4thace reviewed Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
A challenging tangle to listen to
3 stars
This is an example of hypertextual fiction decades before this re-emerged when webpages made linked literary forms easier to implement, where the ostensible subject of the book, the thousand-line poem by the character John Shade ends up being dwarfed by the extravagant and erratic commentary supposedly written by the character Charles Kinbote. The commentary spins out with extended musings on the history of the country Zembla which is dominated by political intrigue to the point of unhinged obsession on the part of Kinbote. By the end, he shows signs of monomania which call into question the sanity of any of what have read, the classic sign of an unreliable narrator. The writing parodies popular melodrama and thrillers, literary criticism, and academic life in its own pompous way, only increasing our doubts.
I had trouble finding this in a regular ebook edition I liked, so I listened to this in …
This is an example of hypertextual fiction decades before this re-emerged when webpages made linked literary forms easier to implement, where the ostensible subject of the book, the thousand-line poem by the character John Shade ends up being dwarfed by the extravagant and erratic commentary supposedly written by the character Charles Kinbote. The commentary spins out with extended musings on the history of the country Zembla which is dominated by political intrigue to the point of unhinged obsession on the part of Kinbote. By the end, he shows signs of monomania which call into question the sanity of any of what have read, the classic sign of an unreliable narrator. The writing parodies popular melodrama and thrillers, literary criticism, and academic life in its own pompous way, only increasing our doubts.
I had trouble finding this in a regular ebook edition I liked, so I listened to this in the form of an audiobook which only increases the difficulty of keeping any of the literary tricks straight, with so many characters and snippets of plot flying around it felt nearly impossible to keep it all in my head. So I wouldn't recommend this way of experiencing this book to anyone reading this for the first time. I would imagine that a better setup would be to have two hardcopy volumes in front of you so that you could avoid much of the flipping back and forth or of following hypertext links it would take to join up all of the allusions multicursally. The experience reminds me of the book S. by Doug Dorst, only not as annoying because the reader is spared having to keep track of layers of marginal notes and drop-in ephemera.
I do like experiments in literary form that also play with language, but I know they can be a lot to ask of the reader. It is clear that this odd work will always belong to the academic crowd, not the mass market, like all the books Nabokov wrote except for Lolita with its multiple film adaptations.
