Highlight from reading Nabokov's Pale Fire:
However! There exists to my knowledge one absolutely extraordinary, unbelievably elegant case, where not only two, but three words are involved. The story itself is trivial enough (and probably apocraphyl). A newspaper account of a Russian tsar's coronation had, instead of korona (crown), the misprint vorona (crow), and when next day this was apologetically 'corrected,' it got misprinted a second time as korova (cow). The artistic correlation between the crown-crow-cow series and the Russian korona-vorona-korova series is something that would have, I am sure, enraptured my poet. I have seen nothing like it on lexical playfields and the odds against the double coincidence defy computation (page 199).
Nabokov's Pale Fire is, without a doubt, one of the more original ideas for a book I've ever come across. It's a 999 line poem with an introduction and commentary. But the commentary, while it does comment on the poem, tells an entirely different story than the poem. In fact, scholars now argue about whether the poet created the commentator or the commentator created the poet.
Or, according to this link:
Pale Fire is one of the most singular and unusual novels ever published; no synopsis could hope to suggest its ingenious layers of meaning. The core of the novel is a poem of 999 lines entitled Pale Fire, by American poet John Francis Shade. Collateral to Shade's poem are a Foreword, Commentary, and Index compiled by the pompous and pedantic scholar Charles Kinbote. Kinbote, an unabashedly solipsistic immigrant from Zembla, 'a distant northern land,' has a personal and distinctive interpretation of Pale Fire the poem, which makes Pale Fire the novel a comical and inventive piece of fiction and one of Nabokov's most treasured works.
posted by Scott @ 10:40 AM
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