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Mr. Nemo posted:Third policeman by O’brian. I found at-swim-two birds to be really fun but agree with your summation of Third Policeman.
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Jun 2, 2022 10:27
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Heath posted:There's a point in the book that shook me, especially on the re-read, where Dolores says, unambiguously and directly to HH, "You raped me." It's where Nabokov doesn't just pull the veil aside, he rips the whole thing off. I don't know how you can read the book and not feel her utter contempt for him. Is that when she’s crying on a chair in the corner of a hotel room? Because, yeah, no punches pulled there.
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Jun 2, 2022 16:13
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lifg posted:Is that when she’s crying on a chair in the corner of a hotel room? Because, yeah, no punches pulled there. That's not the one I was thinking of, it was actually this, page 204 in my annotated copy, part 2, the end of section 13. (Knowing him, maybe intentionally numbered as such) Edit: I'm going to spoiler this for people who haven't read it.  This paragraph is loving amazing. The whole thing is waxing over this idyllic description of this child he claims to love so much that even this memory of her makes him clutch his beating, aching heart, and sandwiched right in the middle of it are three words that undermine the entire premise of his whole story, that their initial sexual encounter was fundamentally consensual. And it passes right by him! He doesn't even seem to hear it! He never hears her, he only ever observes her. He heard her say it in the sense that he's reporting what she said faithfully (because, of course, why else would he include that line in this self-serving missive of his?) but he doesn't listen to her. Same as how he hears her sobbing at night and merely reports it in the prose because he is such a piece of poo poo that he can't even allow himself to emotionally approach the idea that this girl he claims to love is miserable with him and because of him. HH is a top tier character. He's one of the few characters in fiction who makes me actually angry. I generally can separate myself from fiction to the point where I don't get invested but even just reading this paragraph again and thinking about this book makes me want to kick his jaw in. That's what is meant by the power of good writing over good story. None of this is explicit in the text, it is entirely built upon your assessment of the characters as a reader. Nabokov will never tell you anything. He gives you glimpses of the "real" story. Heath fucked around with this message at 18:15 on Jun 2, 2022 |
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Jun 2, 2022 18:04
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Much earlier in the book, at the very end of part 1, on page 143 in my annotated copy there is another accusation of rape. It seems clear to me that this is intended as a setup for the part I quoted above, the "playful" accusation that she has entrapped him and may threaten to call the cops with a "false" rape accusation. There are times in the book where you can tell that HH is masking what was actually happening. There is no way in hell this girl was smiling. No girl would describe herself as "daisy-fresh," especially not a 12 year old. This is pure invention on Humbert's part, except for the "I ought to call the police and tell them you raped me." And she definitely called him a fucker, or something. He makes great effort to dissociate himself from what he did. He says she complains of "pains" and that he tore something inside her, very deliberately listing the pains first as though there were some doubt that the phenomenon was caused by his aggression by reversing cause and effect, and when he nearly runs over a squirrel she calls him a name, as if to imply that she called him an rear end in a top hat because he nearly hit the squirrel and not because he just finished raping her. Heath fucked around with this message at 18:30 on Jun 2, 2022 |
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Jun 2, 2022 18:27
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that second one in the car is the one that stands out in my memory, just horrifying, and he just laughs it off and moves on. that is not subtle, and is just sickening, and is one of the turning points where you start to realize (if you haven't already) that HH is a vile monster. another thing that stood out to me is how he is constantly saying that it's only Lolita that makes him feel this way, only her, and specifically because she looks like a girl he was in love with when he was a boy. Yet throughout the book there are many occurrences of him ogling other children. basically everything out of his mouth is a pretty lie.
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Jun 2, 2022 18:45
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I just looked at the previous page and Nabokov even sets up the loving squirrel! "Oh, a squashed squirrel," she said. "What a shame." "Yes, isn't it?" (Eager, hopeful Hum.) I apparently scribbled "gently caress you gently caress you gently caress you" in the margins of these few pages last time I read it
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Jun 2, 2022 18:54
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It's just occurred to me that the movie adaptations always make the classic mistake of assuming a novel's narrator is fully reliable. Kubrick played with that a little bit but in general it is not the same effect to have a film that shows the unreliable parts -- because the audience can only assume what is shown is actually real.
