Lolita, a Love Story?

A woman sitting next to me on the plane from Ohio to New York saw my book, said she read it in high school and that it was her favorite.

"The desperation is touching, really sad to me," this woman said. It was, in her opinion, a love song.

Weird. I've been reading it as a story of addiction.

Theis passage on page 71 shows how we both can be right.

"So Humbert the Cubus schemed and dreamed --and the red sun of desire and decision (the two things that create a live world) rose higher and higher, while upon a succession of balconies a succession of libertines, sparkling glass in hand, toasted shattered the glass, and boldly imagined (for I was drunk on those visions by then and underrated the gentleness of my nature) how eventually I might blackmail--no, that is too strong a word--mauvemail big Haze into letting me consort with little Haze by gently threatening the poor dotting Big Dove with desertion, if she tried to bar me from playing with my legal step-daughter. in a word, before such an Amazing Offer, before such a vastness and variety of vistas, I was as helpless as Adam at the preview of early oriental history, miraged in his apple orchard.

And now take down the following important remark: the artist in me has been given the upper hand over the gentleman."

Save Your Money: Lolita is On-Line

As a financially challenged writer who who hopes to have his own writing in book stores one day, I'm a bit conflicted about this:

Lolita, the entire book, is on-line.

But at least you can't use the "I can't afford the book" excuse anymore.

Freedom Amid Ruins

I'm in Ohio for my friends wedding reception, where the last thing I saw was the groom and bride, swaying slowly to the last song in an emptying ball room.

Which makes this the last line of this passage appropriate.

Friday. I long for some terrific disaster. Earthquake. Spectacular explosion. Her mother is messily but instantly and permanently eliminated, along with everybody else for miles around. Lolita whimpers in my arms. A free man, I enjoy her among the ruins.[pg53]

Like my friends who just got married, HH has all that he seeks in this life.

But he obtains his freedom only amid "ruins." In fact, that is the only way he obtains Lolita. Is standing amid ruins real freedom? If he has his Lolita, does it matter if there are surrounded by ruins?

NOTE: To find this photo, I did a Google image search for the word "ruin," and came across this photo, titled "Girl-in-ruins-thumb."

'Quit Being Grossed Out'

A commenter, in the previous post, SVGL, does some pretty good literary-psychoanalysis and explains why I'm constantly saying I'm disgusted by what HH is doing.

"are you terrified that you might be able to relate to HH better than you'd like to? What if you quit being grossed out and got turned on-- could you deal with it?"

Bingo!

Desire [updated]

What Humbert Humbert lusts after is deplorable.

But what about his relationship to his object of desires? After Humbert's divorce, and hospitalization, he joins "an expedition into the arctic Canada."[pg33]

"We lived in a prefabricated timber cabins amid a Pre-Cambrian world of granite. We had heaps of supplies -- the Reader's Digest, an ice cream mixer, chemical toilets, paper caps for Christmas. My health improved wonderfully in spite or because of all the fantastic blankness and boredom...I felt curiously aloof from my own self. No temptations maddened me."[pg33]

Absent that which he desires, Humbert is a stranger to himself. it speaks to how central a role desire, and the pursuit of that desire is, to his identity. He's taken jobs, a wife, and traveled across the world, pursuing his desire (nymphets).

Where have our desires led us?

What would happen to you if your desires were somehow removed from you?

Is his relationship to desire weird? Or is distinctly, painfully, part of what it means to be human?

Department of Reader Insight: Hazelgrouse says, "We all relate to HH better than we'd like to, and this doesn't mean we're closet nymphetophiles."

Reading Lolita...At 15

A woman who knows the book well emailed to say...

"i read lolita in high school. i remember not liking it, but i was 15. who knows what i'd think now. there's a derivative work, lo's diary, that i found very interesting. it was written from lolita's
perspective and covered the same period of time."

Imagine reading this book when you're around the same age as the people HH is lusting after. Aaagghh!

Anybody else read this when they were younger?

The Clockwork Orange Technique

Reading Lolita in public is still a bit dramatic for me. I found myself folding the cover of the book so no one could see me reading it on the train this morning.

But what I'm noticing is that the subject matter is repugnant, as is the narrator, but the way that narrator talks about the subject matter is anything but repugnant. Which, I guess, is the point of the book.

A cluster of stars palely glowed above us, between the silhouettes of long thin leaves; that vibrant sky seemed as naked as she was under her light frock. I saw her face in the sky, strangely distinct as if it emitted a faint radiance of its own. [pg 15]

He takes you from the "cluster of stars" to "under her light frock." Yikes!

