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Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita

Shade said:
You may be interested in this thread on Lolita, gizmo.
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I know this other thread and I read it but I would like to discuss this book with a lot of spoilers. The other thread is more about a mother-daughter "conflict" and the suitiability of this book for minors/ teenagers/ young people under 18.


Shade said:
Didn't you feel the slightest bit of sympathy for Humbert? Even at the end?
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I've not yet finished the book but I know the end from the movie and I have to say: NOPE NOT A LITTLE BIT!!!
 
True@1stLight said:
Ya great, another reason to justify censorship.....Can't tell you how tingly I get all over when I hear overgeneralized assumptions as such.
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:confused: Is that so? i thought it meant something different. well, maybe my mind was being dumb. :eek:
 
Ok if no one would like to discuss Lolita ,I'll do it all by myself! :D

I just finished Lolita and it was a little dull near the end. After Lolita left Humbert and he visited her a last time the book was over for me. I didn't care what would happen to this disgusting creature (but it would have been nice of Nabokov to kill him off at the end, like in the short story).
It certainly is a very good book (quiet near excellent) but I thought it would be more sexually explicit (not that I was looking forward to that). I read some reviews and heard that it should be kind of pornographic but it wasn't that shocking with the given descriptions. Although in passages the thoughts of Humbert are very disgusting.
I found it pretty ironic that Humbert killed Cue because he "kidnapped" Lolita. Humbert twisted reality so that he could belive he was Lolitas protector and not her rapist and keeper. He often referred to her as his pet and that was really awful. Furthermore he ignores all signs of Lolitas sadness and sorrows. He really treats her like a nice pet.

[...], I happened to glimpse from the bathroom, [...], a look on her face ... that look I cannot exactly describe ... an expression of helplessness so perfect that it seemed to grade into one of rather comfortabel inanity just because this was the very limit of injustice and frustration [...] hence the neutral illumination.
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Does age govern emotion?

I'm rather fond of ol' Humbert. I found Lo's mother far more depraved.

He was walking the fine line between fitting and not, when Lo made a move. Reality sets in and he has to find a way to cover his ass, hence the blackmail.
 
It's been far too long since I've read this, but I do remember empathizing with Humbert. I'll leave it at that until I have a chance to reread it.
 
Absolutely. At the end, when Humbert meets Lolita as a grown woman when she is married, he is in my view (and I believe Nabokov intended him to be) at that stage an entirely sympathetic character.

Oh and gizmo - read the preface by "John Ray, Jr." again - Nabokov did kill off Humbert in the end... - and not only Humbert!
 
Shade said:
Absolutely. At the end, when Humbert meets Lolita as a grown woman when she is married, he is in my view (and I believe Nabokov intended him to be) at that stage an entirely sympathetic character.
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Sympathetic??? He visited Lolita in order to kill her lover and take her home with him. He finds her happy and nevertheless tries to persuade her to leave with him. [By the way I wouldn't call a 17 year old teenager a grown up.] At this time he is completley nuts!


Shade said:
Oh and gizmo - read the preface by "John Ray, Jr." again - Nabokov did kill off Humbert in the end... - and not only Humbert!
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I know that Humbert dies but I would have preferred something more spectacular (smashed by a big truck, bitten by a rabit racoon, pecked to death by penguins...).


warm enema said:
I'm rather fond of ol' Humbert. I found Lo's mother far more depraved.
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Why?
 
Gizmo said:
Sorry but I don't understand this comment (context??, what does it mean?). :confused:
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If you take out the age of Lolita, would you not be prone to some of the same responses as Humbert if you were madly in love with a girl? No context needed.
 
True@1stLight said:
If you take out the age of Lolita, would you not be prone to some of the same responses as Humbert if you were madly in love with a girl? No context needed.
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Ok, but there is the fact that Lolita is 12 years old and that's the whole problem. I don't have problems with Humbert being in love but he seems to be a sex-maniac when it comes to Lolita.
 
I know this post is quite old, but I have to comment on it. I absolutely loved this book! I read it a long time ago though but I do remember the wonderful allusions to Edgar Allan Poe's "Annabel Lee" (which is my all time favourite poem).

My mother also didn't like the fact that I read it, she's a little conservative when it comes down to anything violent or sexual. But I normally don't buy books and let my mother know what I'm reading until I've finished it. (I have more freedom now that I'm in college)

But anyway, if one plans on buying this book, I suggested getting "the annotated lolita". It's unabridged with lots of helpful notes. There are a lot of endnotes that translate a lot of the French for example. It's also has Poe's poem at the end as well.
 
Has anyone read "Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir In Books" by Azar Nafisi? I've heard good things...
 
