Pale Fire
Vladimir Nabokov(1962)
Extract
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain by the false azure in the windowpane.
A 999-line poem in heroic couplets, composed by a recently murdered American poet, is presented with a foreword, commentary, and index by a scholarly neighbour whose annotations gradually reveal an entirely different story. Vladimir Nabokov's 1962 novel is a puzzle box, a literary hall of mirrors, and a meditation on the way readers colonize the texts they love. Charles Kinbote, the deranged commentator, hijacks John Shade's gentle, grieving poem about the loss of a daughter and transforms it into evidence of his own royal fantasy. The comedy is ferocious and the pathos real, because beneath the game lies a question about whether any reading is anything other than a magnificent, self-serving distortion.
If you loved this
Nabokov's other masterpiece of an unreliable narrator who builds an elaborate prison from beautiful sentences.
Calvino plays the same game of a novel that keeps interrupting itself, but with more warmth and less madness.
Cervantes invented the trick of a character who remakes reality through delusion, and Kinbote is his heir.