Lolita at 50

PublicBroadcasting.Net ^ | 08/18/08 | Colette Bancroft

[Borges]

By many accounts the great American novel of the 20th century.

[Clemenza]

Not Nabakov’s best work, IMHO. That would be “The Defense”, greatest novel ever written about chess (and it wasn’t really even about chess ;-) ) .

[Borges]

‘The Defense’ was also the subject of a terrible film version a few years back. It's good stuff but not remotely as layered as his best work in English.

[Constitution Day]

Absolutely a brilliant book and I agree.

Glad to see I’m in before the knee-jerk reactionaries who will post about how depraved the book is, but probably haven’t read it.

[Clemenza]

Yes. From what I recall, it was called “The Luzhin Defense.” It had a horribly miscast John Turturro. Had no desire to see it at the time, nor will I get it from Netflix.

[Borges]

The trilogy of Lolita, Pale Fire and ‘Ada: or Ardor’ is one of the supreme literary accomplishments of this or any previous century.

[Roscoe Karns]

she would be 73

62 by my math. No?

[Constitution Day]

I remember seeing that movie on the Blockbuster site. Looked like a stinker.

[Borges]

She would be 73 because her birthdate is given in the novel as 1935 regardless of when the novel was published.

[pabianice]

Only PBS could generate this much gas over such a trivial matter.

[Borges]

American Literature is trivial?

[Borges]

PING

[durasell]

I am not responding to this thread.

[mojito]

It is a depraved book. It is also a very great book.

Lionel Trilling wrote that he thought Lolita was about love. I couldn’t disagree more: it is a novel about corruption.

Nabokov greatly admired Gogol’s Dead Souls, and in some ways I think of Lolita as a “dead souls” for our time.

[Roscoe Karns]

Thank you.

[Flycatcher]

Some might say Pale Fire as well. I wouldn't. I've always had a problem with Nabokov. He truly is a great literary artist (in Lolita, his description of the tantalizing curves of mature women is hysterical: he makes real women sound repulsive), but when all is said and one, he says... nothing! By failing to address any sense of the moral complexity inherent to us all, his writing is empty to me.

I've always told people this: No writer writes more beautifully about nothing of real consequence than Nabokov.

[Borges]

Coruption of who by who? That’s the single most depraved question the book poses. And contrary to what most people think...it contains no descriptions of sex acts.

[Borges]

Nabokov would say that writing beautifully is itself a matter of great consequence. Anyway his recurring themes about intellectuals losing their mind and the effect that tyranny has on the imagination are very important. In addition to that, Lolita is about the collision of modernism and an incipient postmodernism.

[CodeToad]

A story of pedophilia is not much to bag about.

[r9etb]

Absolutely a brilliant book....

And very disturbing, too...