Posted on 07/10/2017 5:37:59 PM PDT by Borges
2 July 2017 marked the 40th anniversary of Vladimir Nabokov's death, the trilingual writer best known for his controversial work Lolita. A substantial anniversary as such is a fitting occasion to remember the man whose legacy will perhaps forever be inseparable from the image of a red lollipop and heart-shaped glasses. But with Nabokov, the question of an afterlife takes on an additional significance. Art as a vessel for spiritual transcendence was arguably Nabokovs principal preoccupation, the foundations to his literary temple. Many of his fictional characters take on this pursuit, to varying degrees of success, while his own nuanced literary structures play with patterns and shapes that speak to this central theme.
According to Vera Nabokov — the writer's wife, muse, editor, typist — the essence of both her husband's life and art was, “an intuition about a transcendent realm of being”. In light of this, remembering Nabokov 40 years on is not merely a ceremonial act of respect for a literary great, but a continuation of the very question he set out to answer, namely: does the artist continue to exist beyond the work of art itself? Here are just some of the wonderful and peculiar idiosyncrasies to the man, his opinions and his works.
(Excerpt) Read more at calvertjournal.com ...
My best friend and I were 14 when we heard they were making the movie.
We thought Sue Lyon was about as hot as a girl could be.
There is a more “nuanced” theme, it occurs to me. Women run the world and they learn that at a very early age...
Notice how the writer is celebrating the pervert .. NOT criticizing him for the perversity. Using fancy language and elaborate syntax, but still does not indicate anything wrong with the novel!
But, you see, it is written by an “elite”, not a common plebe.
What writer? The one who wrote this article or Nabokov? Or the character in the novel?
Nabokov was one of the great conservatives of the 20th century.
As a teenager reading Nabokov because my English teacher assigned it, I could not get past the perversity to whatever else it was we were supposed to see in the writing. To me, the idea of a romantic relationship with a 40-ish woman was too gross even to consider, and I assumed the same for a girl barely younger than my age with a man that old.
As a man now on the other side of the age divide, my opinion is (mostly) unchanged. Whatever it is that this story is supposed to say is something I don’t want to hear, except as a warning that children live in a dangerous world. I am certain that was not Nabokov’s point.
When the novel begins the guy is 38 and she’s 12. There is no attempt to make the behavior seem in any way normal. Nor is there any sexual content. What most people remember from the novel was the Americana...descriptions of landscapes and Middle America.
“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.”
“She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.”
At least to me as a teenager, the one and only time I at least partially read it, “fire of my loins” and “in my arms” were over the line. This is not how a parent/grandparent talks about a beloved child on his lap. I don’t plan to read it again to see what I missed. The words are clearly well-chosen, almost poetic, but that is not enough for me. The first impression was terrible, and as I recall, there was enough later in the book to more than maintain that impression.
The character is crazy and loathsome. You’re suppose dto see through what he says to what’s really going on. It’s like Edgar Allan Poe writing stories from the point of view of murderers.
Well, you could always read Pnin or Pale Fire.
Pale Fire is astonishing.
My best friend and I were a couple of years younger and she was being molested by an older man in her family. Perhaps you can imagine how discouraging the movie was for my friend.
The Kubrick film changed the spirit of the novel and made the girl both older and more complicit. She may have been 14 when filming began but she looked 18. In the novel, the kid is a completely ordinary and unsophisticated 12 year old.
The remake with Jeremy Irons is closer to the book.
It’s also dour and humorless. The novel is unfilmable. And not for the reasons one would think.
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