My partner's favorite liquor is gin so I'm looking for some supplementary gifts for his birthday. I love a martini but I'm more of a whiskey guy in general, so my tastes tend to be as simple as Beefeater. He really loves the more botanical stuff, with Monkey 47 being a favorite. I was wondering if y'all have some suggestions for something in that wheelhouse but that might be something new and higher end for him to try. TIA

I’ve just read Pale Fire for the first time and I loved it. Shortly after finishing it, I sat and wrote out some of my thoughts on what might be happening behind the curtain as it were. I wanted to share these possible interpretations, though I’m sure nothing here is novel or untouched by this community in the past. Fair warning, there are several spoilers ahead. I’ll mark the theory titles as spoilers, but please note that this thread is for those who have read the book, or else those who have no concern for spoiling themselves.

>!Theory 1: John Shade was killed by Kinbote!<

In this reading, Gradus is either not real or is a fractured identity taken on by Kinbote. He imposes a structured personality upon the framework of Gradus as a way of grappling with the grief of killing someone he was obsessed with (Shade). We cannot believe anything Kinbote says, most notably in note 1000. He has also already exhibited a flawed concept of personhood, in his already fractured identities of V. Botkin, C. Kinbote, abd Charles the Beloved. Already on the path to mental decline, he killed Shade and unraveled, giving us the heavily warped commentary we receive. This could also be why Kinbote frequently and forcefully refers to Gradus as being less than a man. 

>!Theory 2: John Shade is Judge Goldsmith!<

In this reading, John is the judge whom Gradus was sent to kill, but in the same way that Kinbote has split his own sense of identity into parts he loves (King Charles the Beloved) and parts he hates (Prof. Botkin), he does the same with Shade, splitting him into his beloved writer and the hateful Judge Goldsmith. Shade is referred to as resembling Goldsmith, in a similar way to Kinbote frequently being referred to as resembling both the king and Botkin. In this interpretation, Gradus is either Kinbote (long since released from the asylum after a mental break and nursing a resentment against the judge, but waiting for the right moment) or simply another crazy person out to get the judge, irrespective of Kinbote’s own journey. 

>!Theory 3: John Shade, Kinbote, and Gradus are all the same person!<

In this reading, the poet John Shade is an elaborate fractured identity of Kinbote, created to try and process the grief of losing his daughter and eventually driving him on to suicide at the hands of “Gradus.” “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain” - Kinbote is the Shadow, the imitation, of the murdered John Shade, a Red Admirable, the bird that was free but misunderstood to the point of being named incorrectly as “Red Admiral.” Just as Kinbote is misunderstood, both for being gay and by using false names. “By the false azure of the windowpane,” reflections are not real, they’re just a false copy with false color, a false “Shade” if you will. “I was the smudge of ashen fluff,” Gradus, bedecked in his dark suit, coming to wipe out Shade/Kinbote/Gradus. “Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky,” and to heaven we all go. The next few lines also talk about copying oneself falsely, giving everything away in the opening section of the poem. 

There is no Zembla, but there was a man who was king in his mind who married a woman who could never love nor understand him, call her Disa or Sybil as you like. There is no asylum, but there was a lonely professor Botkin who worked in a university where he was ridiculed and isolated, leaving him to construct entirely new worlds in his mind where he was beloved. There was, critically, I think, a Hazel, who against all odds was conceived the daughter of a gay man and a resentful wife, who could not bear the weight of living, and after killing herself or allowing herself to be killed, drove her father to the breaking point of his own sanity. This would help explain the solemnity of this passage of the poem, arguably the only truly good section of the poem, as well as the tenderness and love with which Kinbote writes about Hazel. Hazel continues on as the muse of the work, which the Shade part of Kinbote needs to write as a means of grappling with her death while the Kinbote part of Kinbote can’t bear to process and thus continues to impose his Zemblan delusions upon, leading him eventually to take on Gradus, ending it all. This is, to me, the theory I most believe in, but I’m not getting into all the nitty gritty here. 

>!Theory 4: All of these characters spring from the same mind, and that mind is Vladimir Nabokov!<

There is no plot, there is no murder, ceci n’est pas une pipe. Are the identities fractured and confusing? That is because they are all of them aspects of Nabokov’s personality, teasing and mocking the reader in a light hearted manner for trying to unravel what is both not real and beside the point. John Shade, the celebrated author who has been widely successful but now yearns to be a recluse, much as Nabokov wrote this directly after the worldwide phenomenon that was Lolita, even referenced later in the poem as a destructive hurricane. Kinbote, the delusional storyteller who is, at times, a much-adored king in a land that is no longer viable as the Soviets take over everything beloved, and at other times the kooky Russian professor who is mocked and jeered at by his fellows. Gradus, that insane, dark spot, bitter about how it all played out and willing everything to simply be killed before it could start. Nabokov is mourning his own career, his loss of a homeland, and the trappings of fame, while also recognizing how enviable a position it is. Hazel here represents Lolita, his magnum opus, his masterwork, who would never be properly appreciated or understood by the world, and like a jilted lover would be stood up by audiences who refused to grapple with her inner turmoil. We, the readers, kill John Shade. We, the readers, kill Hazel Shade. We, the readers, kill Lolita. We, the readers, kill Vladimir Nabokov, and then we refuse to own up when we do it.