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Don't be terrified of Pale Fire
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Re: Don't be terrified of Pale Fire
#12I love seeing anything Nabokov related pop-up here; all of his books are lessons in how powerful fictional characters can be when crafted well. Read all of his books as soon as you can!
Re: Don't be terrified of Pale Fire
#13[flagged]
According to the Cambridge English Dictionary:
> refrain, n. a short part of a song or poem that is repeated, esp. at the end of each longer part, or any phrase that is often repeated
Verbing nouns is a very common feature of the English language.
Re: Don't be terrified of Pale Fire
#14[flagged]
"Repeat as a refrain" I assume. What do you think "refrained" means?
Re: Don't be terrified of Pale Fire
#15Is this a "Bookworm's book?"
Much like a "skier's mountain" or a "band's band," is this the kind of book that only appeals to a narrow audience that likes to pick apart the mechanics of a book?
Or is this a book like Harry Potter, which was panned by the critics, but otherwise is awesome popular fiction?
Re: Don't be terrified of Pale Fire
#16It's a good book that I've read a couple of times but a tiring one. Nabokov puts so many traps and misdirections in it that it becomes a cryptic crossword in a distant language. He is a very smart and clever guy and never tires of reminding the reader of it. He lampoons academia while enabling many an academic career in the process. There are professors aplenty specializing in Nabokov and some in Pale Fire itself.
For s&g I read "Nabokov's Pale Fire : The Magic of Artistic Discovery" by Brian Boyd, one of the aforementioned. It was interesting at first to see how literary criticsm and analysis work but eventually I had a Shatner moment.
Re: Don't be terrified of Pale Fire
#17I have not yet read Pale Fire, but I loved Lolita and hope to read it soon. Nabokov's writing is so rich, the writing itself (aside from the story!) is worth lingering over and savoring. I've only found a few other writers with a similar quality - Proust, Milton, perhaps Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison. Does anyone know of authors with a similar property? I'm not even sure what to call it, so it's difficult to search for.
Re: Don't be terrified of Pale Fire
#18[flagged]
According to the Cambridge English Dictionary: > refrain, n. a short part of a song or poem that is repeated, esp. at the end of each longer part, or any phrase that is often repeated Verbing nouns is a very common feature of the English language.
That's true but in this case the noun and verb forms of refrain have distinct meanings and come into English from different sources:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/refrain#word-hist...
It's don't think I've ever read refrained used this way. I wonder if she was thinking "reframed"?
Re: Don't be terrified of Pale Fire
#19If you are going to read Pale Fire, get it on paper. I tried to read it on my Kindle and the UI is not up to task of lots of flipping back and forth between the poem and the prose sections.
I can't imagine trying to manage this on an e-reader. If the notes popped up in a window over the text it would be an ideal way to experience the book, but every epub reader I've ever used makes jumping around a pain and I have a really hard time even hitting the index links on a touchscreen.
Re: Don't be terrified of Pale Fire
#20This is hilarious. I bought the book after watching Blade Runner 2049. There's a scene where some of book was being recited as part of the protagonist's anti-empathy test and I figured it had to have a deeper importance to the writers so I grabbed it on a whim. It's been sitting on my shelf. Now I'll have to move it up the list after seeing this.