/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.15584821]

Is Pale Fire a good poem?

[Anonymous No.15584842]

>Shade, John. Dislike him. A formidable mediocrity.

guess not

[Anonymous No.15584939]

No. Pale Fire is a terrible book in general.
English Majors tout it as good fiction because FOR them it is great since you can probably write a million papers on pale fire alone and the book seems to have been written for that purpose alone.
Terrible, absolutely terrible. Nabokov is a one hit wonder with Lolita desu.

[Anonymous No.15584970]

i thought the poem was very bad but i kind of expected it was meant to be that way

[Anonymous No.15584989]

>>15584939
Yeah I also didn't like it at all

[Anonymous No.15585094]

I didn't even read the poem...just the commentary. I really struggled with deciding if I should read the book the way the beginning of the book says to (to read the poem, then the commentary, then the poem again), and I ended up just saying fuck that.

[Anonymous No.15585318]

>>15585094
>He fell for the "in game" LARP

[Anonymous No.15585344]

Pale Fire is a great book, just keep POMO in mind and appreciate the characters.
Think of it as a narrative battle between two stories that Nabokov is weaving while he twists the confines of what a novel can be. There are some great moments in Pale Fire
The poem is good, its meant to tell a story; but it doesn't stand alone without the book, its incomplete without the commentary.

I would say to read the commentary and not the book is missing the point of Charles commentary and the way it impedes on John.

[Anonymous No.15585355]

I read the poem and skipped the commentary.
10/10 book

[Anonymous No.15585359]

>>15585355
B-based?!

[Anonymous No.15585429]

no, it's really bad.

[Anonymous No.15585660]

>>15585344

Well did I know he could never resist a golden drop of this or that,
especially since he was severely rationed at home. With an inward leap
of exultation I relieved him of the large envelope that hampered his
movements as he descended the steps of the porch, sideways, like a
hesitating infant. We crossed the lawn, we crossed the road.
Clink-clank, came the horseshoe music from Mystery Lodge. In the large
envelope I carried I could feel the hard-cornered, rubberbanded batches
of index cards. We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few
written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of
thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We
take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of
brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history
of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction,
from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we
awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I
wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its
being readable (so I used to tell my students). Although I am capable,
through long dabbling in blue magic, of imitating any prose in the
world (but singularly enough not verse - I am a miserable rhymester), I
do not consider myself a true artist, save in one matter: I can do what
only a true artist can do - pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of
revelation, wean myself abruptly from the habit of things, see the web
of the world, and the warp and the weft of that web. Solemnly I weighed
in my hand what I was carrying under my left armpit, and for a moment,
I found myself enriched with an indescribable amazement as if informed
that fireflies were making decodable signals on behalf of stranded
spirits, or that a bat was writing a legible tale of torture in the
bruised and branded sky.

[Anonymous No.15585856]

the poem is not so great, except there are some nice pieces, but the book is good

[JN !!vXXhA/qzhjm No.15587559]

Pale Fire was a really risky book to write, because the whole concept is about some hack overshadowed by a great writer. So the poem has to be good enough that you can see the contrast between the two. Of course the quality of poetry is subjective, but under those circumstances, it's great. If he had just shit out some doggerel, it would have been a totally different book.

Most writers would have wussed out and described the poem secondhand, through other characters' reactions, like a Lovecraft monster.

My theory is that Nabokov was a crappy writer before getting serious, and he remembers the way he used to think. Shade and Kinbote are both stand-ins for the positive and negative sides of Nabokov's personality.