Jenkins's edition offers the delights of "Hamlet" and the delights of a "Pale Fire -like novel about "Hamlet" scholars.
Her inclusion of a "Pale Fire -like commentary by a German sociologist seems unnecessary, given the ease with which her exuberant narration evokes her likable protagonist's world.
Even without the marvels of the novel "Pale Fire," the poem "Pale Fire" is a little novel in itself.
She corrected "Speak, Memory" in German, "Strong Opinions" in French, Nabokov's poetry in Italian, and then undertook a translation of "Pale Fire" into Russian after her husband's death.
Although he spotted and supported Nabokov's talent early, he found "Lolita" distasteful — "Nasty subjects may make fine books; but I don't feel you have got away with this," he wrote to Nabokov, who was in despair about finding a publisher — and "Pale Fire" made him irritable.
Phillips's own recent novel, the at once technically virtuosic and humanly moving "The Tragedy of Arthur," takes the form of an introduction to a newly discovered Shakespeare play (and includes the text of the play itself), and is clearly a descendant of "Pale Fire".
At first, you think that maybe Klinger's book is not actually an annotated edition of "Dracula" but, rather, like Nabokov's "Pale Fire," a novel about a paranoid, in the form of an annotated edition.
The lines come from Nabokov's "Pale Fire," a novel that wraps a poem inside a commentary.
(In either case, Dyer is giving a performance, and it's another Russian genius who presides over his book, namely Vladimir Nabokov, who contrived with "Pale Fire" a novel composed of a poem and its unhinged commentary).
"Pale Fire" is a voice within a voice — a mirrored and thoroughly modern sensibility.
It is this imbalance that a new edition of "Pale Fire" seeks to redress.
