NIPPAF or NPPF

[Vincent A. Maeder]

Here is a reference work to help stragglers (well, um, me) along...

Boyd, Brian, Nabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery
Princeton Univ Pr; Reprint edition (December 1, 2001)
ISBN: 0691089574
Used on Amazon from $7.00
New on Amazon at $16.95
Slightly tattered at the city library for free

"Boyd turns his attention to the great enchanter's trickiest and most
unlikely triumph in Nabokov's Pale Fire. With its oddball
structure--which shackles an epic poem in heroic couplets to an
increasingly loony, enveloping commentary--this 1962 novel has always
been a bone of contention among diehard fans. Some consider it less a
work of art than a Rube Goldberg contraption, onto which Nabokov has
brilliantly bolted his favorite motifs. Others call Pale Fire the
author's true masterpiece, and Brian Boyd falls quite emphatically into
the latter camp, arguing that the book is no mere satire on literary
parasitism:

'It is a reflection on the whole history of literature, on the shift
from romance to realism, from the old kind of hero with whose glory the
reader is invited to identify ... to the modern image of everyman as
artist, the suburban Shade, in the modest circumstances of the real,
coping with courage and self-control, with imagination, curiosity,
tenderness, and kindness, with the fact of his mortality and his losses
past and still to come.'

"Boyd's study is at once a shrewd and eloquent guidebook to the
intricacies of Pale Fire and a revisionist argument as to its meaning.
After all, Nabokovians have spent the last three decades feuding over
the ultimate authorship of this double-decker narrative: could the poet,
John Shade, have created both the poem and commentary? Or should both be
chalked up to that nutty exegete Charles Kinbote? As he wades into this
factional war, Boyd can sometimes appear only nominally less insane than
Kinbote. ("The prominence of the Shadean or Kinbotean or 'undecidable'
readings had not gone unchallenged. D. Barton Johnson, attending to
verbal and subverbal detail, stood largely outside the Shade-Kinbote
opposition when he focused on the Botkin behind Kinbote." Help!) Yet his
hypothesis--which involves a ghost feeding lines to the living like a
posthumous Teleprompter--makes perfect sense. And it reminds us that for
all Nabokov's vaunted irony and scientific passion, he was fascinated
throughout his entire career by the afterlife. Volodya as theologian?
Boyd is smart and persuasive enough to make the concept stick, and to
send every last one of us back to Pale Fire--immediately." --James
Marcus --