Synopsis
In Pale Fire Nabokov offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures: a 999-line poem by the reclusive genius John Shade; an adoring foreword and commentary by Shade’s self-styled Boswell, Dr. Charles Kinbote; a darkly comic novel of suspense, literary idolatry, one-upmanship, and political intrigue.
“This centaur work, half poem, half prose…is a creation of perfect beauty, symmetry, strangeness, originality and moral truth. Pretending to be a curio, it cannot disguise the fact that it is one of the great works of art of this century.” — Mary McCarthy
Rosenbaum
The Edgy Enthusiast's novel of the Century: My award goes to Nabakov's Pale Fire...the most Shakespearean work of art the 20'th century has produced, the only prose fiction that offers Shakespearean levels of depth and complexity, of beauty, tragedy, and inexhaustible mystery...reading Pale Fire, both novel and poem, is an almost obscenely sensual pleasure, I guarantee it...let me make the following assertion: Not only is Pale Fire the Novel of the Century, but "Pale Fire," the poem within the nove may well come to be looked upon as the Poem of the Century as well.
The New York Observer