The poetic language isn't reserved for his first love, Annabel, who he's describing the passage above. He maintains that beatific language to describes his "degrading and dangerous desires"[pg24].

He's poetic observations are what brings you into his perverted world.

"Her hips were no bigger than those of a squatting lad; in fact, I do not hesitate to say (and indeed this is the reason why I linger gratefully in that gauze-gray room of memory with little Monique) that among the eight or so prostitutes* I had operate upon me, she was the only one that gave me a pang of genuine pleasure. 'The man who invented this trick was a smart one**,' she commented amiably, and got back into her clothes with the same high-style speed.

I asked for another, more elaborate , assignment later the same evening..."[pg22]

*=Nabokov, who spoke several different languages, keeps infusing French words into the story. Not sure why, but my book, thankfully, has translations. Instead of "prostitute," Nabokov used the French word "grues."

**=Translated from French.

He calls refers to it as "an assignment" and skips over any obvious detail of their encounter, which would remind the reader that they're reading something which, in real life, would disgust them.

It's sort of the technique used in A Clockwork Orange. Most of the deranged, offensive stuff done by the main character there, is filmed in a long shot - literally, distancing the audience from what they're seeing. Topped with some orchestral music, and you got yourself a recipe to accept almost anything.

Reading Lolita on the Train; Uncomfortable

Lolita is alarming, no matter where you read it.

Reading it on a crowded train only adds to the discomfort.

Imagine, a train packed with seemingly respectable, tired people trekking home from work, and trying to read this passage:

"A normal man given a group photograph of school girls or Girl Scouts and asked to point out the comeliest one will not necessarily choose the nymphet among them. You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine (oh, how you have to cringe and hide!), in order to discern at one, by ineffable signs - the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limb, and other indices which despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate - the little deadly demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power." [pg17]

Nabokov explains the obsession is rooted is the loss of a lover the main character had when he was young. But "the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since - until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another." [pg15].

Great. He ruins my train ride home, the purity of childhood, and even reincarnation.

New Book: Lolita

Thanks to a certain reader (okay, this site's only reader for the moment), the next book on the list is Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov.

I'm expecting it to be a thick, academic read, nothing like the breezy, quick-to-cinema novels like The Beach or Fight Club.

So, to help myself out, I'll be reading the annotated Lolita. That'll either provide much needed clarification, or extra stuff that'll fly over my head and feel like homework.

Also, what would a new tradition be without an early exception. I'm heading out of town for a wedding, so I'll be skipping the first Saturday coffee.

But think of it this way...

Extra time to read Nabokov everybody!

Nabokov and Rap

The Nabokov fan emailed me to explain that he's the only author she reads "Because he does things with language that I cannot explain."

Which is the reason I love rap music. How real emcees do things with language I never thought of. So, in that spirit, here's a song featuring Frank Sinatra (a singer with Nabokov-esque stature, and the Norotious B.I.G..


update: One more song becuase, well, why not?


update II: Sinatra and Biggie, never enough.

Book Club Fever!

Excitement over the club is growing. Here's what one person emailed to say:

I only do Nabokov. Love your idea though

So metropolitan. So picky. Oh New York.

Necessary Sins

What happens when a man marries his mistress? Author/mistress and former Washington Post reporter, Lynn Darling, spends most of her memoir, Necessary Sins, wrestling with that question.

"As a child of the sixties, I should have found that notion ridiculous but I never did. For years, I could not square the fact that I loved Lee with my conviction that I should have walked away. That what I had done was wrong, but it wasn't a mistake...Perhaps there is in every life an action, an event, whether great or small, that is meant to life restlessly at the heart of who we are; if we're lucky, it teaches us how to be human."

Necessary Sins gets interesting not just for the story it tells about how Darling meeting her Lee Lescaze, but about their life afterwards.

"All marriages begin in myth, a carapce under which the real marriage takes shape. Since Lee and I had plundered one marriage to make another, our initial idea of romance yielded reluctantly to the reality of daily life. You do not break up a marriage only to argue over the dishes with the one who was meant to take you away from the dullness of arguing over the dishes."

As many memoirs do, this ends with a death, a rebirth, and more than enough pages dedicated to her saintly duties as caretaker for a husbanding slowly wasting away.

"If this catastrophe had to to happen, then it was only right that it happened on my watch, given the upheaval in which our life together began."

What's surprising to me is the way that Darling is haunted by that initial "upheaval" she created in her husband's first marriage. Does it ever go away? It's a hard concept to appreciate if you, like, me, still wonder if you'll ever find that person at all.