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Jun 2, 2022 22:05
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They should just have the wavy picture and harp chords kick in whenever the narrator is unreliable
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Jun 2, 2022 22:08
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I dunno, I feel like Kubrick's adaptation is unfairly maligned. He tried to capture the comedic tone, which is also in the novel, and it's framed in such a way that you can still assume HH is an unreliable narrator and that the film is framed through his perspective. It's not the novel, cuz it's literally unadaptable, but it's not nearly as foolhardy or tone-deaf as it's been criticized as being. I agree that novel HH is one of the best literary characters. Just a horrible, detestable person who's just clever enough and is just coercive enough to make you drop your guard every so often until you're reminded how absolutely horrible the entire thing is. Still one of my favorite novels. I did recently see Lolita pop up on a list of Best Literary Romance novels. I know non-con stuff is popular in romance novels these days, but holy poo poo, that's hosed up. edit: The Jamie Loftus podcast, The Lolitacast, is excellent, by the way. It's dark, but was it insightful about Vladimir, and also importantly his wife Vera. It got me to buy Vera by Stacy Shiff. Franchescanado fucked around with this message at 22:17 on Jun 2, 2022 |
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Jun 2, 2022 22:15
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welp, just ordered the annotated edition. I read Lolita when I was ~20, so I'm sure 13 years later I'll actually understand it
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Jun 2, 2022 22:34
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Nabokov personally approved of Kubrick's version (I think he talks about it in a Playboy interview?) If you haven't read it in a long time I really recommend reading it without the annotations and then again with them. See what you catch the first time around and compare it to the annotations.
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Jun 2, 2022 22:50
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Heath posted:Nabokov personally approved of Kubrick's version (I think he talks about it in a Playboy interview?) Good idea. That will let me read it on my kindle which will let me hide what I am reading
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Jun 2, 2022 22:51
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mdemone posted:It's just occurred to me that the movie adaptations always make the classic mistake of assuming a novel's narrator is fully reliable. Kubrick played with that a little bit but in general it is not the same effect to have a film that shows the unreliable parts -- because the audience can only assume what is shown is actually real. That's amusing because HH is the original unreliable narrator, the example Wayne Booth used when inventing the term. One thing I think is important to note is that Booth didn't invent the term to describe a narrator who lies to you about what happened. What makes a narrator unreliable is that their judgment, specifically their moral and ethical judgment, is suspect. So there are no actually real parts hidden by the unreliable parts. Everything HH says that happens happens. It's just that he presents it all as something beautiful and romantic when it's actually disgusting and predatory. Booth made this important distinction for two reasons. One, you really can't say the narrator of a work of fiction is lying to you unless you have another narrator to put them straight, and then why would you trust that second narrator over the first? Nevermind that we're talking about the truth value of fictional statements. Second, you can have a narrator seemingly make stuff up and still be completely reliable. Booth uses Nick Carraway from Gatsby as an example of a reliable narrator who relates to the reader something he cannot himself know: the argument in the garage that he is not present for.
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Jun 2, 2022 22:51
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It's like the example I posted above. Humbert is a liar, but he's a delusional liar. Everything he says to you he says in the context of an appeal to your sympathy for him. The first thing he does is implore you to look upon the "tangle of thorns" that traps him. If he were an out and out liar, he would have no reason to include the times Dolores outright calls him a rapist, or the sobbing, or any of that. The only thing that seems to me to be a straight up falsehood is the circumstances around Charlotte's death -- he makes multiple allusions to her having been strangled later in the book (I can't remember the exact quote but there's a line that's like "Should I marry [x] and strangle her?" and there may have even been an implied "...too?") But even then the brilliant thing about the book is that the delusional lying throws the actual lying into question. Is it a lie? How much of it is a lie? Where's the truth? It's scattered in bits and pieces and you'll only ever get a smattering of it and only if you're paying attention.
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Jun 2, 2022 23:13
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But then again as you said, Lo was unlikely to have called herself "daisy-fresh". Are we to view every single part of the narration as possibly suspect? And if we do that, as I think Nabokov might have endorsed, then what are we saying about the nature of truth in stories, or in reality?
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Jun 2, 2022 23:20
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PeterWeller posted:Booth made this important distinction for two reasons. One, you really can't say the narrator of a work of fiction is lying to you unless you have another narrator to put them straight, and then why would you trust that second narrator over the first? Nevermind that we're talking about the truth value of fictional statements. Second, you can have a narrator seemingly make stuff up and still be completely reliable. Booth uses Nick Carraway from Gatsby as an example of a reliable narrator who relates to the reader something he cannot himself know: the argument in the garage that he is not present for. Great post. I had forgotten that about Carraway's narration. And Fitzgerald must clearly have known what he was doing by including that.
