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Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita

Boy! those midwestern women are tough! Wooden spoons.....hmmm. :D Seriously ABC I think its great that you've started a new and improved thread for Little Lo, but Peder is right. Maybe someone that was unsure of themselves or shy or whatever reason, will feel more comfortable in a brand new thread. So all I can say is Have Fun with it!

Nabokovia is alive and well, and kicking.........er, you know what I mean. ;)
 
Good for you, abc! I will begin by saying that perhaps I only thought I had read this book back when we first started discussing it here but maybe in actuality I had only skimmed through it back in the sixties. (I might have been one of those people who saw the Kubric movie and then decided to read the book.) What got me interested this time was Nafisi's book, Reading Lolita in Tehran. Of course I am at least forty years mature-er than I was back in the sixties, and this time when I read Lolita it was literally a whole 'nother story to me.

Since Lolita was named book of the month here (how many months ago?) I have happily acquired a whole new collection of Nabokoviana. First it was The Annotated Lolita, then Pifer's VN's Lolita, a Casebook, then I bought both of the movies on DVD (thereby developing a not-so-innocent crush on Jeremy Irons), not to mention the unabridged recorded book version read (oh, so beautifully) by the above named actor. Oh. and Stacey Schiff's biography of Nabokov's wife and "first reader", Vera, a must-have if you want to know more about the man himself.

For me, Lolita has turned out to be a real-life love story (if it was not a true love that linked the two protagonists, then it is most certainly a true love that has developed between Nabokov and me.)

It seems to me that nobody else on earth writes quite like Nabokov wriote. And simply nothing he wrote was just like Lolita. It is quite simply one of my all-time favorite books. I mean:

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.
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Humbert forces the reader to do all the work here in order to realize what he is really doing - raping Lolita. None of these images are very sexual in nature if taken out of context. By forcing the reader to do the work, Humbert also attempts to indict the reader along with himself, taking a "you said it, not me" standpoint. Also notice the artistic imagery, especially "last dab of color." Humbert often takes the position that he is an artist, and hides behind "the refuge of art," using it as one of his many excuses.
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Right on, KristoCat. You have caught the evil Humbert right in the act. Perfect example.
 
Thanks Still :D

What I find extremely interesting also is the tension between Humbert and Aubrey McFate, aka Nabokov himself. Sometimes there's dialogue between the two, where Aubrey tries to force Humbert out of his various refuges and make him admit culpability. Aubrey is there to constantly remind the reader to question Humbert and everything he says. He's a slimy, slippery fellow, HH.
 
Who-hoo. I liked this one:

... fate (or, as Humbert would have it, "McFate") obtrudes a shade too obtrusively; the border between memory and imagination, fact and fabulation, is crossed and recrossed until those categories come to look like the most fragile semantic conceits. Finally, Lolita's plot is unmasked as a "plot" of another sort, a game played by an author whose powers of control are so awesome that they seem to extend beyond the page, leaving us with the uncomfortable sensation that we are not just Nabokov's readers, but his characters.
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link
 
Nice discussion guys. Keep it up! Lolita is just 1 down in my TBR and I'm really enjoying your analysis and opinions.
 
abecedarian said:
So tell us, what do you think of our Lo?
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Well, wow, what a question. Do you mean Lo as in the book? Or Lo as in the twelve-year old girl seduced by a middle age man?

If you mean the book, then that is a loaded question anyway (it's surely the most discussable (new word, heh!) book around), but if you mean the little girl, then moreso.

Is this an open-spoiler thread? Or not?

I remember when I first started reading this book. I think, actually, that's how I found TBF in the first place, because the book just happened to be the BoTM here. I jumped into the original thread, mid-read, and like others have said, it was a helluva ride...

But anyway, I begun thinking HH was a crazed lunatic, a pedophile, completely insane, etc. Later, my view changed. I think it happened when...

SPOILER: they were driving across America and Lo was flirting crazily with HH, telling him how her mum would be heartbroken to discover their affair. She was joking, of course, but then... in that first hotel, when he discovers her lack of virginity. She's TWELVE! Hello...

I do think he loved her, in his own crazy, obsessed, psychologically disturbed way.
 
Well I decided I was timid after all, so I joined in...

But yay, two active Lolita threads. Yay yay yay!

TOES!! Peder!
 
steffee said:
Well I decided I was timid after all, so I joined in...

