Vladimir Nabokov - Pale Fire (1962), 9/10

Nabokov’s metafictional caricature of academia is not only narratively and linguistically striking, it continues to be relevant and impactful many decades after its publication. Pale Fire tells the story of two (fictional) academics: Dr. John Francis Shade and Dr. Charles Kinbote. The story is told via Kinbote’s writing in first-person perspective, resulting in a predictably biased and distorted textual product. The novel as a text is unique in many respects, but one of the most notable is its metatextual form: it exists as a purposeful parody of academic artifacts. The novel is assembled and presented in four parts: a “Foreword”, the titular poem (Dr. Shade’s Pale Fire: A Poem in Four Cantos), “Commentary”, and an “Index”. Yet one of the more important and interesting aspects of the novel's form is its telling through Kinbote's toxic hubris. As Kinbote writes during the “Foreword”, “for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word” (29). The beauty of Pale Fire is in its combination of style and parody. Shade's writing is almost as fascinating and illuminating as Kinbote’s, a feat only an author like Nabokov could manage. The novel is overflowing with references and cues toward narrative obscuration, but the message is capable of being unearthed. Nabokov provided possible answers during interviews, but the best way to enjoy the novel is with a personal, untainted reading following one’s intuition, then a second. Similar to other great postmodern works, however, the plot itself is argued and is not agreed upon in scholarship. This makes Pale Fire, along with a few other great novels, a particularly personal story, one the reader interacts with more than a traditional, temporally linear text. As with many of Nabokov’s greater novels, its intertextuality is substantial. While it is decidedly postmodern, some readers even labeling the text as “unreadable”, it is a beautifully written novel that captures many of academia’s realities, and further the psyche of an appropriately labeled madman.