Pale Fire

not much help i know!

But somewhere around halfway, it became funny. Kinbote is so far off-base and just full of himself that I stopped being annoyed and just started laughing.

Pale Fire is an excellent book. Lots of people think it (not Lolita) is Nabokov's best. I don't want to spoil anything for you, but (as usual for Nabokov) there is a lot going on just inches below the surface.

Pale Fire is definitely a book that gets better with the second reading. You can understand a lot on the first time through, but you will see much more on the second try (if you don't want to read it twice, at skim back through the book a second time).

Lots of people don't like Pale Fire because "it's not about anything." Yes, it is true that the book is a metaphysical puzzle and that it probably won't change the world, or help you to understand some ignored part of society. But aren't we supposed to enjoy books for multiple reasons? Pale Fire is a delightful puzzle to unravel, and (at leat when I read it) Nabakov creates quite a bit of empathy for Shade and Kinbote.

Some things to think about:

* Who's the real author of the poem?
* Why is Kinbote writing the commentary?
* Pay attention to the discussion of the afterlife, both in the poem and in the commentary. This information seems tangential, but Nabakov includes it for a reason.
* Pay attention to the index in the back.

I hope you like it. It's a great book.

this book is awesome

i cant believe i never read it before

i mean there is just so much stuff going on in this joint that i dont even know where to begin to start thinking about it let alone talking about it (or maybe the other way around)--i feel like i will have to read it 6 times before i even might be able to form an opinion about what happened in the book

people on the nabokov thread called it a one-joke book, those psychos

those KINBOTES

To be fair, there is one really big joke in it.

there are a lot of really big jokes in it

i've never read this! maybe it will be my next book

o man que do you like "postmodernism" because if u do let me tell u you will love this book

i love me some postmodernism let me tell you i eat that shit for breakfast.

i tried to read this book once, did not go so well

let me give u some quick insight: one of the characters in this book is named shade, and also there are ghosts called poltergeists that feautre and of course there is the spectre of for example vladimir nabokov but also of soviet russia and maybe even writing itself so you see it is many-layered

wikipedia tells me that Alfred Chester called the novel a "total wreck"

let me tell you something: alfred chester is a "total gaywad"

people on the nabokov thread called it a one-joke book, those psychos

i want to say something here about how all of nabakov's books are one joke and the punchline is that we are so cruel to laugh and i want to say something about satire being a lesson, parody being a game and i want say something brilliant but i remember poor hazel's ghost and i think basically what im trying to say here is ♥♥♥♥♥ this book.

yeah guys yeah

i like this book so much i think i am going to add it to my facebook favorite books section

i feel now like italics are the tools of the credulous and vulgar. i got distracted by a phone call but i needed to say that i think. i'm reading kinbote's commentary on she took her poor young life and it is so cruel! i still laughed tho

haha also that DEAD thread now :/

lamp no joke i really love this book in as earnest & genuine a way as possible, italix are just joeks

man i know i am going to stay up late just thinking about this book, its been a long time since that happened

well like two months

Max, I have read Pale Fire.

sweet

I have nothing intelligent to add however

^^^ my ilx career in a nutshell.

no i know max i was just teasing and/or referencing this which is hard to read because i will agree with any stupid thing if someone says it cleverly.

haha i like that interview, it is as though charles kinbote himself is interviewing nabokov

there are like 1000 massive jokes in this book

fules

this is my favorite book of all time.

Me too!

like all that douchbaggy "changed my way of looking at literature" stuff will come gouting out of me whenever anyone makes the mistake of talking about it/looking in it's general direction around me. that good. and yeah, anyone who thinks that it is a one-joke thing is kind of a moron or just not paying much attention.

xpost: awesome!

true story: this is the first book i ever bought a companion book to (something about butterflies?) and also the first book i felt compelled to scrawl little notes in the margin. also the first time i went back and bought the hardcover after i read it just because i thought it deserved it.

really enjoyed this first time around, about a year ago. am totally gonna read it again asap.

nothing but love for this book

Damn, has it really been 25 years since I read this? Must reread now.

I always imagine the Rolling Stones singing this title to the tune of "Hang Fire."

