Posted by Joffre on 16/4/2009, 16:19:16, in reply to "Re: Lolita and what I'm reading now"
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I watched the three Lolita lectures again; it had been so long since I first watched. I begin to regret sharing them. They annoy me, and I'm no longer sure I'll watch them all. Such things as the characteristics of modernism are reasonably interesting, but I don't think either lecturer said anything at all about the novel that interested me. I found it amusing that Hungerford thought her students so dumb they'd have to pay special attention to figure out who Mrs. Richard Schiller was. And then she immediately said that Vivian Darkbloom was palindromic. Moolbkrad Naiviv? Oh well, on to the book.
I wonder if we normally fail to ask an important question about Lolita, or if we perhaps ask the question but miss something important about it. Why is Humbert telling the story he tells? He is charged, presumably, with the murder of Quilty. I don't really see how the court would know about Lolita. Being a child molestor doesn't seem such a good mitigating circumstance for murder.
The more I read Lolita (this was the fourth time), the less sure I feel about my impressions of the story. I guess this is what usually happens with a novel that seems more or less clear on the first reading. And with Nabokov, I think that there is some proper reading. He said he liked composing problems with elegant solutions. Hungerford suggests that the problem is how to make people like a pedaphile. If that were the case, the book would be the solution, not the problem. Nabokov might actually have said riddle, I'm not sure. It's interesting that Nabokov liked Robbe-Grillet. I do not think RG's works have solutions. I think uncertainty was, for lack of a better word, the point or part of it.
Back to the lecture for a moment, Goldstone refers to Petersburg as obscure. It's in Bloom's Western Canon and Burt's Novel 100. It doesn't seem that obscure. And yet it's certainly the most obscure of Nabokov's four. I wonder why it is that Pevear and Volokhonsky haven't translated Petersburg. I think there are two translations of it. One incomplete, and the other done to no great acclaim by a couple of professors. I read the second and enjoyed it well enough.
Yeah, there are a lot of short story anthologies. There is even one called 50 Great Short Stories. But the contents didn't appeal to me much. I'll try to look for Francis Macomber online.
I too enjoyed your little poem.
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