TBB BotM August: PALE FIRE by Vladimir Nabokov

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > TBB BotM August: PALE FIRE by Vladimir Nabokov

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

Welcome earthlings to the Awful Book of the Month!
In this thread, we choose one work of ~~literature~~ absolute crap and read/discuss it over a month. If you have any suggestions of books, choose something that will be appreciated by many people, and has many avenues of discussion. We'd also appreciate if it were a work of ~~literature~~ complete drivel that is easily located from a local library or book shop, as opposed to ordering something second hand off the internet and missing out on a week's worth of reading. Better yet, books available on e-readers.

Resources:

Project Gutenberg - http://www.gutenberg.org

- A database of over 17000 books available online. If you can suggest books from here, that'd be the best.

SparkNotes - http://www.sparknotes.com/

- A very helpful Cliffnotes-esque site, but much better, in my opinion. If you happen to come in late and need to catch-up, you can get great character/chapter/plot summaries here.

:siren:

For recommendations on future material, suggestions on how to improve the club, or just a general rant, feel free to PM me. :siren:

Past Books of the Month

[for BOTM before 2014, refer to archives]

2014:
January: Ursula K. LeGuin - The Left Hand of Darkness
February: Mikhail Bulgalov - Master & Margarita
March: Richard P. Feynman -- Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
April: James Joyce -- Dubliners
May: Gabriel Garcia Marquez -- 100 Years of Solitude
June: Howard Zinn -- A People's History of the United States
July: Mary Renault -- The Last of the Wine
August: Barbara Tuchtman -- The Guns of August
September: Jane Austen -- Pride and Prejudice
October: Roger Zelazny -- A Night in the Lonesome October
November: John Gardner -- Grendel
December: Christopher Moore -- The Stupidest Angel

2015:
January: Italo Calvino -- Invisible Cities
February: Karl Ove Knausgaard -- My Struggle: Book 1.
March: Knut Hamsun -- Hunger
April: Liu Cixin -- 三体 ( The Three-Body Problem)
May: John Steinbeck -- Cannery Row
June: Truman Capote -- In Cold Blood
(Hiatus)
August: Ta-Nehisi Coates -- Between the World and Me
September: Wilkie Collins -- The Moonstone
October:Seth Dickinson -- The Traitor Baru Cormorant
November:Svetlana Alexievich -- Voices from Chernobyl
December: Michael Chabon -- Gentlemen of the Road

2016:
January: Three Men in a Boat (To say nothing of the Dog!) by Jerome K. Jerome
February:The March Up Country (The Anabasis) of Xenophon
March: The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
April: Plain Tales from the Hills by Rudyard Kipling
May: Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima
June:The Vegetarian by Han Kang
July:Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees

Current:

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

Online hypertext version of the novel here: http://www.shannonrchamberlain.com/palefiremain.html

quote:

As Nabokov pointed out himself,[14] the title of John Shade's poem is from Shakespeare's Timon of Athens: "The moon's an arrant thief, / And her pale fire she snatches from the sun" (Act IV, scene 3), a line often taken as a metaphor about creativity and inspiration. Kinbote quotes the passage but does not recognize it, as he says he has access only to an inaccurate Zemblan translation of the play "in his Timonian cave", and in a separate note he even rails against the common practice of using quotations as titles.

quote:

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 �migr� 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.

Fairly good summary here:

quote:

Vladimir Nabokov's 1962 novel, Pale Fire, is widely considered a forerunner of postmodernism and a prime example of the literature of exhaustion. The novel has four distinct sections. The first is a "Forward" by a man who calls himself Charles Kinbote. Kinbote, who claims to be a scholar from the country of Zembla, relates how he befriended the American poet John Shade. Following Shade's untimely death, Kinbote was entrusted with the manuscript of the poet's last major work, a long autobiographical poem called "Pale Fire." Despite the many reservations of others concerning his authority to do so, Kinbote has edited the work for publication. The second section is the poem itself, divided into four cantos. It is followed by the third, and longest section, Kinbote's own idiosyncratic commentary and line by line glosses. The fourth section is an index in which Kinbote provides brief capsule descriptions of the major people and places of the text and its accompanying commentary.