Charles Kinbote is my second-favorite VN character, right after Vivian Darkbloom.

the only nabokov i've read is lolita. you ppl have got me intrigued

glad to see that other people love this book as much as i do

for me the love wasnt super immediate--it was like i read the first 200 pages, everything before the index, and i liked it, i thought it was great--and then paging through the index and cross referencing some of the pages it was like, i dunno, i guess i want to say the sixth sense? but not a) because i thought the sixth sense was amazing or b) in the way where its like a trick ending--i just mean one of those things where so much of the stuff going on in the book just shifted five feet to the left and i realized how much i had totally glossed over/missed and how much stuff looked like one thing while you were reading it and like something totally different when you were done.

and he did that all in the index. so cool!

he structures the book and the contents of the notes so well--so that while on the one hand it plays as a very linear narrative even w/in the of the notes-on-a-poem structure while kinbote slowly reveals his hand--in fact kinbote explicitly encourages this by marking the chronology of the writing of the poem and the movement of gradus through the world toward an inescapable finishing point--its ultimately bizarre ending and the things suggested by the index deny that linearity, since you need to know the contents of that end--both the final few notes and the index--to properly place kinbote & shade & grey--not to mention that even in his encouraging of that linear structure kinbote halfway denies it by revealing the ultimate destination of the novel (shades death at the hands of gradus).

which is all a long way of saying this book is totally dope and deserves multiple readings

ok that's it. just ordered it. am not reading any more of this thread till after i'm done.

I read this, like, 5 years ago. totally loved it, but I'm sure that a ton of shit went over my head (lol precocious high-schooler), so I'm definitely up for a reread.

I also used to have the entire first canto of the poem memorized

leading to an unfortunate drunken scene a few years ago where I laid down on the floor of a friend's dorm room with the door open and my head protruding into the hallway so that I could vomit profusely while reciting it

i've seen pretty much that exact thing happen before, bizzarely

Haven't read it in quite some time, and then only once, but it's one of my favorite books of any sort. Funny as hell, endlessly clever, mindbending, diabolical in the best sense. I don't know that I've ever been quite so happy just to read the words printed on a page as I was while reading this book. On the other hand, I've never memorized any of it, and have therefore been denied the pleasure of vomiting while reciting it

man, this book was amazing! just finished it five minutes ago -- i read it straight through in two nights and probably would've tried to do it in one sitting if i hadn't fallen asleep.

i confess i didn't do much referring back to the poem, though. should i read it again with a photocopy of said poem spread out in front of me, as kinbote advises?

No, that's not necessary. The joke is that the correspondence between the line in the poem that Kinbote uses as a jumping-off point and the resulting endnote becomes increasingly tenuous. Which is a joke that loses some of its funniness once you get the idea.

does the poem have any 'point' apart from being pretty, then?

um, yes

it would, for one, be hard to have a book consisting of footnotes if you had nothing for them to be footnoting

A fair question. I think the poem stands fine on its own as a poem, full of genuine adult American human sentiments and thoughts. You get Shade's midlife wistfulness, his love for his daughter, his gentle humanism, his contempt for fate. It wouldn't be out of place in the work of Randall Jarrell or Stephen Dunn.

But it's also accurate to say that Nabokov went to the trouble of constructing a deeply sane fictional poet - and of having him write a pretty solid poem - mainly so as to provide contrast for the deranged idiot who drives the notes. That is, he didn't want Kinbote to be the hero and didn't want you to have any sympathy for him (cf. the homophobia), so he had to provide a reference point for Kinbote to be compared unfavorably against.

Also Nabokov needed a platform from which to vent his contempt for critics and criticism. To do that, he needed both parts. Kinbote's maniacal misreadings required a text for Kinbote to maniacally misread.

I should say that my interpretation of Pale Fire is heavily influenced by Nabokov's interviews on the subject. In my view, Nabokov comes across as unnecessarily cranky both toward Kinbote as a character and toward the entertainment value of the King's adventures (which is considerable).

In doing so I think he over-rates Shade ("the greatest of the invented poets"). And he shortchanges much of the fun one can get from the notes.

Um, or what max said, also. If the point were just "LOLZ, critics be misreadin'," Nabokov could have had Kinbote radically misread something already in the canon. Shakespeare, say (there's already some Hamlet embedded in the title).

Part of the alleged delusion is that K. believes his story had more influence on the poem's composition than it did in "fact," and his obstinacy on this point is part of the joke.

it would, for one, be hard to have a book consisting of footnotes if you had nothing for them to be footnoting
I believe the most recent Dag Solstad novel, "Armand V", is exactly this. It's supposed to be the footnotes to an unpublished novel. I've not read it yet, but I hear it's very good.

