Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire (1962). New York: Berkley Medallion, 1969.

A novel in the form of a work of criticism. After the death of the renowned poet John Shade, his neighbor and colleague Charles Kinbote gets hold of the 999-line autobiographical poem he'd been writing; what we read are Kinbote's foreword to Shade's poem, the poem itself, and then more than 150 pages of Kinbote's commentary on the poem. Oh, and an index. What makes the text readable like a novel (and ultimately what saves Pale Fire from being merely a fun exercise in pomo intertextualities) is that Kinbote for one reason or another is convinced that Shade's poem is a narrative of his (Kinbote's) motherland, Zembla—specifically its recent tragic revolution.

This is where most of the book's comedy comes from. Line 12 contains the phrase "that crystal land" and Kinbote makes a note here that begins "Perhaps an allusion to Zembla, my dear country," though of course nothing in the line or those surrounding it appears to make any reference of the sort. In a note about Shade's use of winter imagery, he writes: "One is too modest to suppose that the fact that the poet and his future commentator first met on a winter day somehow impinges here on the actual season." (This sentence shows up in the index, under Kinbote, Charles, Dr.; "his modesty".)

Pale Fire is probably the best novel I've read all year, except maybe for one, which was a reread, which was Lolita, so it goes without saying that I need more Nabokov in my future. He's so incredibly good at exposing villainy and heroism as false, elusive things we try in vain to hold onto as readers. See his treatment of Humbert Humbert in Lolita (alluded to here and there in PF, along with Pnin), and see here his treatment of Kinbote. It's clear from the start that Kinbote is perhaps the worst person possible to edit Shade's final poem—his reading of the text is self-serving and flat-out ridiculous at parts. But by the end of the book he becomes the best and most perfect commentator for it, with his reading lifting what is otherwise a plain and sometimes boring poem (written in rhyming heroic couplets) up to something much more strange and so much more beautiful.

This one and Lolita reaffirm my faith in the first-person point of view. I write fiction almost exclusively in it, these days, and as I do and as I slowly plan a novel in such a POV I remind myself that it is a limited one and that a novel told in such a manner cannot have the wonderful breadth of those told in the third person. Nabokov seems to want to argue otherwise. So much world, here, in 224 pages! So much packed in every sentence! Here's Kinbote on jumping off a tall building:

Down you go, but all the while you feel suspended and buoyed as you somersault in slow motion like a somnolent tumbler pigeon, and sprawl supine on the eiderdown of the air, or lazily turn to embrace your pillow, enjoying every last instant of soft, deep, death-padded life, with the earth's green seesaw now above, now below, and the voluptuous crucifixion, as you stretch yourself in the growing rush, in the nearing swish, and then your loved body's obliteration in the Lap of the Lord.

And here he is on senior citizens:

I find nothing more conducive to the blunting of one's appetite than to have none but elderly persons sitting around one at a table, fouling their napkins with the disintegration of their make-up, and surreptitiously trying, behind noncommittal smiles, to dislodge the red-hot torture point of a raspberry seed from between false gum and dead gum.

And here's one that just stuns me for its specificity, for how much it creates just in its collection of nouns:

They used to hand out to the kitchen boys Russian caramels with plums or cherries depicted on the rich luscious six-cornered wrappers that enclosed a jacket of thinner paper with the mauve mummy inside; and lustful country girls were known to creep up along the drungen (bramble-choked footpaths) to the very foot of bulwark when the two silhouetted against the now flushed sky sang beautiful sentimental military duets at eventide on the rampart.

All this, and a queer hero we get to laugh with and not at. This, in 1962!