| The Upper East Cider™ | ||
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| Ezine | January 21, 2003 | Manhattan |
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| This Edition: Book Review Two Regular Features:
We are the beasts and these are truly God's children.
Fine art gallery showing samples of the painter's work. Click Me If you are using Netscape, it may be necessary to widen this window to prevent words from flowing behind pictures. | The Pale Fire of Hidden Stars
Pale fire is a line of poetry co-otped by Vladimir Nabokov (author of the famous Lolita) for his 1962 novel entitled Pale Fire, which revolves around the waning certitude of interpretations of a poem of the same title. Both Hidden Stars and Pale Fire challenge readers to reverse engineer interpretations to find more than just glimmers of truth. Hidden Stars is the third book published by author and engineer Rev. John F. Gregorek. The first two books are scientific nonfiction. This third book is science fiction. The Fifth Dimension, his first book, explores the dynamics of the universe. The Science Within investigates myths and biblical accounts of the universe. Hidden Stars explains Man's interpretation of the universe.
Imagine how a society doomed to extinction might have their legacy interpretted by the next society to rise from their ashes. This is the premise of Hidden Stars. A low tech society carries forward the legacy of a high tech society. As all good science fiction, Hidden Stars extrapolates a dynamic of society to reveal hidden lessons. Hidden Stars extrapolates on the child's game of telephone. An oral message is started through a chain of children. Each child passes along the message by whispering it to the next child. At the end of the chain, the message received is compared to the original message sent. The messages are often comically different. Ironically, the messages in Hidden Stars are comically different but the same. Hidden Stars is rich in parallels. A hundred pages into the novel you can picture Superman in the icy Fortress of Solitude watching a talking image of his father. In another part you can picture the recurring episodes in the Bible of sacrificing the first born males. There are many unmistakable parallels throughout the novel to the Bible, like the plea of a character known as Joe Vah (as in Jejovah) beseeching "Remember me!" This encourages a reader to keep a Bible close at hand while reading this novel to cross-reference these allusions. Nabokov's novel requires the same flipping back and forth by setting up its own internal cross-references. This setup provokes the reader to reevaluate first impressions to find deeper, richer, more complex and sometimes different meanings. Nabokov's Pale Fire is a cautionary tale of a literary critic examining another writer's work. Nabokov's novel consists of a poem and the commentary on it. The commentary illuminates more about the commentator critiquing the poem than about the poet himself. The novel's poem is ostensibly a loose autobiographical epitaph of the fictitious poet. However, the fictitious commentator reads his own life into the lines of the poem. The poem and the commentary obfuscate the truth by rich layers of interpretation upon interpretation. Even the characters' perceptions and veracity are called into question. Nabokov goes further by stenciling the commentator's life from real events in Nabokov's life. This last device deepens the irony of the cautionary message of the novel. Hidden Stars is to archeology what Pale Fire is to literary criticism. Both novels challenge the reader to find the truth being washed over by layers of interpretations. Both novels blur the line between fiction and reality. Both novels resist the form of a book by starting their tales before page "1" and carrying on their stories beyond the last page. In Pale Fire the book's "Forward" is part of the story. In Hidden Stars the story reaches out from the pages to turn the book inside out. Vladimir Nabokov analogized literary criticism to the pale fire stolen by the moon from the sun. John Gregorek analogizes our myths and legends to stars hidden by our deification of the sun and the moon.
| Past Editions: June 16, 2002: Commentary September 11, 2001: Memorial August 11, 2001: Travel Diary December 5, 2000: Art Exhibit November 12, 2000: Abortion Debate October 31, 2000: Political Cartoon September 2, 2000: Movie Review August 8, 2000: Cruelty Expose` July 4, 2000: Animals Are Just Another Bag, Again Legislation Alert June 24, 2000: | ||||||||||||
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| © 2003 Judge Michael J. Gregorek | ||