Maybe tomorrow I’ll think this is cute. In the meantime, I trust no one named Vladimir. God help me if I dream about this… —Karissa Kilgore —Nabokov will play you, fool (Sugarpacket)
One of my students vents her frustration at being completely fooled during her first encounter with Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire.
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I’ve never taught the novel before, and I’m really looking forward to that discussion.
How’d I know you’d blog this…
But seriously, I’m holding you responsible for any literary nightmares I happen to experience for the rest of spring break. ;)
I dearly love that novel for the very way it undercuts and undercuts again my expectations. In fact, I’d go so far to call it one of the best novels of the 20th century, up there with Ulysses and Midnight’s Children and Beloved and Gravity’s Rainbow. It is, as Pynchon put it, a progressive knotting-into, and there are delights to find, fine things, at every level, and mysteries to solve. What does the ghost say? Who do we trust? What do we make of that key alliterative reference to Browning, and all those other language games?
Karissa’s got her finger on the key problem, which is one of trust. There is pleasure, though, I’ll argue, in reading mistrustfully, in reading skeptically. Or at least that’s what Vivian Darkbloom, of Lolita, might tell us.