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Jun 2, 2022 23:26
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Yeah, exactly. She calls herself "daisy-fresh" and then immediately after that the line about the police. I fully believe she said one of those things, but even then, I don't think she said it in the playful way that he is claiming she did. Everything is the truth and a lie simultaneously. The clarity is only made visible through a lens that is fundamentally distorted. There are parts where it is very clear that Dolores is speaking and then there are parts where Lolita is speaking. Her voice changes to suit HH's mood. When he needs her to be his nymphet, she's playful and sultry and teases him. When he is annoyed with her, she sounds like a regular 12 year old. The book is so fuckin good you guys
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Jun 2, 2022 23:30
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Heath posted:Yeah, exactly. She calls herself "daisy-fresh" and then immediately after that the line about the police. I fully believe she said one of those things, but even then, I don't think she said it in the playful way that he is claiming she did. Everything is the truth and a lie simultaneously. The clarity is only made visible through a lens that is fundamentally distorted. And this is the darkest move of all: Nabokov shows us that nothing we see, or think we know, should be regarded as Real. I think it was typical of his project, which was to show the unreality lurking above, behind, and beneath what we think of as socially-constructed reality.
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Jun 3, 2022 00:22
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making me want to read lolita again, as well as pale fire, and despair, which all are very similar in that the narrator is something completely other than what he is trying to show you
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Jun 3, 2022 00:33
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I just read the prologue. What a statement by Nabokov. Such a (well-earned) confidence.
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Jun 3, 2022 00:38
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blue squares posted:I just read the prologue. What a statement by Nabokov. Such a (well-earned) confidence. I loving love that poo poo
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Jun 3, 2022 00:56
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the pull quotes on my copy are all about how funny it is O_O
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Jun 3, 2022 01:00
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derp posted:the pull quotes on my copy are all about how funny it is O_O Go read the reviews written right after publication. They're about romance and men and everything but what the drat book is about.
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Jun 3, 2022 01:03
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Jun 3, 2022 01:05
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how embarassing
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Jun 3, 2022 01:09
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That is certainly an interpretation. ∨∨∨∨∨∨∨ Jesus, It's too bad that the Online media race to the bottom ended with all the journalists being dumb kids without a clue and all the editors were non existent cause someone really needed to step in and say "What you just wrote makes you look like a total loving idiot" Gaius Marius fucked around with this message at 02:02 on Jun 3, 2022 |
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Jun 3, 2022 01:11
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At the risk of steering the thread into talking about people talking about Lolita rather than the book itself, this is still the reigning heavyweight champ in the category of "worst Lolita review"
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Jun 3, 2022 01:29
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The one thing I dislike about reading Nabokov is sometimes I’ll come across a word I don’t know, so I look it up. But then the definition still doesn’t really explain it, so I click on “see it used in a sentence”, and the example is the exact sentence I was reading. Happens with David Foster Wallace too.
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Jun 3, 2022 05:05
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All the best writers make up words
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Jun 3, 2022 06:01
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derp posted:another thing that stood out to me is how he is constantly saying that it's only Lolita that makes him feel this way, only her, and specifically because she looks like a girl he was in love with when he was a boy. Yet throughout the book there are many occurrences of him ogling other children. basically everything out of his mouth is a pretty lie. See also: HH's ideas about "nymphets," which is entirely his projecting his attraction to children into the concept that it's a trait of the children themselves, an arbitrary magnetic force against which he is helpless. It's just the "she was so mature, man" argument in a flowery coat of paint.
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Jun 3, 2022 07:29
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Started Libra. Loving it. My first DeLillo. Might do American Tabloid next. Or maybe I'll try another Pynchon. Why are these kinds of books so good? I love these horrible men and hate that they say stuff I sorta agree with. But with all this Nabokov talk maybe I'll read another of his. Only done Lolita and Pale Fire so far. Don't hear about his other stuff as much as those two, though.
