The Lost Glove is Happy

That’s a quote from Pale Fire, by Nabokov, it’s Luca’s book offering this week, and I was so glad he’s reading it, that I decided to read it again. It’s considered one of his best novels. I read it so long ago that I only have vague impressions of the story—I’m looking forward to reading it again. My memory is that it’s about a writer and academic named John Shade who has written a sprawling, beautiful poem called Pale Fire that alludes to the death of his daughter and other memories and losses in life. At the beginning of the book, the writer has just died, and we are left with the poem and an interpretation of it and of Shade’s life and intentions that are written by his neighbor, Charles Kinbote. You start to realize pretty quickly that Kinbote is a very unreliable narrator, who presents himself as the exiled king of the fictional country of Zembla. Kinbote hijacks the poem to serve his own purposes. If you’ve read anything by Nabokov, you will be able to imagine how deftly he moves between the two writers and how good he is at creating a pretty creepy character in Kinbote. If you’ve read anything by Nabokov and you liked it, you’ve probably read this one. And if you haven’t read this one, I recommend it. ;)