But yay, two active Lolita threads. Yay yay yay!

TOES!! Peder!
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Steffee,
Timid is good.
And to my way of thinking two Lolita threads is even gooder.
Y'all have fun! Hear?! :)
Peder
 
I think open spoilers are fine. As for my opening question, that 'Lo' is for both the character and the book as a whole. There's so much to talk about for both. I always avoided Lolita because I thought it was a 'smutty' book about a pedophile. While it IS a sensual book, I was impresed that it was not a nasty book. Lolita was a victum, but she was a wily one. I'm not ready to agree that HH truly loved her. My feeling is he was in love with the image he had in his head, which was a combination of Lo and Annabelle. He was obsessed certainly, but I hold to the definition of love as spelled out in the Bible, in 1 Corinthians 13, which in summary, says that love is patient, kind, long suffering,doesn't envy or boast, always protects, and is not self-seeking. HH falls short specially on the last point. If he truly loved Lo he would not have forced her into a relationship she was not mature enough to fully enjoy.
 
steffee =
Or Lo as in the twelve-year old girl seduced by a middle age man?
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I think "kidnapped, terrorized and repeatedly raped" describes it better. Lo behaved like the spoliled and precocious girl that she was in the beginning, but that in no way excuses Humbert's cruel and deranged behavior.

Read KristoCat's post about the wincing child again. Humbert wants you to blame Lolita for all that he does to her. The fact (if it is a fact -- I don't trust this narrator one teeny, tiny little bit) that the child was not a virgin doesn't mean that she deserved everything she got.

HH also took the fact that a girl-child had "high cheekbones" as a sign that she was probably also a nymphet, and just aching for his tender attentions.
 
Peder =
Y'all have fun! Hear?!
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Y'all get right back in here. And don't try to tell me you don't have the time or the energy to throw in an opinion now and again.

We'll happily accept one-liners. (Still stomps a foot.) :mad:
 
StillILearn said:
You pay attention when you read, KC. I think I just might have to go right on back in for a quick doubletake at McFate.
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It helped that I wrote at least two undergraduate papers on Lolita :D

But I found myself doing the same thing with Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad. You can't trust the narrator (and now that I think of it, the same goes for The Blind Assassin). You have to dig to get further at the truth. If I unwrapped Atwood's writing I bet I'd find more layers than I found upon the first reading. But that's a different thread...

Anyway, I would argue that Humbert didn't love Lolita the girl. He loved Lolita the idea, just as ABC said. Humbert is really a rather intellectual person, and one who seems to like things complicated. It doesn't seem far-fetched to me that he would love an idea. A depraved idea.
 
StillILearn said:
Read KristoCat's post about the wincing child again. Humbert wants you to blame Lolita for all that he does to her. The fact (if it is a fact -- I don't trust this narrator one teeny, tiny little bit) that the child was not a virgin doesn't mean that she deserved everything she got.
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No, no, no, I don't blame Lolita at all. It shocked me, what she got up to, but I don't blame her for what Humbert the Horrible did.

When I say I think he loved her, I mean... well, what KC said, she said it better than I could.
 
StillILearn said:
Peder =

Y'all get right back in here. And don't try to tell me you don't have the time or the energy to throw in an opinion now and again.

We'll happily accept one-liners. (Still stomps a foot.) :mad:
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But ya better do it here, because I see that people are still outright snotty about Nabokov out in the the further realms of this bookly and readerly enclave.
SHEESH! :mad:
 
steffee said:
No, no, no, I don't blame Lolita at all. It shocked me, what she got up to, but I don't blame her for what Humbert the Horrible did.

When I say I think he loved her, I mean... well, what KC said, she said it better than I could.
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You know, I wonder if we ever did discuss just exactly what Dolores got up to prior to her fiery affair with her stepfather. Without checking, I seem to remember Humbert telling us that Lo and her girlfriend probably had some form of homosexual contact at one point, and that they most certainly subsequently participated in alfresco heterosexual encounters with the camp leader's son on their morning tramps to the lake. Seems to me that Humbert claimed that these things had taken place during two summers running, which would have made our tiny temptress (respectively) eleven and twelve years old at the time. Isn't that more or less what HH told us? With florid flourishes, of course.
 
I think you're absolutely right, kristocat, about Humber hiding (his vices and deceptions) behind art. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
 
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