Despair – 4/5 Literature is full of doubles. Whether this means the concept of foil characters who are designed to offset the lead character by contrast like Tybalt to Romeo or Fortinbras to Hamlet, twins and twinning, chiastic structures, repetitions in actions and plot, cycles of violence etc, or like literal doubles. In most of these stories where are actual double occurs we will get something like Mr Hyde as shadow-self to Dr Jeckyll or a trickster figure like in Dostoyevsky’s The Double and the […]

Pale Fire Pale Fire remains one of the funniest and most impressive books I’ve ever read, and for me is Nabokov’s absolute masterpiece, especially in English. The book begins with a brief introduction from one of our two narrators, Charles Kinbote. Charles Kinbote is a professor and in this book will be editing the long poem of his colleague John Shade. John Shade, also a professor, has recently died and left a poem in intricately ordered index cards. We come to understand that Kinbote has […]