Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

Readers who encountered Pale Fire when it was first published in 1962 no doubt marveled over its unrelenting cleverness. Here was a novel that was as smartly structured as a chess problem, as tightly written as one of those arcane crossword puzzles for professional lexicons. Only a spoilsport—in this instance, Trotskyite-turned- anarchist critic Dwight …