Pale Fire- Vladimir Nabokov

A book for people who don't mind wasting their time reading, that is for people who read willingly. Pale Fire is a multi-dimensional book, a playfully written book that was probably more fun for the writer to write than for the reader to read (at the end of a boring, extremely boring annotation the following cruel words-"I trust the reader has enjoyed this note"). This is the plot, a poem called Pale Fire, by an american deceased writer named John Shade, is published and annotated by a "friend", his scholarly neighbor Charles Kinbote. That's it. Preceded by an introduction by Kinbote, the poem is 999 lines and is in itself a good poem. Kinbote's commentary, or if you will, his reading of the poem is what gives the poem/novel it's amazing depth. Charles Kinbote might or might not be crazy, for his commentary is unusually personal, effectively making him the main character of the "novel", and many times the commentary really seems to be off, as in having nothing to do with what the poem is obviously about, John Shade's life. Withing the commentary Kinbote tries to convince the reader that the poem is about the far away kingdom he is from (Zembla) and it's last king.

If it wasnt for Mr. Nabokov's exquisite prose, his humor, and his borgesian sense of irony, this book could well have fallen flat in the hands of any other writer. Nabokov's usual themes of memory, invented memories, the past, literature, and strange coincidences is here, as well as his penchant for creating extreme and quirky characters, but what is truly rewarding is how the book embodies the relationship between reader/text/writer. John Shade doesn't write for Kinbote, but Kinbote feels it so (and what dedicated reader doesnt feel like that about an admired writer?). In a way, Nabokov cancels out the reader's perception of the story by giving it a fictional one in the form of Kinbote's commentaries, and through this notes, Nabokov mocks, yes, he elegantly mocks the love that takes readers of all kinds to read into books their own lives or other peoples lives or metaphores or whatever. Perhaps Mr. Nabokov understood better than anyone the miscommunications possible, actually the impossibility of complete communication when the reader faces the writer's text. Therefore, in an endearingly quirky way, Nabokov tells us through this book, that without a reader and his imagination, a poem, a novel, a short story or any text would be incredibly flat and incomplete without a co-creator, that is without a reader. Pale Fire, the novel, wouldn't be the novel it is without the crazy Kinbote, just like any text isn't complete until it is actually imagined or seen/read in the mind of a reader. This is what's so rewarding about Pale Fire (though boring it can get), the illustration of this symbiotic relationship between the writer/reader.

And then of course there's the word games and puns and language that are nothing but stimulating (though most linguistic games and references probably went over my head).