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Publisher: Vintage

Author: Vladimir Nabokov

ISBN: 9780679723424

Classics, Fiction

Pale Fire by
Vladimir Nabokov

- +

$ 400.00 mxn

Pale Fire by

Vladimir Nabokov

Reviews

""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

Summary

A darkly comic novel of suspense, literary idolatry and one-upmanship, and political intrigue from one of the leading writers of the twentieth century, the acclaimed author of Lolita.

The American poet John Shade is dead. His last poem, 'Pale Fire', is put into a book, together with a preface, a lengthy commentary and notes by Shade's editor, Charles Kinbote. Known on campus as the 'Great Beaver', Kinbote is haughty, inquisitive, intolerant, but is he also mad, bad - and even dangerous? As his wildly eccentric annotations slide into the personal and the fantastical, Kinbote reveals perhaps more than he should be.

Nabokov's darkly witty, richly inventive masterpiece is a suspenseful whodunit, a story of one-upmanship and dubious penmanship, and a glorious literary conundrum.

“To a man born without conscience, a soul-stricken man must seem ridiculous. To a criminal, honesty is foolish. You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.”

John Steinbeck

“I knew when I had looked for a long time that I had hardly begun to see.”

Nan Shepard

“What a mistake, above all, it had been to believe that I couldn’t live without him, when for a long time I had not been at all certain that I was alive with him.”

Elena Ferrante

“Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.”

George Orwell

“How short a time a person had to be alive, he thought. How long to be dead.”

Kate Grenville