The novel, however, is something more than a satiric look at the solipsistic excesses of academic exegesis. Kinbote's commentary gradually transforms the heterogenous elements of the text into a labyrinth of dazzling complexity. Kinbote's status as a reliable narrator is subverted early in the book; by the end of the Forward, we suspect him to be something of an opportunist who has made off with Shade's manuscript before the grieving widow can gather her wits. His commentary supports this suspicion. Shade's poem seems to be a fairly straightforward bit of personal reminiscence, as unmarked by worldly concerns as it is by any hint of literary talent. Bending every word of Shade's poem to ludicrous extremes, however, Kinbote proceeds to unfold the story of the overthrow of the last King of Zembla, Charles II. The story of Shade's composition of the poem is made parallel to the story of the approach of an assassin named Gradus who is coming to America to slay the exiled King.

Subtly, Kinbote's identity begins to merge with his stories of Charles II, even as Shade's poem is gradually co-opted by the Commentary. Kinbote, it appears, may in fact be the exiled King, using Shade's poem as a means of telling his own story. However, even this possibility begins to slip away as a third and almost invisible narrator, a Russian emigr� named Botkin, makes his way into the narrative, raising the possibility that the whole thing, Kinbote, Zembla, Charles II, Gradus, even Shade's poem itself, might be the elaborate creation of this other figure.

http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0244.html

About the Author

quote:

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (/nəˈbɔːkəf, ˈn�bəˌkɔːf, -ˌkɒf/;[1] Russian: Влади́мир Влади́мирович Набо́ков, pronounced [vlɐˈdʲimʲɪr nɐˈbokəf] ( listen), also known by the pen name Vladimir Sirin; 22 April [O.S. 10 April] 1899c � 2 July 1977) was a Russian-American novelist. His first nine novels were in Russian, and he achieved international prominence after he began writing English prose.

Nabokov's Lolita (1955), his most famous novel in English, was ranked fourth in the list of the Modern Library 100 Best Novels;[2] Pale Fire (1962) was ranked 53rd on the same list, and his memoir, Speak, Memory (1951), was listed eighth on the publisher's list of the 20th century's greatest nonfiction.[3] He was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction seven times.

Nabokov, like his wife, his son and several characters in his novels, was a synesthete. He was also an expert lepidopterist and composer of chess problems.

quote:

Nabokov was a self-described synesthete, who at a young age equated the number five with the colour red.[35] Aspects of synesthesia can be found in several of his works. His wife also exhibited synesthesia; like her husband, her mind's eye associated colours with particular letters. They discovered that Dmitri shared the trait, and moreover that the colours he associated with some letters were in some cases blends of his parents' hues�"which is as if genes were painting in aquarelle".[36]

For some synesthetes, letters are not simply associated with certain colors, they are themselves colored. Nabokov frequently endowed his protagonists with a similar gift. In Bend Sinister Krug comments on his perception of the word "loyalty" as being like a golden fork lying out in the sun. In The Defense, Nabokov mentioned briefly how the main character's father, a writer, found he was unable to complete a novel that he planned to write, becoming lost in the fabricated storyline by "starting with colors". Many other subtle references are made in Nabokov's writing that can be traced back to his synesthesia. Many of his characters have a distinct "sensory appetite" reminiscent of synesthesia.[37]

quote:

. . . Nabokov played an elaborate practical joke on Georgy Adamovich, the critic who had so consistently dismissed his verse. Writing poems under the name Vasily Shishkov, Nabokov managed to get them published in a leading journal. They were praised by Adamovich -- who had no idea Nabokov had written them -- as heralding the arrival of "a great poet."

A Nabokov short story titled "Vasily Shishkov" appeared months later in the same publication, describing a retiring, gifted poet of the same name who meets with the narrator twice before vanishing. The pseudonymous poems combined with the story -- which was signed by Nabokov -- in such a way to make it apparent that the whole thing had been a ruse engineered to prove that Adamovitch was unfairly prejudiced against Nabokov's work.

https://books.google.com/books?id=U...20prank&f=false

Pacing

Just read, then post. This one is complex so don't be afraid to toss your theories into the ring.

