I finally finished Lolita, and it really is fabulous. I haven’t had time to read long pieces of involved fiction in far too long, and this was a real winner. The prose is unbelievably excellent, and the latter chapters perfectly convey the (perhaps disquietingly familiar) sensation of “Oh shit, I think I’m losing it.” For people considering reading, the tight prose means it is not a quick read, so you might want to invest the two hours in watching one of the movie adaptations first, I’ve only seen the newer one, and, while naturally lacking in richness, I thought it conveyed the texture of the story quite well.
I usually hate defacing books, even my own, but while reading I’ve dogeared and margin-marked about half a dozen passages I’m particularly found of in my copy. I’ve actually memorized the opening paragraph, partly for sport and partly as a memory exercise (I’ve always been terrible at rote memorization, I remember things by collapsing their meanings); the prose here is complicated and significant enough that it resists my usual reduction. A few of the other lines that I really, really enjoy (”Nuggets” in the parlance of my peculiar senior English teacher):
“Despite my manly looks , I am horribly timid. My romantic soul gets all clammy and shivery at the thought of running into some awful unpleasantness”
*Waves excitedly at the familiarity* I’m pretty contextually shy, so most people who don’t know me well only see one mode or the other, and assume that’s how I am. It makes for some interesting double-takes.
“…and the red sun of desire and decision (the two things that create a live world) rose higher and higher…”
I just like the phrasing for the process of enacting one’s desires.
“The very attraction immaturity has for me lies not so much in the limpidity of pure young forbidden fairy child beauty as in the security of a situation where infinite perfections fill the gap between the little given and the great promised — the great rosegray never-to-be-had.”
I love the expression of the (again, disquietingly familiar) sensation of almost preferring to remain in the perfect purity of potential instead of plunging oneself into the ambiguities of reality. (The pedophilia isn’t the familiar part, I don’t do that, although some people might snarkily invoke my reproducible taste for the slight and strange in argument.)
One of my favorite features is the author’s retrospective On a Book Titled Lolita appended to later printings, which is almost better than the novel itself: Nabokov, in his perfect prose, provides a humorous, high brow, critique of criticism from publishers received in attempting to get the novel published, which develops naturally into a clever social commentary. In particular, it contains all the jadedness toward classical literary analysis that keeps me away from the literary in any formal capacity.
(I’m partially conscious that I’m trying to emulate Nabokov’s peculiar alliterative prose here, I enjoy doing so too much to try to correct it. At this point it’s probably good for me anyway.)
In a partially related matter, I’ve been listening to Bif Naked (Who is an (adopted) child of a former UK professor. Colorful company.) while I finished Lolita. I got Lucky stuck in my head from my previously mentioned recent fascination with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is really a pretty typical example of Joss Whedon’s excellent taste for integrating pop music into his TV projects. It’s a bit melodramatic and punk-ish for my usual tastes, but suits the reading.
Perhaps my next post will be about one of my various technological projects, I’m finding that I most want to blog about things which are outside the mundane for me, while I know that really at this point in my life the technical endeavors are the novelties, and the novel amusements are comparatively mundane.
