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“We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable.��

I read Nabokov books at a remove �� they are magnificently constructed, but don’t lend themselves to an absorbed and maniacal flipping through. Imagine jogging freely. Now imagine jogging with 10-pound weights on each ankle. Nabokov is the second. Despite that all, his works are pleasant. I am genuinely curious about the plot, and I find myself in debate with him (or his protagonists) on every page. I thought Lolita was fantastic, and I enjoyed Pnin, though not as much as the former. Pale Fire is my favourite so far.

The feeling of moving through molasses may come because Nabokov doesn’t care whether you understand him or not. I am humbled over and over again, as I’m unable to read two paragraphs smoothly, without referring to the OED. You cannot even blame him for employing too many neologisms. He just knows what he’s doing and respects the reader enough to just plop it all down and make it his/her duty to figure it out. Does this make it slightly more difficult? For sure it does. But it’s also immensely rewarding, finding out definitions for such words as “svelte�� and “preterist��.

The structure of the book itself is a breath of fresh air. I have come to admit that I am a fan of experimental fiction, so I’ll try anything. When it’s so masterfully constructed, I can only stand back in awe. A poem in four cantos, dissected with overzealous detail by Kinbote, along with a foreword and index readymade. You flip back and forth between Pale Fire and its not-always-scholarly commentary, marvelling in the image that is forming. Confusing at first, made whole at the end. The poem itself is “meh�� at best. The commentary is something else.

Some of the lines of Pale Fire (the poem, not the book) made me exhale air out of my nostrils at a slightly more forceful pace than usual. I can’t say with any real zest that I had favourites. I did have some favourites from the commentary. Kinbote’s annotations for line 149 made me laugh when he was 5 pages in. I saw a familiar friend in line 172 and questioned the structure of life in line 230 (“how curious that our rationality feels satisfied when we plumb for the first explanation, though, actually, the scientific and the supernatural, the miracle of the muscle and the miracle of the mind, are both inexplicable��). I wasn’t even surprised by the audacity of notes on lines 680 and 929.

A true work of art. Bravo.