The poem is great. It stands as a great poem in its own right. Kinbote's misinterpretation is not the straightforward gag it appears to be on first reading. There actually are all sorts of cross-connections going on between Shade/Kinbote at a lexical and biographical level. Shade is every bit as much of a fiction as Kinbote, both of them puppets of Nabokov's. The book deals as much with the relationship of reader/author as it does critic/author. In fact Kinbote totally does influence the structure of the poem because the poem has been written - by Nabokov - to allow Kinbote to exist.

i finally read this--totally fun and great. but i thought the poem was supposed to be bad in places. i don't think it's much of a poem.

aren't there some interpretations where Shade himself is "fictional," i.e., another creation of Kinbote's insanity?

yeah i definitely remember reading that somewhere^

"I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the window-pane"

reads pretty well to me.

from wikip:

'"Shadeans" maintain that John Shade wrote not only the poem, but the commentary as well, having invented his own death and the character of Kinbote as a literary device. [...] "Kinboteans", a decidedly smaller group, believe that Kinbote invented the existence of John Shade.'

also

'In 1997, Brian Boyd published a much-discussed study arguing that the ghost of John Shade influenced Kinbote's contributions. He later expanded this essay into a book, in which he also argues that Hazel's ghost induced Kinbote to say things to Shade that inspired Shade's poem.'

^ The 'ghost' connection is an interesting one to explore, I believe that the 'nonsense' spelled out in the barn by the flickering light can plausibly be read as a warning about Shade's death, from Aunt Maud ... it's all in here:
http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/boydpf1.htm
(which i have yet to read in its entirety).

from page 5 of the above:

'"pada ata lane pad not ogo old wart alan ther tale feur far rant lant tal told" [C.347, 188]), a message to Hazel to tell her father ("pada": pa, da, padre) not to go across the lane to old Goldsworth's, as an atalanta butterfly dances by, after he finishes "Pale Fire" ("tale feur"), at the invitation of someone from a foreign land who has told and even ranted his tall tale to him [...] it is the spirit of Shade's Aunt Maud, always so fond of "images of doom" (P.89, 36), who shortly before she dies has a stroke that seriously interferes with her speech'

it would, for one, be hard to have a book consisting of footnotes if you had nothing for them to be footnoting

this is a good take on the kinbote v shade: http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~wcd/palenarr.htm

my own feeling which is very undeveloped having only read the book once and quickly at that is that trying to discern the relative reality/fictionality of shade and kinbote is sort of missing the forest for the trees--to me one of the big concerns of pf is the relationship btw. a work of art & its interpreters and the way each gives life to the other, so i guess in certain ways i want to say that theyre equally fictional & equally real or something? i mean w/out shade there is no kinbote, but the reverse is true as well.

Yeah exactly. Shade is called Shade, for a start. The opening couplet of the poem introduces reflections and taking reflections for reality.

Yeah, I've always thought that.

Now I wanna read this book again before I look at some of the fancier exegeses.

I think the temptation to want to solve a book like PF is misguided. Fun, in the spirit of it, in a way, but misguided.

Me too. Sometimes I hang out on Nabokov-L and somebody comes out with something like Boyd's reading, or like "AHA! These 47 trilingual puns plus these eight obscure chess and entomology references clearly PROVE that we're meant to conclude that the entire frame narrative was IN FACT dictated to Van Veen's spleen by Dolly Haze's unborn baby."

Even if "true," (that is, authorially intended), it sorta has the feeling of letting you get to the end of the book and then jerking the rug out from you and saying, "You didn't just read the book you thought you were reading."

For me, the poem is good. So are the notes. There's plenty of fun to be had just in a comparatively surfacey reading, without running down every Slavic root or cracking the code. I mean, hell, just a few posts ago I talked about being entertained just by reading the Karlist escape narrative as a pure and silly picaresque!

i basically agree with you guys that you can miss a lot of the beauty and fun of the book by focusing on the details. on the other hand, nabakov was not the type to just throw a bunch of shit together and be like "oh there are LOTS of interpretations." that is, i'm pretty sure in his mind there was one correct solution to what was going on in pale fire, and that he had left ample hints for the reader to figure out that solution. so i don't think it's misguided for someone to try and solve the mystery or whatever, nabakov totally encouraged this approach. i personally don't have the patience for it though.