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Jun 3, 2022 17:31
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Heath posted:It's like the example I posted above. Humbert is a liar, but he's a delusional liar. Everything he says to you he says in the context of an appeal to your sympathy for him. The first thing he does is implore you to look upon the "tangle of thorns" that traps him. If he were an out and out liar, he would have no reason to include the times Dolores outright calls him a rapist, or the sobbing, or any of that. The only thing that seems to me to be a straight up falsehood is the circumstances around Charlotte's death -- he makes multiple allusions to her having been strangled later in the book (I can't remember the exact quote but there's a line that's like "Should I marry [x] and strangle her?" and there may have even been an implied "...too?") I found the passage:  Towards the bottom. HH's thoughts turn violent basically any time an (adult) woman annoys him, but this line punched me in the head because it's not only aggressive, it's a weird intrusive thought, and it's so specific, and it speaks volumes about HH. The missing "...too?" booms so loudly for its absence that Nabokov sneaks a goddamn cannon into an otherwise fairly comical scene in which he is jabbing at boarding school culture. I love this about his writing especially, because he never gives you his reveals unless you're reading him very closely, it's always an entire world away from the actual event, and it's not only arresting when you catch it, it's very rewarding (and I appreciate Appel for not annotating these and leaving it to the reader to suss out) and he does this kind of thing constantly in his writing. Again, in my mind at least, this is what is meant by good writing over good story, and this is the kind of thing that separates capital-L Literature from mere fiction. Nabokov's stories are nonlinear in this way and you will see echoes of them reverberate in unexpected places rather than the kind of linear A then B then C kind of plot beat storytelling you get from most genre fiction especially. Not that linear plots are bad for being linear, but there's another degree of reward that comes with an author making you work for it a little bit. Nabokov never tells you that Charlotte's death is a lie because, for one thing at least, you can never be entirely sure, but because over the course of the book you will (probably) get a sense of HH as a character by virtue of being locked in his horrible little head with him. Edit: also worth noting that there is another little glimpse in the phrase "I'll thrash it out," another hint of physical violence that he likely inflicts on Dolores but is not explicit about, juxtaposed just prior to the bigger reveal just a couple of sentences down -- he skillfully plants that notion in your head just before distracting you with something much bigger. Heath fucked around with this message at 18:50 on Jun 3, 2022 |
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Jun 3, 2022 18:46
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Not to be vulgar, but the section that really paints the abuse in Lolita for me is the scene in the library where Dolores is trying to do homework or work on a project and HH leverages her interests into exploiting her into giving him a handjob. It’s just a clear cut-and-dried abuser exploiting this teenage child, and she’s described as being “bored”, when she’s just disassociating from the situation, and HH paints it as this sexy moment of seduction where she is in charge and treating him like a horny puppet. I don’t know how anyone reads that section and thinks it’s romantic or erotic. It’s written in a detached way to avoid being erotic or pornographic, but it’s also the most sexually explicit thing in the book and it’s just so sad, I don’t now how someone could read it otherwise. It’s worth noting (and I learned this from the Loftus podcast) that Nabakov was sexually molested by a family member (or family friend?) as a child, and the quiet pain of abuse being ignored by selfish/evil/ignorant adults is a constant through the book. I need to read another Nabakov. Maybe Pnin or Ada or Ardor. What’s the next best one after Pale Fire and Lolita?
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Jun 3, 2022 19:43
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if you liked pale fire, i'd say give Despair a try, it is hilarious. invitation to a beheading is very weird and dark and funny and good
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Jun 3, 2022 19:51
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Ada, or Ardor was good, but if I'm being totally honest it didn't resonate with me as much as PF or Lolita did, even though it is at least as dense as either of them if not moreso. It is definitely on my list for a re-read. I think the sheer scope of it is both exceptional among his work and also a bit of a barrier since it lacks the obsessive focus of the intense few years of Lolita or the meandering puzzlebox nature of PF as it covers the entire lifespan of its protagonists and takes place in a world that is even more explicitly not-Earth than PF does with its fictional kingdom.
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Jun 3, 2022 19:52
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Invitation to a beheading is a fun little Kafkaesque story
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Jun 3, 2022 19:54
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The Gift is one I've been wanting to read for a while and definitely seems in line with the Pale Fire side of his work.
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Jun 3, 2022 20:33
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It paints a bleak picture of human sexual and romantic relations, but this seems like a reasonable interpretation to me? Nabokov is suggesting that we all, to a certain extent, become like Humbert Humbert when we desire another person, because the act of desire inescapably involves objectifying and dehumanising the person towards whom it is directed. On some deep level, even a consensual relationship involves a kind of wilful blindness and selfishness. That's part of the horror of the book. Isn't it? The reviewer isn't saying "fellas, we've all been there, am i rite" On the other hand, I dunno if I agree that there's an implication HH implying secretly murdered Charlotte, precisely because he's so happy to admit his desperate willingness to do it, his immediate consideration of murder as an option in other situations, and his successful murder of Quilty. So why would he feel the need to lie?
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Jun 3, 2022 23:58
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Lobster Henry posted:because the act of desire inescapably involves objectifying and dehumanising the person towards whom it is directed does it???
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Jun 4, 2022 00:48
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Lobster Henry posted:On the other hand, I dunno if I agree that there's an implication HH implying secretly murdered Charlotte, precisely because he's so happy to admit his desperate willingness to do it, his immediate consideration of murder as an option in other situations, and his successful murder of Quilty. So why would he feel the need to lie? Recall that this memoir is being addressed to a jury. HH doesn't need to lie about killing Quilty -- that murder was a crime of passion, and the victim was a predator and child pornographer who snatched Lolita away, and he deserved what he got. It's sympathetic in that way. Admitting to killing Charlotte is less so, since she is fully innocent.
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Jun 4, 2022 00:50
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