Word: paled
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...PALE FIRE (315 pp.)-Vladimir Nabokov-Putnam...
From the entrance, the cathedral's dominant characteristic is simplicity. The ten pale grey, angled walls visible from the entrance are bare except for a simply inscribed rectangular Tablet of the Word on each of them. No windows can be seen, but the entire nave-from the dark marble floor to the fanlike tracery of the roof-is drenched with a multicolored light that draws the eye toward the altar and the huge Graham Sutherland tapestry (in color, opposite) that covers the north wall behind it. From the altar, the source of light is suddenly, almost theatrically apparent...
Here Nabokov becomes more poet than stuntman; the elegy Pale Fire has a lean grace and clarity of emotion worthy of a writer who is ranked, as Shade is supposed to be, only a step behind Robert Frost...
...acknowledgment as the cleverest writer is a touchy business, a little like becoming Pope - one must not campaign for the election. Readers of Nabokov's new book, which is surely the most eccentric novel published in this decade, have considerable reason to feel that the author is campaigning. Pale Fire, like Lolita, is a monstrous, witty, intricately entertaining work whose verbal agility is often bewildering. But unlike the earlier book, Pale Fire does not really cohere as a satire; good as it is, the novel in the end seems to be mostly an exercise in agility - or perhaps...
...seems possible that Pale Fire is a wonderfully funny trap for symbol simons, sex searchers and Ph.D. postulants...