What a funny book.
And by funny, I mean over the top homophobic.
Not that that should particularly bother me: plenty of great books in the world with objectionable politics. Here though, it feels more than anything like a missed opportunity. Lolita is a masterpiece rendering of the precious pain of a hopeless love that can never be legitimately requited… In picking a homosexual for his protagonist, Nabokov could have produced the same the same kind of story (given the era), but instead makes his narrator/commentator a bumbling bufoon, not disconcertingly sympathetic like HH but merely ridiculous in his desires. This of course sits a bit funny in our current queer-friendly era, but I can't imagine that even at the time, a stereotype this grotesque and one-note could really sustain a 300 page narative.
All that said, there are pleasures to be had, here. The sentences gleam like jewels, playful language dazzles and delights. That's the small scale — on the large scale, it's an compelling meditation on the relationship author, text and reader, though ultimately Nabokov takes the conservative (indeed, reactionary) position that anyone who "misreads" a poem is most likely a nut, an idiot, or both.
Ultimately, what wound up interesting me most about this text is the weird, almost spooky way it seems to predict Nabokov's own last work, The Original of Laura
. I mean, I guess not that weird — any working writer will probably have a work in progress at his death, just as John Shade does in Pale Fire. And it's not too shocking that it turns out Nabokov himself composed his rough drafts on index cards, just as he has the fictional Shade do. Still, it forms a weirdly prescient commentary on the controversy that came when N's posthumous novel was released… Would Nabokov see his own son and literary executor, Dmitri, as a latter day Kinbote? Was Pale Fire intended as a warning to those who would seek to publish him posthumously, or a good-humored acceptance of how things would inevitably go?
