It’s happened to me before, while stretching and rising in a cinema – shaking my head, rejecting the very spirit of what I’ve just seen, all the angrier because of how exquisitely it was pulled off. Sometimes you can’t fault the artist who has just been tormenting you; you can’t fault any part of their process because it is immaculate, because they’ve left nothing out of place.

I’m told the film Happiness acts in this way. And although I haven’t read Lolita – am dreading doing so even more than before taking up Pale Fire –it’s hopefully fair to say I'll be writing this review in a state of Nabokovian – what’s the opposite of reverie – anguish.

Pale Fire is a compact novel containing one completely beautiful late-modernist lyrical poem, in the tradition of Frost or Yeats, written by John Shade, and featuring the commentary of a detestable, lecherous madman, Charles Kinbote, set on destroying any joy you just garnered in reading it. I know this isn’t the traditional reading. When Pale Fire came out in 1962, no one was in the mood for:

• I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
• By the false azure in the windowpane;
• I was the smudge of ashen fluff – and I
• Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.

And no one had seen Perfect Blue a few dozen times, and Mark Z. Danielewski hadn’t even been born. No one was tired of the postmodern style because they were busy crafting it. This heart-tugging, curtain-rustling, cosy-as campfire poem in 999 lines, across four cantos, covers: the beauty of an Appalachian forest upbringing; reflections on being an ugly child; a love poem to a wife of 40 years; reflections on having an ugly daughter who perished in an icy lake; contemplation of what happens after death; and a fourth canto which I can only beg that you experience free from either Kinbote’s commentary or mine. I could live in this poem.

But the poem has never been the focus of scholars. The following 228 pages subject the reader to the metafiction of the story, the “Oh yes, we were reading a novel, weren't we?” –during which one Charles Kinbote attempts and fails to pull his focus away from underage boys just long enough to convince you that he was the ousted king of a fictitious (but real in the book’s universe) Eastern European country. I couldn’t care less. My angle is one of new sincerity and of Wildean “art as impact”, so naturally I’m going to take Kinbote at his word and experience his tale – just as I experience the poem in its own right – long before I consider the metafictional scaffolding or the man behind all this. And in doing so, I am brought to fury. I was shaking my fist and cursing Kinbote – for his horrid, constant disdain for women writ large; for his tendency to linger on les jeunes beautés; for his usurping of what could have been useful commentary on a wonderful poem.

I must remind the reader, here, that I do possess object permanence, and that I know Kinbote isn’t real and can’t hurt me. The fact that I must remind myself of this, must resist shredding the book immediately, is a testament to the godlike powers of Vladimir Nabokov. Even as I passed into the commentary and realised what I was in for, I still found myself smiling through the pain more often than not. He’s just that good.

There’s so much more to speak on regarding the layers of the narrative, the shockingly real voice the author creates in Kinbote, or the sixty years academics have spent theorising as to who Kinbote really is (A fellow professor, hiding in the marginalia of the story? The poet himself? The girl reading this?) But I don’t want to. Whether Nabokov intended the poem to be worthy of analysis on its own or not – and who am I to guess at his motives? – I would rather leave the technical analysis to those with the degrees. For my part, House of Leaves is a love story, nothing more or less.

If you’re a fan of cummings, Frost, Yeats, Eliot, and you don’t have to finish this book so as to write a review, I wouldn’t recommend it. Enjoy Shade on his own terms, as deluded as that may sound. But if you’re a nerd for postmodern metafiction, and want to see the master at work creating, frankly, something which outshines all of its successors in technical perfection to this day, then Pale Fire is mandatory.