Pale Fire

Pale Fire (1962) is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov. The novel is presented as a poem titled "Pale Fire" by John Shade, a fictional author, with an introduction and commentary by a fictional friend of his, Charles Kinbote. Together these elements form a narrative in which both authors are central characters.

Foreword

• The heating system was a farce, depending as it did on registers in the floor wherefrom the tepid exhalations of a throbbing and groaning basement furnace were transmitted to the rooms with the faintness of a moribund's last breath.

Pale Fire

• I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
  by the false azure in the windowpane;

• No free man needs a God; but was I free?

• What moment in that gradual decay

Does resurrection choose? What year?

Who has the stopwatch? Who rewinds the tape?

Are some less lucky, or do all escape?

A syllogism: other men die; but I

Am not another: therefore I'll not die.

• For we die every day; oblivion thrives

Not on dry thighbones but on blood-ripe lives,

And our best yesterdays are now foul piles

Of crumpled names, phone numbers and foxed files.

Commentary

• Solitude is the playfield of Satan.

• "You have hal..... real bad, chum."

• "What!" cried Bretwit in candid surprise, "They know at home that His Majesty has left Zembla?"

• We can at last describe his tie, an Easter gift from a dressy butcher, his brother in law in Onhava: imitation silk, colour chocolate brown barred with red, the end tucked into the shirt between the second and third buttons - a Zemblan fashion of the ninteen thirties.

• This brand of paper (used by macaroon makers) was not only digestible but delicious.

• "I certainly do speak Russian. You see, it was the fashionable language par excellence, much more than French, among the nobles of Zembla at least."

External links

• http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm (Official site of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society)