Pale Fire

[Paul Mackin]

On Sat, 2003-06-14 at 13:49, Terrance wrote:
> 
> 
> Jasper Fidget wrote:
> > 
> > A few years ago I found an Ada first edition in a small town library
> > thrift sale.  It cost me $1.  Ada, incidentally, was for me a much more
> > difficult book than Pale Fire.  Has anyone here seriously studied it?
> 
> Got my copy the same way, a discarded library copy, a 1969, only cost me
> a buck. 
> I read it recently. It's beautiful.

It is beautiful notwithstanding the fact that the principle sare at
times so horrid. 

Nabokov was really hot stuff back in '69. There had been five
McGraw-Hill printings before my 1970 Fawcett paperback. Everybody was
reading Ada. 

Can't help thinking that Nabokov's techniques in handling so
tantalizingly still quite forbidding sexual matters--incest in the case
of Ada and boylove in Pale Fire--did not provide example, lent moral
support perhaps, to Pynchon for Gravity's Rainbow. (the timing in the
case of Ada wasn't ideal--can a 1969 work influence one of 1972?)

P.



 Not as difficult as PF. PF is a pain
> in the ass. 
> But it's a perfect book for the Pynchon List. Again, I think the set up
> or schedule is absurd. I would like to try teaming up with someone on a
> canto & commentary. Of course we would need to be at liberty to spoil,
> thread into other "sections" of the text and make general comments that
> would not be restricted by the spoiler rule.