pale fire

[illuvium]

so! i've recently been reading pale fire, and while i'm not terribly far into it (about 60 or so lines in with the accompanying annotations), i'm getting the feeling that this will be a book that makes my list of favorites. i'm really enamoured with the protagonist (which feels like the wrong word to use for a situation like this one given that it's an experimental format). i usually like egotistical characters given that they'll usually have more to them than just that facade, but honestly, i don't entirely know in this case. again, i'm not that far in, so my opinions are stc, etc etc. out of the three books i've read by nabokov, i think i like this one best so far. the narrator's insistence that his ideas are glorious and that he's been carefully feeding the poet, shade, his ideas so that shade can incorporate it into the poem from the first half of the book made me really amused and honestly reminds me of me prodding some of my friends to get into medias i enjoy so that i can hear their thoughts. on the other hand, i also do not stalk my friends and would prefer to imagine myself as someone relatively well-adjusted, so that comparison shouldn't be read into that much. another thing i really liked in kinbote was his penchant for describing himself and shade with way too much detail while he leaves sybil's (john's wife) description at a mere sentence or two. he's the kind of protagonist you're pretty much designed to criticize, i think, which i like!! i love seeing narrators who are pretty terrible or uptight people knowing the author intentionally designed them that way. i'm not quite sure if i've mentioned it before here, but that's one of the reasons i really tend to shy away from a lot of ya novels nowadays; the narrators are very unlikable to me and their personalities are insufferable but you can tell the author intends for you to like them. i guess i like it most when i can tell the author actually put thought into developing the character for the reader's perspective, which i mean, is something authors tend to do by virtue of wanting their books to sell but usually suck at.