Title: Pale Fire
Author: Vladimir Nabokov
Rating: 10/10
A strange and beautiful book, like a rare and perfect pearl, and yet strangely un-pearl-like, which must be very hard to polish? Yes. Yes. This is a book which, once it catches your attention, it is difficult to forget. It demands to be talked about and thought about, like no other book I know of.
And yet the more you think about it the more baffling, and the more “pearl-like,” the whole book appears.
I am not sure that you can explain this, but I will try. The great “pearl” of the book, the pearl which it demands to be remembered and thought about, is not any one of the hundreds or thousands of pages: it is the whole “book” as a whole, the shape of the whole, its unique “aura,” the way the book makes you feel on a deep, intuitive level that you must discuss it, that you cannot “take the book” or even read it in any ordinary sense — you can only look into its aura, you must hold and examine it in a very particular way, the way one examines a gemstone.
For example, just looking at it, I can make the distinction between the “book” (its shape and its unique aura) and the individual text. The text may be very long — but the aura is inescapably different.
The text does not “go on” (the way a book does), it breaks up. It never really does what it says on the tin; it doesn’t “conclude.” It does not form one clear “argument,” it does not have one “claim” and one “corollary” to back it up. It doesn’t “say one thing and prove it” to any great degree: it says a thousand things and proves only the most tentative and peripheral ones. One of its great virtues is that it makes you question and think about what it’s saying, and the questions it raises tend to be difficult questions — not questions with easy “answers.”
And yet if you’re used to thinking of books as a “conclusion” — as containing an “argument” and one “corollary” — you must ask yourself what it even means to “conclude” it, since it is very far from having an “argument” or “conclusion” at all. And indeed, there is almost no explicit argument to be found: the “conclusion” is implied throughout the book, and can be inferred, but the “conclusion” is not really an explicit part of the structure of the book’s “bookness” — it is part of its “aura” which is like the “aura” of some rare and beautiful piece of music (or of a person)
……
Pale Fire reads like a series of “tweets” and “replies” and “retweets.” The book consists of a series of poems, “discussed” by “others” — usually in very brief, rapid-fire, seemingly casual exchanges, the way one tweets. And yet, even in these little “conversations,” each of the “tweetees” has a unique voice, a unique “aura,” and together they make up a large whole, which is as much one “person” in conversation as it is one “person” in conversation with another “person.”
This leads to a curious difficulty in reading the book. Because each of the “tweetees” is a “person” in conversation with one another, the book has no “center.” There is no one person who “is the author” (as in other famous books, like Infinite Jest). The whole “book” is, as I said earlier, a “pearl.” There is no one “person” who is doing most of the “tweeting.” There are multiple tweeters, and each of them “tweets” in conversation with the others, even while other tweeters are “talking” to them — so that, even though there is a “center,” it is a center without a core, or a center which shifts around in response to other centers.
And yet there is one central “topic” of conversation throughout the “book.” It is the contrasting of two “poets,” “Andrew Marvell” and “Wallace Stevens,” which runs through each of the book’s many conversations. The contrast is, in part, between “tweeting” styles. The contrast is, in part, between “contemporary poetic norms” and “medieval poetic norms” — between a “conventional,” “standardized” poetry which is supposed to follow certain “rules” (the rules that Marvell adheres to), and a “non-conventional” “abstract” poetry (Wallace Stevens’ poetry) which does not follow any specific rules or “rules.” The contrast is also between the “conventional” and “abstract” forms of poetry which, in turn, contrast with the ways in which the two poets “tweet.” The difference between the two “tweeting styles” is that, while Marvell is supposed to write “conventional” poetry, his poems are written on the “left” side of the page in “left-handed” italics. Wallace Stevens, by contrast, is supposed to write “abstract” poetry. His poems are written on the “right” side of the page in “left-handed” italics, and they contain elaborate, long-winded verbal “commentaries” (“essays”) which are at odds with the “conventional” style of his poetry.
The contrasts of the two styles of poetry are, I feel, part of what makes the book so difficult to “read.” The contrasts are, first of all, between “conventional” styles and “non-conventional” ones, and so they’re hard to “tweet” in exactly the right “way” — especially to the degree that they’re “conversational,” to which both tweeters must respond “appropriately”
……
If you read the book without any awareness of these contrasts, then it is just like a normal book, which means that the aura it has is just like any other book. There are good, mediocre, and bad parts of the book, no more different from Finnegan’s Wake than from a novel one person finds enjoyable and the same person finds dull. The “aura” of the whole book, in other words, is something that is always there in all books — something like the “aura” which distinguishes a truly good book from a merely good book, or from a merely good one which one can take pleasure in, or from a merely good book which is too familiar to be truly enjoyable.
But if you read the book with this awareness, and in light of the central contrast of the two poets, then you see that the book is a series of conversations which are all “saying something different about the contrast.” And so, you realize that this is something which is unique to this book, which cannot really be compared with anything else. And you cannot “take the book” in any ordinary way. You just can’t “take it” at
Excellent analysis Frank. What made you interested in reviewing Pale Fire?

