Libra6Poe said:
Has anyone read "Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir In Books" by Azar Nafisi? I've heard good things...
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I read this one awhile back and thought I had a thread floating around here somewhere, but now can't find it. :confused: I enjoyed it, a memoir can do things that fiction can't sometimes. And now I really want to catch up on some of the classics they discussed and I missed.
 
Impressive

Nice review about Lolita! Hope you enjoyed Marcus Aurelius.

Tanya

Shade said:
You must get your intelligence and discernment from your father, Love4OneAnother. Get a friend to borrow it for you. To be honest I wouldn't have got that much out of it at 15, but maybe you're more advanced than I was!

Lolita is a phenomenon, for all sorts of reasons. It is one of the few literary novels of the 20th century (along with the likes of Catch-22 and Nineteen Eighty Four) that has put a new word or phrase into the common language. It is the work of a man writing in not his first or second, but third language. It is responsible for the worst rhyming couplet in musical history*. And its subject matter, of a paedophile 'relationship' is utterly contemporary - so it doesn't fade and date like other fifty-year-old books (Lucky Jim, anyone?) - and also makes it hard to believe that it was published in the prudish 1950s. Of course, it almost wasn't: like that other great "obscene" novel Ulysses, it was first published in Paris. Nabokov in his afterword writes:


The other reason why it has not dated is because of its innovative language, which while nowhere near Joycean - or even, to me, Marquezian - complexity, does take a bit of getting used to. (Nabokov described it as "a record of my love affair with the English language.") The supple and witty language is never better displayed than in the scene at the end between Humbert and Quilty, which comes at the start of Kubrick's film version (another distinction: great book becomes great film shocker), and which I had presumed was mostly Peter Sellers' improvisation ("You will only wound me hideously and then rot in jail while I recuperate in a tropical setting"): but it's all there on the page.

Lolita is, as you surely know, and whatever the naysayers may claim, a love story. And there are plenty of naysayers, even in the 21st century, where you might expect sophistication enough to understand the difference between writer, or reader, and character. One saddened Amazon reviewer states "If you want to read erotic descriptions of children and sickeningly-detailed depictions of child molesting, the law is apparently powerless (or at least unwilling) to stop you, but please, please, don't hide behind "art." Admit, at least to yourself, what you're really doing; admit what you are." Needless to say, there are not really any erotics or sickeningly-detaileds in Lolita. Yes, unsurprisingly, it's all in his mind.

Humbert Humbert relates his love story from jail, where he awaits trial for murder. It has been edited by "John Ray, Jr." after Humbert's death, who also provides a foreword where he gives away all the protagonists' fates without the reader realising. The name Humbert Humbert is significant: it is the narrator's own choice of fictional name - the "double rumble" which Nabokov felt carried the right amount of sinister intent - and reflects his two personas. There is Humbert the rapacious paedophile, with his authentic attention to detail and planning, and his enormous cruelty - the last sentence of Part 1 of the novel packed a punch like I hadn't felt since A Handful of Dust. And there is Humbert the repentant regretter: filled with self-loathing and longing at the end of the book, in an exceptionally moving scene where he realises that he really loves the grown-up Lolita.

Humbert is a mesmerising narrator, charming, repellent, pitiable and witty. Despite its occasional forays into picaresque road-movie territory, there is not a single boring page in the book, for now I know where Martin Amis gets his ambition never to write a sentence that someone else could have written. (As Humbert warns us at the start: "You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.") If you're going to read Lolita - and why wouldn't you? - I recommend the annotated version, which will not only give you more background and notation than you will ever require, but also enable you to identify who the hell they're talking about at one crucial point of the plot, and to spot the same character's preshadowings, as he appears and vanishes and vanishes and appears throughout the book's first two-hundred-and-fifty pages before he actually comes centre stage, rather like Brad Pitt in Fight Club.

Time, then, to reacquaint myself with the other Nabokovs I have, and have surely read, but which I can't remember anything about either. They will hardly match the perfection of Lolita, a novel for which I reserve the highest praise: that is, to shut up about it, and leave it to Martin Amis:


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* "He sees her / He starts to shake and cough / Just like the old man in / That book by Nabokov" - The Police, Don't Stand So Close To Me. For shame!
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Yeah - without trying to sound wanky - I was really moved by all that, Mr. Shade. I'd never considered reading Lolita before, but now I have it sitting at the top of my Wishlist.
Shade said:
...now I know where Martin Amis gets his ambition never to write a sentence that someone else could have written.
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I just love that sentence. I have a feeling that I write uniquely, and I feel a bit comforted and appreciated about the way I write. I know that was completely inadvertent, but I thought I'd just let you know.

Anyway, I despise censoring and people who judge art before 'experiencing' it. I always have a laugh when reading a list of books banned by the church. Oh no, I've done it again - brought religion into it. Somebody shoot me.
 
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