Cannonball Read 3 - Review #2 - Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

I've said it before, but Lolita is one of my all-time favorite novels. I've heard people say that it's the kind of book English majors love, which, you've got me. I like it because Nabokov can really, REALLY write, and he also makes a disgusting pedophile and sociopath into a sad, almost sympathetic character. That is some skill. So I decided to try another of his novels, and I picked up Pale Fire. The premise interested me. It starts off with a 999 poem in four cantos by the fictional poet John Shade, shortly after his death. Then the rest of the book is a commentary written by his friend and neighbor, Dr. Charles Kinbote. I mean, you can't say the idea isn't original. Nabokov wrote a 999-line autobiographical poem of a fictional man, and then wrote another 230 pages or so of commentary from the perspective of a truly weird and creepy admirer. However, Kinbote, the man writing about the poem, is a weird duck. He spends most of the time commenting not on John Shade's poem about his life, but on three things: the story of the exiled King of Zembla, (the King of where? Exactly.), the story of the King's hired assassin, and then Kinbote's own perspective on his friendship with the poet John Shade. It's disjointed and weird, and although the book only clocks in at 301 pages, it took me a damn long time to get through. From the light research I did on its critical reception, I have gathered that it was met with mixed reviews. I certainly applaud Nabokov's creativity and effort, however it's a very strange and sometimes frustrating read. But the narrator is, in my opinion, most likely a lunatic, so perhaps that was Nabokov's plan after all. I'm going to read Nabokov's novel Ada at some point, so hopefully that will be more on the side of Lolita than Pale Fire.