i should probably read this again, every time i open this thread i get all giddy.

ugh sorry for misspelling nabokov a million times

i basically agree with you guys that you can miss a lot of the beauty and fun of the book by focusing on the details. on the other hand, nabakov was not the type to just throw a bunch of shit together and be like "oh there are LOTS of interpretations." that is, i'm pretty sure in his mind there was one correct solution to what was going on in pale fire, and that he had left ample hints for the reader to figure out that solution. so i don't think it's misguided for someone to try and solve the mystery or whatever, nabakov totally encouraged this approach. i personally don't have the patience for it though.

he did! nabokovs solution is that kinbote = that one professor of russian lit whose name i forget

Botkin.

I've not read this thread for fear of learning too much about the story beforehand, but I've reached the first canto and I have a question. This may sound silly but is there a "better" way of reading it like should I read the cantos and then the footnotes or should I go back and forth between the both?

you will end up going back and forth anyway.

i think general consensus is to read the poem first, then go back and refer to it as you read the novel, but it's not entirely necessary to do the latter

I read the poem then reread the poem alongside the notes. Personally that seems a more rewarding way of doing it but you cd go a canto at a time or even just read the notes alongside the poem first go thru. Personal preference really.

OK thx!

I did one canto at a time, which seemed to work just fine (and helped break up the notes)

just finished this and what a fuckin

this is the first book I've read in a long time that I've just had so much fun reading, just immensely enjoyed all the way through

dude I can't believe you had never read this before, it is the best!

I can never play ping pong with a straight face ever again

I will never look at a map of zembla the same way again

****** kind of a spoiler ******************

think that this book is better than any of the harry matthews shit that aims for what pale fire does. I mean tlooth and sinking of whatever staduim or whatever are still worth reading if you haven't. I mean I think all three have pretty incredibly done and have quite different twists or whatever in them, but while matthews is just blatantly ripping of rousell for the most part, it just seems like nabokov is doing his own shit and hitting the same sort of notes. I don't know what to say, none of what I really wrote matters, this one was just a pretty satisfying book.

just to clarify, the previous post is not saying that matthews was attempting to do nobokov's pale fire thing (for all I know, and it can be easily checked but I'm not doing it, matthews wrote his shit before nabokov), just that both have some works with similar auras

sp. knobokov

it has been a while since the fields of zembla were plowed tbh

ugh don't remind me

still thinking about this book

is the one big joke about ping pong?

coincidence: I need to reread it, and fast.

dude I can't believe you had never read this before, it is the best!

― bernard snowy, Thursday, March 31, 2011 4:02 AM (5 days ago) Bookmark

Truth Bomb.

This is probably my favorite book of all time.

the one big joke is about pink pong

ping obv

the only negative thing about this book thats kind of nagging at me is that it's pretty mean spirited in that a lot of it is about how much fun it is to laugh at crazy people when they are eloquent, but, then again, there is a lot more to the book and there are a couple other books about even crazier, more eloquent people, that are favorites

of mine

i keep looking for my copy of this whenever i'm at my parents'. i've probably wasted so much time i could have just bought a copy. several.

A top fiver in BOOKS OF ALL TIME for me. One relentless book, every single detail seemingly thought through/polished, although not to the point of fussiness, like later Nabokov.

I mean tlooth and sinking of whatever staduim

what! to me, the conversions is sub-tlooth at best and cigarettes is just like dude got old and lost whatever wonderful madcap imaginative powers his youth granted him. Haven't read the journalist though

I probably just need to grow up or something

lol, what the fuck do I sound like there, all SUB-TLOOTH AT BEST I TELL YOU

Singular Pleasures is from around the same time as Cigarettes isn't it?

Pale Fire is awesome, and I admire it greatly; but rereading it I am finding Kinbote's 'my secret (I am King)' business a bit too heavily telegraphed early on.

Then this makes me think, well it's supposed to be like that.
So, that's not really the issue, we're supposed to see that immediately, and move on to something else
- which is ... what?

(contrast Rorty who wrote an Intro to this that bizarrely says that for most of the book the reader takes it at face value, thinks Kinbote is a sensible fellow, etc - nah)

note to line 12, Kinbote on lecturing while wearing a disguise -- I'd forgotten how flagrantly daft this book could get.

