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PALE FIRE by Vladimir Nabokov


jaedmc

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Sorry you didn't enjoy it Jingus.  My main worry coming into this was that Pale Fire's appeal may be a bit narrow, at least compared to the previous two book club books.  Thanks for at least giving it a shot.  Also you remind me that I need to get around to reading House of Leaves one of these days.

 

That is a very intriguing analysis tim.  I checked around online a few days ago to double check to see if how I interpreted some things wasn't completely off the ball and was stunned to see how many theories there are out there about what is real, what isn't and just who everyone is.  Again I'm not sure I'd go as far to endorse any of them, but that linked one does do a good job of explaining exactly why that person sees the work that way.

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Also you remind me that I need to get around to reading House of Leaves one of these days.

I think that poor Mark Z. Danielewski is one of those one-and-done authors who produce one shining masterpiece and then spend the rest of their lives living in its shadow.  Everything else he's written since then, well... poor fella.  It all looks like unreadable bullshit, the kind of books which are only ever owned by people who started as English majors and did not stop with just one college degree.  But; House of Leaves is an unmitigated work of exploding genius.  This one book kinda-sorta invented the entire Creepy Pasta style of modern reality-bending literary horror, AND bizarrely predicted the idea of a found-footage horror movie when nothing but Cannibal Holocaust and Man Bites Dog were doing that gimmick.
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Yeah, I've kinda tapped out as well. Maybe it was the format (I had an ePub version when maybe it would have been better reading it as a physical book), but I just struggled to get into it. I was about 45% through, but failed miserably. Whilst I know they are different books, I fairly rocketed through the last one, so it is a bit of a shame. Still, worth exposing myself to other stuff outside of my comfort zone.

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And oh yeah, 

 

Sorry you didn't enjoy it Jingus.

 

No need to apologize, dude.  The whole point of this club: 

 

 

Still, worth exposing myself to other stuff outside of my comfort zone.

 

I have no problem with you picking it.  (There's plenty of damn fine books which I never would've read if school hadn't forced them upon me, stuff like Candide or Jane Eyre or Grendel, which are good enough to make all the unreadable bullshit along the lines of Tess of the D'Urbervilles or Anything Hawthorne Ever worth wasting my time on.)  My problem lies with Nabokov writing it.  

 

And, addendum: is there anything in the world that is whinier than an artist complaining about critics?  Aside from literal babies who are bawling for their mommy's teat, I mean.  I might come at this subject differently than most artists because I've wanted to be both a producer and a critic of multiple narrative artforms, but it does seem to me that the majority of artist-on-critic bashing tends to be in the vein of those dumbass wrestlers who say "the internet marks don't know anything, they've never taken a bump in their life".  WAY too many writers, filmmakers, musicians, etc. seem to be living under the assumption that every single person who dares to rate the work in their industry is some combination of Waldorf & Statler heckling from the balcony and that one insanely unpleasable food critic in Ratatouille.  That they're both actively malignant towards the broad spectrum of all the work they're grading, and also criminally undereducated or misguided on the subject which they write about.  (I'm thinking of Lady in the Water here in a big bad way.)  Not all artists are like that, there's plenty of guys from Kevin Smith to CM Punk who totally understand the point of having critics in the first place, but man I get sick of listening to performers make the same vague generic gripes about a critical minority that they clearly don't know jack shit about in the first place.  Not saying Pale Fire itself is a definitive example of that (it'd be unfair to judge without having, y'know, finished the damn thing) but at times it felt like it was heading in that direction.

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