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BOYD, BRIAN. Nabokov's "Pale Fire": The Magic of Artistic Discovery. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Xii + 303 pp. $29.95.
It is difficult to imagine a closer reading of a literary text than Brian Boyd's Nabokov's "Pale Fire ": The Magic of Artistic Discovery. His analysis is particularly welcome in the context of contemporary criticism, with its often Kinbotean privileging of the critic or "theorist" over the creative artist. There are no such transgressions here; this book is all about Pale Fire and the artistic genius behind and within it. Throughout his career Nabokov always perceived a clear relationship between "the surprising weave of the world itself" (260), in Boyd's words, and the intricate texture of his fictional constructs. Boyd never loses sight of that link, even in the careful orchestration of his somewhat unorthodox thesis in the book's second half. During the course of his argument Boyd, as he himself points out, returns again and again to key passages from the novel, each time unveiling additional implications, as if he is examining a precious jewel with an infinite number of facets. He also repeatedly re-summarizes key points that he has made about the text. He explains the strategy with reference to a process of reading, rereading, and re-rereading necessary to an ever fuller comprehension of Nabokov's artistic design, which reflects the "complex, dense, and deceptive" (9) nature of the world itself. Boyd's subtitle echoes Karl Popper's Logic of Scientific Discovery, and his method is largely shaped by Popper's theories on the nature of discovery, especially the notion that the process is endless, with each new theory being challenged and often overthrown by another one. This approach, Boyd finds, is appropriate to a text like Pale Fire, which contains layer after layer of "problems" to be solved by the reader, with each new reading requiring greater ingenuity and concentration. Indeed, "the thrill of discovery" (13) animates Nabokov's "Pale Fire", giving it something of the feel of a detective novel; we cannot help but press on, turning the pages, anxious to discover Boyd's "solutions" to the problems of the text, to compare them with our own, and frequently to revise and adjust our understanding of the novel, achieving the kind of "combinational delight"' that...