Pale Fire » (Reissue)

Readers of Vladimir Nabokov's books might be slightly uncomfortable with them, were they not so awe-inspiring. Nabokov had a penchant for writing about the tragic and the taboo; but his erudite, inventive approach to narration -- buttressed by his formidable academic and cultural intellect -- made him a literary legend.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)The urbane authority that Vladimir Nabokov brought to every word he ever wrote, and the ironic amusement he cultivated in response to being uprooted and politically exiled twice in his life, never found fuller expression than in Pale Fire published in 1962 after the critical and popular success of Lolita had made him an international literary figure.An ingeniously constructed parody of detective fiction and learned commentary, Pale Fire offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures, at the center of which is a 999-line poem written by the literary genius John Shade just before his death. Surrounding the poem is a foreword and commentary by the demented scholar Charles Kinbote, who interweaves adoring literary analysis with the fantastical tale of an assassin from the land of Zembla in pursuit of a deposed king. Brilliantly constructed and wildly inventive, this darkly witty novel of suspense, literary one-upmanship, and political intrigue achieves that rarest of things in literature–perfect tragicomic balance.With an Introduction by Richard Rorty

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