September 16, 2010

Rohit Reviews: Pale Fire

We who burrow in filth every day may be forgiven perhaps the one sin that ends all sins.
—Charles Kinbote

Having only very recently returned to the literary world after an absence that is as staggering as it is embarrassing, I have finally achieved a pace of reading that I once maintained for years on end. (But we shall see how long this lofty pace shall last; I am, as you all well know, no stranger to all-consuming failure.) Today I review Pale Fire, the heavily analyzed and criticized 1962 novel by Vladimir Nabokov. This is the third Nabokov novel I have completed, though the first I have reviewed. The other two—the immaculate Lolita and the intensely dark Despair—I completed before I had taken to writing about books on this most dreary and dreadful of sites.