Pale Fire: Introduction by Richard Rorty

I was prepared for this to be complex, multi-layered, dense and allusive, which it is. What I didn't expect was that it would be quite so funny. Kinbote is a hilariously pompous buffoon to rank alongside Ignatius J. Reilly, although he also, particularly at the end, displays glimmerings of self-awareness which turn him into a rather tragic figure.It's like a house of mirrors which defies attempts to establish who or what is "real". The wikipedia page lists any number of theories as to which characters are aliases or aspects of others, which is fascinating but, I feel, misses the point: the book is satirising critics and their over-elaborate analyses.By the way, Mary McCarthy's painfully pretentious introduction almost put me off reading it at all, but afterwards I found out that she was a noted satirist in her own right - maybe her introduction is part of the joke...?

Can't remember what the exact quality the seller said, but I think it was a little over stated. It's got all the pages, but they are dogeared in places and the cover is bent. It was cheap, so not over priced as such.Book is a masterpiece. We're not here to write a book review though.

PALE FIRE explores the wayward mind of Charles Kinbote, a man brimming with outrageous delusions.Firstly, he believes himself to be the exiled King of Zembla (Zembla being a "distant northern land" in the vain of Hyperborea or, say, Avalon).Secondly, Kinbote is obsessed with an old poet named John Shade, who just happens to live across the street near the college campus, and it's with Shade's latest and last poem that the novel begins, a poem which Kinote utterly misinterprets as being about his life in the kingdom of Zembla and his daring escape to America from a plot to assassinate him.The result of all this delusion is a humorous, puzzling, and elegantly imaginative account of one man's insanity, a madness that turns out to be strangely endearing, and which during its exposure invites the reader to decipher the truth of what really happened.Concisely extravagant and weirdly exotic - some say Nabokov's finest novel, some may be perturbed by the foibles of the writer - overall an intriguing mix of fantasy and reality, truth and lies.

Not the same cover as advertised but my partner is happy with it non the less. It is a good read, I really liked the cover shown so personally I am disappointed as it is misleading advertising.

Thankfully, this edition does not contain Mary McCarthy's essay as an "introduction".I will never forget the students' puzzlement and annoyance when they unwittingly read the essay which was tucked in as an intro in the Penguin paperback editions many years ago. Of course, nobody warned them not to read it before reading Kinbote's Foreword, Shade's Poem, Kinbote's Commentary and Index!