References and Further Reading

http://www.postmodernmystery.com/pale_fire.html

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_spectator/2010/07/freeing_pale_fire_from_pale_fire.html

http://nabokovsecrethistory.com/news/pale-fire-nabokov-zembla-secret-history/#.V6XlTbgrIuU

http://www.nabokovonline.com/uploads/2/3/7/7/23779748/v3_06_roth.pdf

http://observer.com/1999/12/the-novel-of-the-century-nabokovs-pale-fire/

Final Note:

If you have any suggestions to change, improve or assess the book club generally, please PM or email me -- i.e., keep it out of this thread -- at least until into the last five days of the month, just so we don't derail discussion of the current book with meta-discussion. I do want to hear new ideas though, seriously, so please do actually PM or email me or whatever, or if you can't do either of those things, just hold that thought till the last five days of the month before posting it in this thread. Thanks, and I hope everyone enjoys the book!

Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 16:25 on Aug 6, 2016

# ¿ Aug 6, 2016 16:17

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 09:31

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

the_homemaster posted:

2) Didn't realise the Ruskis did postmodernism (this must be a very early predecessor to postmodernism?).

quote:

Indeed, if this work had come out in, say, 1992, one
might suspect that it was intended as a parody of the
textual deconstructions of the late 20th Century. Yet
when Nabokov was first planning Pale Fire during the
period from 1956 and 1958, Jacques Derrida was still
employed teaching the children of military personnel,
Paul De Man was working on his Ph.D, and the term
"deconstruction" was used only in the demolition
business. Thus it is more accurate to see Nabokov as
responding to the intensely close readings of text
popularized by the practitioners of so-called New
Criticism, (today it would be called old criticism) still
in ascendancy during the 1950s and 1960s, and poking
gentle fun at specific literary models, such as T.S.
Eliot�s accompanying notes to "The Waste Land," in
which the dividing line between poetry, biography
and theory were deliberately blurred.

http://www.postmodernmystery.com/pale_fire.html

Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 04:27 on Aug 7, 2016

# ¿ Aug 7, 2016 04:24

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

House Louse posted:

drat, I was hoping to get "first post, what order are we going to read the pages in?" The first time I read it, I read them more or less in order, I think; this time I think I'll read the poem first and then everything else in order.

Read the poem only, then stop

# ¿ Aug 12, 2016 05:20

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zembla

Despite the ultimate entry, note the penultimate.

But even there, of course, that's *new* Zembla.

And even then,

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novaya_Zemlya_effect

And don't forget https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prisoner_of_Zenda

This work is fractal.

Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 18:17 on Aug 12, 2016

# ¿ Aug 12, 2016 17:52

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

Ok who's readin this and who was just frontin'

# ¿ Aug 19, 2016 04:40

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

We need noms for next.month
Ideally I'd like to alternate in some lighter fare, maybe something free or out of copyright.

# ¿ Aug 21, 2016 23:59

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 09:31

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

Zorodius posted:

Speaking of crazy: Nabokov really didn't show an accurate picture of mental illness, did he? Someone mentioned the unrealistic 1950s stereotype of a homosexual, and I think you could say the same for psychosis in Pale Fire.

In his Lectures on Literature, one of the things he talks about -- especially as regards to Jane Austen and Dickens -- is that he believed "great authors" create(d) their own reality within the world of their works; i.e., what matters isn't whether or not upper class British women of Austen's era acted and thought and behaved the way she describes them, but rather the fact that when you are reading an Austen novel, you are within Austen's reality.

So i suspect that Nabokov wasn't so concerned with "realistically" depicting homosexuality or mental illness, as he was with beautifully depicting. Of course, to a modern reader, that may result in jarring notes. . .

mcustic posted:

Herman Hesse's Siddhartha? I'm always up for a reread of that one. It's on Gutenberg, as well.

Good call.

# ¿ Aug 30, 2016 20:49

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > TBB BotM August: PALE FIRE by Vladimir Nabokov