Elderly John Shade is a great American poet who is befriended by a new
neighbor, our narrator, the preposterous Charles Kinbote. Preposterous
because he is the new professor at Wordsmith College,where both men
teach, who claims to be from Zembla, a fabulously improbable northern
European kingdom in close proximity to Russia.
In the Foreword, Kinbote expresses his regret at John Shade’s recent,
tragic passing, and also his great honor is providing commentary to the
great man’s epic unfinished poem, posthumously published. Indeed,
he sees himself as the only one capable of doing so with any faculty.
What follows is the poem itself, so rich, modern and ancient in its own
way that we are absorbed completely into it. We are also absorbed
with curiousity about Shade, as the poem
is intriguingly autobiographical, describing his love for his wife, his
daughter’s suicide, and his own mystical revelation in the course of a
near-death experience.
The intelligent commentary and illuminating scholarship we seek by the
time we reach the unfinished end of the (fictional?) poem contrasts
sharply with what we are actually given; Kinbote takes the entire
thing as an allusion to himself, and the strange tale of his life, on
which he’s stuck, like a dingleberry on a furry butt. The analogy is
crude but apt in terms of the reader’s feelings towards this pompous
meglomaniac, butting in on the depth of Shade. [. . .]
ABOUT
THIS BLOG
A BLOG FOR WRITERS AND OTHER SERIOUS LIT GEEKS
INTERESTED IN THE CRAFT AND MECHANICS OF FICTION--WRITTEN BY ME, SUSAN
DEFREITAS, WRITER, EDITOR AND MULTIMEDIA ARTIST.