Book Review: Pale Fire

Most people know of Nabokov from Lolita, a book bearing a title now synonymous with guileless jailbaiting teenage girls. Pale Fire was published after Lolita and hasn’t enjoyed its household word status, probably because it’s significantly more difficult to read and far less prurient. If you can successfully wade through his complicated narrative and strange or now-forgotten (or fictional?) cultural references, the payoff might be more worth it.

Pale Fire is centered around a 999-line autobiographical poem, written by a now-dead professor John Slade, but the bulk of the book is the meta-fictional forward and extensive commentary on the poem by Slade’s neighbor and colleague, Charles Kinbote. The commentary is where the real narrative rests, as Kinbote weaves into the vagaries of the text of Slade’s poem the story of his homeland of Zembla and its exiled king, Charles Xavier (the literary connection between his name and the leader of the X-Men is in question). Through Nabokov’s ridiculously detailed narrative we can piece together the circumstances surrounding Kinbote’s academic employment in New Wye, the history of Zembla, and the immediate events leading up to Slade’s death.

Kinbote suffers from an unhealthy obsession with Slade’s personal life and mentions his undoubtedly annoying proddings towards Slade to write the analogous poem to tell Zembla’s story. The strength of the personal aspect of their friendship is exaggerated by Kinbote’s histrionics and his fixation on his homeland is befuddling, and through Kinbote’s knowledge of the life of Zembla’s king and his escape, the mind of the astute reader should throw up some red flags of suspicion as to how he came across detailed information of supposedly semi-secret events. I went into this reading mostly naive so I didn’t catch onto Nabokov’s scheme until “it was too late”.

There are some theories of the “reality” of the events in Pale Fire within the context of the narrative, most of them dealing with the mental health on Kinbote and one “reach” theory. Since the narrative is first person limited we have to make some assumptions on the veracity of Kinbote’s statements. If you haven’t read the book or don’t know any of its history, I would skip reading this if you want to save the surprise.

1. Kinbote’s claim of being Zembla’s deposed king are true and his recounting of the events are more or less true.
2. Zembla is a real place but his obsession with his homeland exaggerates his own role so much that he believes he is Xavier, possibly amnesial and recovering.
3. Zembla and Charles Xavier are fictional and Kinbote, either from mental illness or an intentional desire to mislead readers of the poem and commentary, uses Slade’s poem to make it more of a reality.
4. Zembla, Xavier, and Slade (and possibly more) are all constructs of Kinbote’s mind and he is attempting to recreate his past with “Slade’s” poem.
5. Nabokov is trying to communicate something about his or someone else’s life using the story as a code.
6. Some combination of any of these.

Wikipedia has a nice roundup of the theories and interpretations of Pale Fire here, but you can see how the book’s ambiguity would spawn deliberation. I tend toward the first or second theory. Nabokov deviously placed Kinbote and Slade in a fictional American college town to throw us off — had Zembla been the only fictional locale, options 3 and 4 would be more likely. So we are left with piecing together the meta-story together with uncertainty.

I haven’t read anything else by Nabokov so I don’t know how it fares against his other works. Kinbote’s narrative style is precise and humorous, and I am assuming that since Nabokov was an astute writer he aimed and successfully forced himself to reconfigure his writing style completely to accommodate his role as Kinbote. It should be read more than once to be able to process all the nuances but even an initial reading reveals a masterwork of fiction.