Pale Fire

Name: Pale Fire
Author: Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov · 1962

A 999-line poem with footnotes by an increasingly unreliable annotator. The form is the whole point: the actual narrative is buried in the editor's commentary, where Charles Kinbote may or may not be the deposed king of Zembla and may or may not be insane. The most playful experiment in 20th-century fiction. Reread three times and you still will not know what happened.

The case against

on the length
“a short story tied mercilessly to the rack”
a book blog
on the Zembla story
“I did find the Zembla story tedious at times”
a book blog
on the construction
“the most oddly constructed novel I have ever come across”
a book blog
on the format
“some sort of poem? And a line-by-line critique of it?”
two stars · a book blog