Pale Fire

<p>The American poet John Shade is dead; murdered. His last poem Pale Fire is put into a book together with a preface a lengthy commentary and notes by Shade's editor Charles Kinbote. Known on campus as the 'Great Beaver' Kinbote is haughty inquisitive intolerant but is he also mad bad - and even dangerous? As his wildly eccentric annotations slide into the personal and the fantastical Kinbote reveals perhaps more than he should. <br><br>Nabokov's darkly witty richly inventive masterwork is a suspenseful whodunit a story of one-upmanship and dubious penmanship and a glorious literary conundrum.</p> 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 <p>The American poet John Shade is dead; murdered. His last poem Pale Fire is put into a book together with a preface a lengthy commentary and notes by Shade's editor Charles Kinbote. Known on campus as the 'Great Beaver' Kinbote is haughty inquisitive intolerant but is he also mad bad - and even dangerous? As his wildly eccentric annotations slide into the personal and the fantastical Kinbote reveals perhaps more than he should. <br><br>Nabokov's darkly witty richly inventive masterwork is a suspenseful whodunit a story of one-upmanship and dubious penmanship and a glorious literary conundrum.</p>