Pale Fire
Pale Fire remains one of the funniest and most impressive books I’ve ever read, and for me is Nabokov’s absolute masterpiece, especially in English. The book begins with a brief introduction from one of our two narrators, Charles Kinbote. Charles Kinbote is a professor and in this book will be editing the long poem of his colleague John Shade. John Shade, also a professor, has recently died and left a poem in intricately ordered index cards. We come to understand that Kinbote has muscled his way into Shade’s afterlife, and been allowed (possibly not) to edit and annotate the publication. The rest of the book is that book.
Next comes the poem itself. Like Kinbote mentions, this is a 1000 line poem (well 999, but with the possible implication of the first line repeating again as the last line), and the rest of the poem is divided up into four cantos detailing John Shade’s early life, his marriage, the birth and eventual death of his daughter, and then his grief and life after. The poem is written in paired couplets and makes numerous references through out, especially to birds and nature. The title of the poem “Pale Fire” is from scene in Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens.
From there, the book then begins Charle Kinbote’s extensive notes on the poem. We begin simply enough with a few references in the early section, but what becomes increasingly clear are a few possibilities, depending on what exactly you believe is happening. For certain, Kinbote is hijacking the poem. This was very possible from the opening moments in the introduction, and becomes undeniable soon after the editing phase begins. Kinbote tells us that he has a kind of German-sounding accent, and comes from a far off “Northern land” called Zembla. Zembla is fictional of course, but so also is New Wye, Appalachia, the apparent setting of the novel outside the poem. We begin to get further and further references to Zembla in the notes, and what very much seems like a poem about pastoral college life and loss and grief is interpreted by Kinbote and for us to oblique references to a dying European kingdom, subsumed by the nation-forming and warfare of the 19th and 20th centuries. This challenges our belief to say the least. We also begin to suspect that Kinbote might be losing his mind, and he even includes legal notices and warnings he’s read and received into the notes for the text. In addition, we also led to believe that he and Shade talked at length about this homeland and that Shade was so enamored, this poem emerged. Setting aside, of course, that Kinbote and Shade only knew each other for a few months.
If you’ve read other Nabokov, he already know how squirrely he is as a writer, and how much cynical disdain (with ironic flairs) he has for academic life. His Russian novels are often written with the sense of danger and flourish of an exile’s life. His American novels show his discomfort for the stability of the West.
Invitation to a Beheading
One of Nabokov’s Russian-language novels, which further proves that he’s probably the greatest novelist of all time, not just because this book happens to be very good, but that he was a master writer in two different languages. There’s something funny about this book being translated in the late 1950s as Nabokov is writing entirely in English and published in the early 1960s, about the same time as Pale Fire. He in the extra text of this book Nabokov lauds his son’s translation and lauds his own writing (of course). He mentions that he doesn’t appreciate one set of interpretations, that this book is like Orwell, because of course, it’s not. But he also thinks it’s funny that it’s referred to as Kafkaesque, as he didn’t read Kafka until well after this novel came out as he didn’t have access to translations and didn’t read German. The book also has to contend with being a famous example of samizdat.
It’s funny to me because the book doesn’t actually feel like Orwell at all. I get the Kafka comparisons because like Kafka he doesn’t seem to be reacting strictly to overt society political control so much as the control society inspires in us. I think a closer comparison would be Melville, especially “Bartleby” where a character finds himself completely checking out of society. That story seems to suggest that he’s separate from the existence that society expect, but since it’s told from his boss’s perspective he’s met with exasperation.
In this novel, the Orwell comparison makes sense because our main character Cincinnatus C is accused in a secret court of “gnostic turpitude” and sentenced to death in 20 days. We find also that his captors work to incorporate him back into society before killing him, removing him permanently. This is also similar enough to Orwell. But Orwell’s novel is about ideology, and this seems more to be about culture or the lack of it. There’s something missing in this society that Cincinnatus seems to embody that cannot stand. It’s challenging because of it’s strange level of detail but it’s a worthy novel. Like a lot of his Russian novels, it feels like the novel of a younger writer, and it is.
