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Pale Fire

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Pale Fire

Written by: Vladimir Nabokov
Narrated by: Marc Vietor, Robert Blumenfeld
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About this listen

A 999 line poem in heroic couplets, divided into 4 cantos, was composed - according to Nabokov's fiction - by John Francis Shade, an obsessively methodical man, during the last 20 days of his life.

©1962 Vera Nabokov and Dmitri Nabokov (P)2010 Audible, Inc Classics Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction

What the critics say

"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, The New Republic)

"Of all [Nabokov's] inventions, Pale Fire is the wildest, the funniest and the most earnest. It is like nothing on God's earth." (New York Herald Tribune)

"A monstrous, witty, intricately entertaining work . . . done with dazzling skill." (Time)

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I didnt mind re-reading it 3 times!

oh I guess I LISTENED to it 3 times. #Audible1
this is a crazy book and as soon as I begin to understand it, I realize I have not understood it and want to keep listening to it until theres no more questions left. however, I don't think that's possible.
The narration was also very good although I listened to it at a little slower speed, I'm not sure why I made that choice but I stuck with it.

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You’ve got to be kidding me, right?

This book is a spoof, a satire and a parody of a complex novel. The 999 line poem in couplets could’ve been written by an undergraduate English student in a creative writing class, perhaps, and I wish those who try analyzing it all the best! The commentary by a completely unreliable, narcissistic, and jealous narrator and madman might be interesting to try to mine for meaning, but why? This book seems to be adored by the very academic intellectuals that Nabokov was mocking with it. He was a remarkable writer, no doubt, and I suppose this novel takes postmodernism to the extreme and I such it’s interesting,
At least some.

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