Pale Fire

Pale Fire is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, published in 1962. It is presented as a poem of nine hundred and ninety-nine lines, written in heroic couplets and divided into four cantos, and attributed to a fictional poet called John Francis Shade.

Shade is described as an obsessively methodical man, and the poem is supposed to have been composed during the last twenty days of his life. The novel is not the poem alone: it carries a foreword, a lengthy commentary and an index written by Shade's neighbour and academic colleague, Charles Kinbote.

Those surrounding parts make a narrative of their own, and both of the fictional authors end up as central characters in it. Nabokov wrote the book in 1960 and 1961, after the success of Lolita had made him financially independent and allowed him to retire from teaching and return to Europe.

It was begun in Nice and completed in Montreux, and it is built out of parts that are meant to be read against one another rather than in sequence.