The Next Nabokov Controversy?
Like a lot of literary snobs, my favorite Nabokov book is not “Lolita” but “Pale Fire.” There’s a longstanding disagreement among Nabokov fans about the eponymous 999-line poem at the center of “Pale”: Can the poem be taken seriously as literature by itself or is it inseparable from the annotative footnotes (putatively by the madman who stole the manuscript of the verse) that form the rest of the novel? This fall, a publisher is releasing a freestanding version of the poem – as a book-cum-objet d’art – that’s certain to reignite the controversy.
PALE FIRE is my very favorite Nabokov–in fact, it’s one of my favorite English-language novels of all. I think the poem is meant to be *just* good enough to pass as a decent poem–NOT a masterpiece. The book is, in part, all about mediocrity. I can’t really see publishing the poem separately.