Won over anew by many things including so many cases of that daftness - something delicately literary is also like a Pink Panther film.

(ps / I suppose the first thing that lies beyond the quick realization that Kinbote claims to be king is the question: well, is he? and if not, what is he, and how insane is he? - etc

not to say that these are the book's greatest attractions)

i think more, ahem, trusting readers - and maybe those also brought up on more speculative genres, where stories of secret flights by usurped kings are more commonplace - might be less inclined to immediately penetrate kinbote's facade.

Kinbote can be acute as well as idiotic: his Index's reference to Proust's Marcel is boldly accurate.

Won over anew by many things including so many cases of that daftness - something delicately literary is also like a Pink Panther film.

― the pinefox, Thursday, April 7, 2011 8:17 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark

haha, I love it!! perfect description

wish I could reread this — I left my copy with my ex :(
I hope she's at least gotten around to reading it...

write her a fairly long poem urging its return

then send a lengthy commentary on the poem

It may soon be time to begin at last to read the book that's titled Pnin.

A query of another flavour, should I ever make a raid on Ada?

i love pnin. warmer on the surface than most nabokov, and the usual temperature underneath. (hot, i guess.) ada is the clearest example i've ever seen of a style utterly curdled. martin amis called it "a waterlogged corpse at the point of maximal bloat". but some people like it.

no nabokov expert here, but i did read Ada for some reason many summers ago. some amazing stuff in the first 200 pages! and then a lot of less amazing stuff.

Pnin is awesome, one of my faves by the guy.

one other, obvious, thing about VN, perhaps what moves me most: he seems matchless as a describer of mid-century America. Take the image of the Wordsmith campus that ends Pale Fire notes 47-8, culminating in a boy alone on the football field flying a model aeroplane.

I'm moved because I think there's an idea, maybe VN's own, that what he's describing is banal, but to me it seems idyllic, fascinating and beautiful.

and I say matchless in this regard a) cos he was a better prose writer than almost anyone but b) the 'outsider' schtick helped him see it better, probably, than a lot of American-born observers.

i like descriptions of american childhood stuff in nabokov because it feels like he's seeing things through this filter of intense nostalgia he has for being a (well-off) little boy in late-imperial russia, and like the model airplanes and football fields and baseball gloves are the closest things he has to this lost world with its tragic romantic Fall story (nabokov hates when you say things like this but pale fire is in a weird way one of his most autobiographical). and he has powers of attention and description now that he didn't have then, and using them to reveal american childhood as so voluptuous is the closest he can come to actually revisiting the dacha.

(then there's the summer camp stuff in lolita, which is tremendously acute and like pungent but which has this layer of fetishization on top of everything else that is weird & shivery & very deft)

So, that's not really the issue, we're supposed to see that immediately, and move on to something else
- which is ... what?

I understood Pale Fire as a self-parody of VN's years of obsessively translating and commenting on Onegin. * Which doesn't answer your question at all.

(contrast Rorty who wrote an Intro to this that bizarrely says that for most of the book the reader takes it at face value, thinks Kinbote is a sensible fellow, etc - nah)

Rorty was the self-styled philosopher of debunking philosophy. Maybe he needs a straw man, or a deluded reader that he can see through.

(* With disastrous results, they say)

VN did say that writing Kinbote involved ‘retwisting my own experience’ as editor of Eugene Onegin. (Strong Opinions p.77)

I oddly feel I've benefited from not reading too much about this novel - though I have read Rorty and Michael Wood - because things about it that are probably done to death in secondary material always feel quite fresh to me. Like the parody of scholarship and the fact that the whole thing curiously echoes VN's flight from Russia to the USA, and even the fact that the treatment of Stalinism is so absurd, and mediated by a kind of madman, which seems an odd (and in a way oddly generous and relaxed) thing for such a thorough anti-Stalinist or intuitive anti-Bolshevik to do.

thinking about politics etc, though:
1) Shade's view of psychoanalysis, identical to Kinbote's, is also identical to VN's - this seems strangely limited, not much 'negative capability' going on
2) Shade's view of politics also feels identical to VN's; or maybe less intelligent as he says rather crude things like 'Marxism needs a dictator'. So he's, let's say, a US Cold War liberal.

(again all this feels somewhat interesting to me in a way it might not if I'd read tons more about it)

love that part where kinbote goes to that party with the student

I once read an essay on Pale Fire by Mary McCarthy and it spiraled out of control. It was clear that she had lost the ability to tell where the allusions stopped.

