One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2000 My award for Novel of the Century goes to Nabokov's Pale Fire ...The book that prompted these reflections and confirmed me in my choice for Novel of the Century was Brian Boyd's remarkable, obsessive, delirious, devotional study.
Ron Rosenbaum, New York Observer It seems impossible for any scholar to write about Pale Fire, Nabokov's novel disguised as a poem and a pseudo-scholarly consideration of that poem, without appearing to be offering a mimicry of the great work. Nabokov's Pale Fire is no exception. Writing with an intensity that would suit Pale Fire's own narrators, Brian Boyd, a leading authority on Nabokov, gives an exquisitely detailed reading of the book and advances a new thesis about which fictional character (or characters) is supposed to have written the book.
Publishers Weekly Brian Boyd's strength as a critic ... is that his compendious knowledge of Nabokov's biography and writings, especially those in English, is matched by his level-headedness and attention to detail.
Catriona Kelly, Times Literary Supplement [Boyd] is far and away Nabokov's best-informed and most subtle critic... [He] bases his new interpretation on a staggering wealth of textual and extratextual detail and is clearly right on every major argument.
Choice A readable, elegantly written and witty guide through [the] process of discovery to which Nabokov himself invariably invites us, in what is arguably his finest novel.
Helen McLean, The Globe and Mail This critical study ... is not merely a brilliant search for the 'truth' of Pale Fire
it is also a study of the way we read texts and think about existence.
Irving Malin, Review of Contemporary Fiction [E]ye-opening... Boyd's singular reading ... suggests a novel that is in fact startlingly harmonious, one in which life and death blend in seamless unity.
Daniel Zalewski, New York Times Book Review Writing with an intensity that would suit Pale Fire's own narrators, Brian Boyd, a leading authority on Nabokov, gives an exquisitely detailed reading of the book.
Publishers Weekly This startling new theory is not only hard to refute
it makes it impossible for anyone to see Pale Fire under the same light... For the discoveries that lie ahead we are now indebted to Boyd's scrupulous research and pertinent interpretation. Nabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery is truly the essential companion/mode d'emploi to one of the greatest masterpieces of the 20th century.
Alexandre O. Philippe, Bloomsbury Review Boyd's Pale Fire will change how we read Nabokov's. Boyd brilliantly shows the intensity with which the three parts of the novel 'recall' one another... Above all, Nabokov's Pale Fire is a manifesto for close reading. There can be no better recommendation than that.
Eric Naiman, Slavic Review