Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov (1962)

_Pale Fire_ opens with a waxwing dead against a windowpane, the first line of a 999-line poem John Shade wrote in the last weeks of his life. Then the poem ends, Shade is shot in his own garden, and the book hands itself to Charles Kinbote, the neighbour who claims the poem secretly tells his story: that he is the exiled king of a far northern land called Zembla. His foreword, his line-by-line commentary, even his index become the vehicle for a tale Shade never wrote and may never have heard. To read it you must flip between the elegy and the gloss, watching a grieving father's quiet poem about his drowned daughter get colonised by a lonely madman's gorgeous, impossible romance. Nabokov makes the act of reading itself the plot, and turns a set of footnotes into one of the funniest, saddest novels ever built. Shade is gone by the second page. What survives is the argument over what he meant.