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Zusatztext "This centaur-work, half poem, half prose…is a creation of perfect beauty, symmetry, strangeness, originality and moral truth. Pretending to be a curio, it cannot disguise the fact that it is one of the great works of art of this century." —Mary McCarthy, The New Republic "As a literary tour de force it surpasses anything else Mr. Nabokov has done." — Atlantic Monthly "Scintillating, brilliantly inventive…[ Pale Fire ] has almost as many layers of meaning as an artichoke has petals." — Commonwealth "Of all [Nabokov's] inventions, Pale Fire is the wildest, the funniest and the most earnest. It is like nothing on God's earth." — New York Herald Tribune "A monstrous, witty, intricately entertaining work . . . done with dazzling skill." — Time "Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically." —John Updike Informationen zum Autor Vladimir Nabokov; Introduction by Richard Rorty Klappentext The urbane authority that Vladimir Nabokov brought to every word he ever wrote, and the ironic amusement he cultivated in response to being uprooted and politically exiled twice in his life, never found fuller expression than in Pale Fire published in 1962 after the critical and popular success of Lolita had made him an international literary figure. An ingeniously constructed parody of detective fiction and learned commentary, Pale Fire offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures, at the center of which is a 999-line poem written by the literary genius John Shade just before his death. Surrounding the poem is a foreword and commentary by the demented scholar Charles Kinbote, who interweaves adoring literary analysis with the fantastical tale of an assassin from the land of Zembla in pursuit of a deposed king. Brilliantly constructed and wildly inventive, this darkly witty novel of suspense, literary one-upmanship, and political intrigue achieves that rarest of things in literature-perfect tragicomic balance. With an introduction by Richard Rorty. INTRODUCUTION by Richard Rorty [WARNING: this Introduction not only gives away the plot of Pale Fire , but presumes to describe the reader’s reactions in the course of a first reading of the book – reactions which will not occur if the Introduction is read first. The first-time reader may wish to postpone the Introduction until he or she has finished the Index.] The imagination, Wallace Stevens said, is the mind pressing back against reality. But it is in the interest of reality – that is to say, of the imagination of the dead – to insist that no further pressure is needed: that the imagination of the living can do nothing save reiterate lessons previously learned, instantiate previously known truths. Judicious reviewers must presuppose that nothing genuinely new can be written, for only on that assumption are they in a position to judge, and in no danger of being judged by, the book they are reviewing. Like the judicious reviewer, the common reader is made nervous by books that are insufficiently like the books he or she has read in the past. Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) wrote books which were not much like anybody else’s, and they rarely got good reviews. Most reviewers echoed Dr Johnson’s dictum that nothing odd can last, and proceeded to diagnose Nabokov’s oddities as signs of his egoistical disdain for reality, a disdain which cloaked his inability to imitate reality convincingly. Simon Raven, reviewing Pale Fire on its publication in 1962, said that it was ‘not a novel, but a blueprint’. Saul Maloff’s review explained that ‘the novelist’s immemorial purpose and justification’ was ‘to create a world’, and that Nabokov had created only ‘a constellation of elegant and marvelous bibelots , an art which is minor by definition’. Reviewer after reviewer conceded Nabokov’s skill while de...