Brian Boyd devoted an entire book to Pale Fire. I have no interest in reading it. Boyd has just edited a facsimile edition of the poem standing alone, which seems like a real misjudgment.

not much 'negative capability' going on

In Dabney's biography of Edmund Wilson, Isaiah Berlin (I think) is quoted on Nabokov: "a vast narcissistic talent and no capacity for conveying other works of art, which needs the negative capability of which he is totally devoid."

Haven't read Boyd's PF book, but another overview of Nabokov was published in '94 or '95 whose name escapes me -- I read it then when I was in thrall to Nabokov -- and it was insightful and hilarious.

nabokov hates when you say things like this

In interviews he used to insist on things that didn't seem true at all. He is not a writer whose opinions you can trust.

If novels were composed of marvelous sentences Nabokov would surely have to be judged the greatest living writer; and it is certain he would be some kind of great writer if he were writing travel brochures, field guides to lepidoptery, technical manuals for the automotive industry.

But novels are not composed of beautiful sentences. Occasionally--perhaps especially when he has stunned us with his performance in sentence after sentence--we long for a huge, lumbering, sweating, grunting workhorse of a sentence that will ploddingly perform the brute labor of bearing its terrible, necessary burden from here to there. But of course getting "there" is not the point of Vadim's novel; the point lies in the elaboration of fantastic, fugal designs, gorgeous patterns and textures, all with contemptuous grace and virtuosity. Such art is in the essence and by disdainful intention decadent, flung in the faces of the "facetious criticules in the Sunday papers" who charge him with "aristocratic obscurity." Nabokov is our great decadent, our reigning mandarin and eccentric, a supreme, determinedly minor artist whom major ones might well envy while criticules continue to carp and gnash the stubs of their teeth.

-- Saul Maloff

Ha! That reads like the pastiche reviews he mocks incessantly in The Gift!

Haven't read Boyd's PF book, but another overview of Nabokov was published in '94 or '95 whose name escapes me -- I read it then when I was in thrall to Nabokov -- and it was insightful and hilarious.

Was it The Magician's Doubts by Michael Wood? That's one fine dense little book.

YES! A marvelous book.

The Magician's Doubts is one of the great works of criticism that I know - but it can't justly be called 'little'.

I didn't think I remembered Kinbote at the party, but now I think I do.

I looked at Boyd's PF book online; it seemed limited in tone. He's the one with the grandest theories about the book's logic I think, which Wood shuns.

The poem on its own sounds an odd idea but maybe would make a good art object or something ... or a way of estranging the poem, taking it away from Kinbote, and seeing if it works in other ways or without him?

"no capacity for conveying other works of art" seems harsh as the poem Pale Fire is such a work, and arguably a staggering impersonation of a different writer - what else does 'conveying' mean: VN's lectures?

Not sure about 'different writer', though, now that I recall that at least one of Shade's poems was written by VN as VN before the novel.

VN, asked about Joyce and Pynchon:

What is your opinion of Joyce's parodies? Do you see any
difference in the artistic effect of scenes such as the
maternity hospital and the beach interlude with Gerty
Macdowell? Are you familiar with the work of younger American
writers who have been influenced by both you and Joyce, such as
Thomas Pynchon (a Cornellian, Class of '59, who surely was in
Literature 312), and do you have any opinion on the current
ascendancy of the so-called parody-novel (John Barth, for
instance)?

The literary parodies in the Maternal Hospital chapter are
on the whole jejunish. Joyce seems to have been hampered by the
general sterilized tone he chose for that chapter, and this
somehow dulled and monotonized the in] aid skits. On the other
hand, the frilly novelette parodies in the Masturbation scene
are highly successful; and the sudden junction of its cliches
with the fireworks and tender sky of real poetry is a feat of
genius. I am not familiar with the works of the two other
writers you mention.

http://www.kulichki.com/moshkow/NABOKOW/Inter06.txt

The "conveying" phrase was made in reference to the Onegin translation.

I don't even know what to make of this:

Since Mr. Nabokov does not like to talk off the cuff
(or "Off the Nabocuff," as he said) no tape recorder was used.

iirc he would respond only if he recieved the questions beforehand, with his responses in writing as well.

ah I meant I can't imagine him saying "Off the Nabocuff"

Since Mr. Nabokov liked to huff a bit of paint in the afternoons
(or "Just taking my Nabohuffs," as he said) the interviews were conducted in the evening.

why paint?

re interviews, did he then READ OUT LOUD the answers that he'd already written down?

