But next they'll be coming after Rochelle, Rochelle.
Posted on 03/12/2019 2:15:18 PM PDT by Borges
If millennials are currently aged between the ages of 22 and 36, I am one, albeit somewhere in the upper echelons – and I am also a publisher. And so I note with particular interest when people who are usually not millennials and don’t work in publishing share their view that Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita would never be published now because of awful young people like me. Not in a million years, they say. Highly unlikely, at a push.
It’s a view that pops up with surprising frequency. In the Spectator this week, Rachel Johnson writes that Lolita would be stuck on the slush pile if Nabokov had written it now, casting doubt over whether the classic would even be placed on curriculums any more.
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
I’ve read the first version (Kubrick) also missed the spirit of the novel by a mile.
I’ve never read the book. But I’ve been lead to understand the book is more about the symbolism of US/Russia relations rather than Hebephilia.
I think John Mortimer, who most of us know as the author of Rumpole, fought for the publication of Lolita as well as Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
Right, Lolita representing America.
I’ve read the book (Lolita) and seen both movie versions of it. I prefer the newer version just because it didn’t dance around the subject with a lot of inferences.
However, I found James Mason to be much less creepy than Jeremy Irons. My problem with Jeremy Irons was that he was very convincing in the role.
Well Humbert is not Russian but it’s certainly one reading of it. More like Old World culture and New World culture.
The novel is all inferences. It has no sexual content.
I have hope that, with a little more experience, and a little more of their wealth being redistributed, some of them may start to see the light.
I thought it was supposed to be an allegory of how Europeans (including Russians) see and perceive America, without having been here.
Humbert Humbert idolizes Lolita, ruins his life over her, only to find out that she's just an ordinary young female. He builds her into a dream figure, but its all in her mind. She's just a dizzy teenager, who thinks about little beyond the tip of her own cute nose.
In the end she marries a guy named Biff, or Boff, who she hardly knows, gets pregnant and moves to Alaska, shrugging as she says good-bye.
A lot of them don’t have wealth which is the problem. A lot I know appear to be extremely cynical and just see things as “The system is collapsing anyway, I might as well get my cut while I can, because right now everyone else is but me.” There’s also a lot of skepticism among them that the United States as we know it not going to exist much longer without descending into some kind of ethnic/civil war conflict. To be honest, I don’t have any answers for them when they ask me how things are going to turn around.
Lolita is an awful story, and it certainly should not be on the required reading list for high school students. It has no redeeming value that I can discern; I found the book quite sickening and I felt rather dirty. I am definitely not the better for having had to read it.
Played brilliantly by Sue Lyon in the movie. Boy, does she wrap James Mason around her little finger. I only wish we did that to the Rooskies and Euroweenies!
I realize this is satire, but the current crop of students can’t interpret ants at a picnic without seeing everything through a distorted ideological lens comprised of platitudes, fallacies, and outright lies.
Nabokov is too difficult for them.
While Lolita is well known, it isn’t all Nabokov wrote.
My favorite is Speak Memory.
In what sense? It isn’t remotely pornographic and has some of the greatest description Truman era America ever written.
“Lolita is an awful story,...”
It is the story of a liar. Is he fabricating all this in his nasty mind, or is it real?
Is he distorting this tale or is she really a seductrous?
Is it appropriate for high school? Not in today’s world.
Yeah, he’s always trying to teach her about philosophy and great works of literature, and she’s popping a bubble-gum bubble and saying “yeah, that’s neat, can I have $5?”
The story is hilarious. But even as a woman, I can understand Mr. Mason’s eye-popping stare as he sees Lolita sunbathing in her heart-shaped shades.
The recent book The Real Lolita, about Nabokov’s use of a contemporary true crime story as the basis for his story, was a real eye opener for a one-time serial Nab reader like me. I read some Borges, too, but really loved Nabokov classics like Pale Fire and others. By Sarah Weinman. Well worth reading.
The book had been banned for a time in Britain and France and other countries.
It was originally rejected by all major US publishers and had to be published by a French house that specialized in erotica.
Lolita was only allowed in America because of the "Howl" trial a few years before caused censorship to crumble.
So no, we aren't that different from how things were back then.
Yes and no. I don’t think it’s quite so dismissive of Lolita as that. And you have to understand that Humbert is not a reliable narrator.
But next they'll be coming after Rochelle, Rochelle.
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