotations fill over 200. It is in the annotations that the narrative takes place, and Nabokov brilliantly uses the twisted and egotistic mind of the writer to portray both his character and his story of suspense, literary arrogance, and political intrigue.

Esposito explains:

Stories are generally thought of as the meat of a book, the stuff that everything else hangs on to, but in Pale Fire Nabokov reversed that equation. The story was the errata that hung on to what was supposedly the meat. By reversing things, Nabokov drew attention not to the plot, but to the way it was conveyed to the reader. He cast the reader's eye toward the nuts and bolts and screws and gears that most authors are at pains to hide.

Personally, I find it great fun to read this way, and delighted in the way Kinbote ignores the rules of scholarly analysis while Nabakov tells his story. In footnotes!

I love this stuff.

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

tags: books book reviews postmodern literature non-traditional narrative Vladimir Nabokov