I can't remember, but that would be awesomely Kinbotish!

i think there are TV or radio interviews with him where he's basically reading out his prewritten answers, yes

I think the last tv interview VN did - with ROBERT ROBINSON, for the BBC - is like this. Bewilderingly it has yet to show up on youtube.

(contrast Rorty who wrote an Intro to this that bizarrely says that for most of the book the reader takes it at face value, thinks Kinbote is a sensible fellow, etc - nah)

this is why i set (/threw!) this book aside, Kinbote is pretty obviously insane and unbelievable from the off so where can it go? i've voiced my disapproval to others and they tend to tell me that this is the point or alt. that i completely missed the point (/i'm an idiot). since i didn't finish the book i can't produce a counter argument but i did think (what i read of) the book was p. obvious and one-note.

well, I think we can leave aside RR's idea that we do take Kinbote at face value for long.

That is, we can assume that we soon realize he's a very wacky kind of character who claims to be a king. And I don't believe that we ever know for sure whether his claim is true or false.

I think it's true, then, that realizing that he thinks he's the king can't, as such, be the point. It must be a stage on the way to, or a part of, the whole experience of the book.

What does that whole experience include?

The sheer metatextual fun of having these massive notes that dwarf the poem; a play upon the idea of commentating, of misreading, of taking an object and misappropriating it - but then also the ambiguity that the misappropriation might be making a more interesting object than the poem was in the first place, so misreading could be a good thing

the parody of academia, of the age of the institutionalization of modernism (and the portrait of the university and the academics)

The artistry, the intricacy of the design: the thought that VN wrote that whole poem, which works straight-faced, and engineered it so that it could also work as prompt for the notes; the pleasure of the poem itself; the intricacy of the Index

VN's marvellous rendition of post-war USA as I suggested above

pure style, VN's nigh matchless gift with lean unlovely English

camp: daft dashing fun, a sort of gay Indiana Jones or John Buchan or Prisoner of Zembla, with people in drag parachuting out of flying boats - well, not quite that, but that sort of register

the ethical and affective dimension around Hazel: the pathos of her, and of her parents' well-meaning but perhaps (as Wood says) bad attitude here, and then of Kinbote's blindness to it, which Rorty thinks is the great moral rhetoric of the book.

pinefox, you have convinced me to give it another shot, thanks!

took this off the shelf tonight because of this thread. has kind of a reputation as the Cold Fastidious One but it's actually downright goofy: I contented myself on my way out with pulling Gerald Emerald's bowtie loose with a deft jerk of my fingers as I passed by him.

I offered to take him home in my powerful Kramler.

or "Just taking my Nabohuffs," as he said)

Nabokov seems to have such an obsession with cheesy puns in English--I remember reading that his US editor had to really fight him to remove some of them from his books. The joy of using a second language, I guess, is that these things seem more fresh and clever than to native speakers who went through that stage when they were kids.

Should we reevaluate the characterization of Kinbote in light of recent biographical scholars' unpacking of Nabokov's relationship with his gay brother Sergey?

Or not.

We could, just, you know, not do that.

Me? I think it's fair to say that VVN was not comfortable with the topic; how much that leaks into Pale Fire or The Real Life of Sebastian Knight remains an open question.

Haven't read that new biographical stuff so am going to say nope.

I have, however, had the opening lines of the poem swirling around my head for the last three weeks, just popping in again and again and again.

Having only read a paltry few of his books, I feel I'm probably not allowed nor fully equipped to say it, but I suspect this is Nabokov's one and only true masterpiece.

Some great pinefox posts in this thread.

I guess this book is a kind of extension of Gogol's Diary of a Madman? It functions in a similar way -- there's all of this madcap comedy but when you step back and ask yourself what sort of reality presumably lies behind the text, you feel a pit of dread in your stomach.

? For me, it's not dread but disappointment. The fun bits of the story are fantasy. The sad bits are poetry.

Reality is mundane as fuck, and comparatively uninteresting.

I feel like Botkin was an unsettling, not mundane presence to the people around him. That's why all his ping pong companions left.

Gradus is now much nearer to us in space and time than he was in the preceding cantos.