Pale Fire is a delightful escape-room of a novel, with layers of meaning, unreliablility, and puns that might seem a bit highfalutin but crucially does not take itself seriously. The conceit of a somewhat crazy man telling a story through the footnotes of an unrelated poem is good fun. Also helpful is the fact that Nabokov has maybe the best grasp of language of anyone ever? And the poem is actually quite good.