9 ms·

I just reread Lolita at 45, for the first time since I was 14. I slogged through it the first time, and didn't particularly enjoy it. All I remember from the f

I just reread Lolita at 45, for the first time since I was 14. I slogged through it the first time, and didn't particularly enjoy it. All I remember from the first reading is that HH seemed kind of icky. I was barely older than Delores was in the first half of the novel, and I didn't really understand all the implications. I probably skimmed a great deal of the book without paying attention to it. Much of the subtlety of the story and all of the brilliant writing went right over my head. Then I happened to pick up The Fued, about the friendship and subsequent falling out between Nabakov and Edmund Wilson. It mentioned several times that Lolita was a runaway success, and it made Nabakov famous. I thought there must be something more to Lolita than I remembered, so I picked up a copy at the library. It was a whole different book. This time, I found the story both riveting and disturbing. On the first read, I knew that what he was doing would be called abuse, but I didn't really understand how he took advantage of her trust and naivety and adolescent rebelliousness. Or how awful it is to dehumanize pre teen girls and characterize them as sexual objects called nymphets. HH claims to know that he took something irreplaceable from her and ruined her childhood. But - and I think this is why they say he is an unreliable narrator - it's not clear if he really believes what he's saying, or if it's a calculated ploy to garner sympathy. The writing is incredible. The story is troubling and fascinating, and stayed in my mind a long time after. RIP Delores Schiller.

whateveracct 6y ago
when a story stays with you like this, you know there's something to it. all my favorite films and books had me thinking about them months after the fact. even if it was just one part.
grey-area 6y ago
It is a remarkable story on many levels. It's also very disturbing, as it manages to make you feel sympathy for an odious character. I did end up wondering how Nabokov could so completely imagine this world and this character, which was also troubling. I don't think anyone is ready to read this as a child, not because it is going to corrupt children (who are routinely exposed to exactly this sort of manipulation in their teen years), but because there are so many levels you'd miss. Truly a masterpiece, in spite of the icky subject matter, some parts are really dark in retrospect, but it's handled with such a light touch it's hard to look away.
- BayAreaEscapee 6y ago
  My father reads voraciously. Whenever we talked about a book I was assigned in high school, he would say, "Literature is wasted on the young." Now I understand what he meant and I agree with him. I understand so much more of literature now that I am well into adulthood.
  - javajosh 6y ago
    The median age of working adults is probably around 40 or so, including those who's job it is to evaluate literature for use in schools. So it makes sense that you'd appreciate their choices more when you turn 40 or so. This is an interesting situation, because it creates a reading list that is a "projected aspiration". We hope, I guess, that kids will read precociously. Education is, after all, the teaching of civilization's most important messages compressed into a fixed, very short time-span. School gets kids "caught up" on the civilizational conversations about things. But so much of the art and literature of humanity is like Lolita, in that it requires lots of actual living to appreciate (unlike algebra), so its position is...odd. I wonder if, by being exposed to these things at a young age, we give kids a "shared coordinate system" to interpret and express their world, and so shape their choices in it.
  - jfengel 6y ago
    Literature, history, and math are all wasted on the young. We get exposed to a lot of things that we don't understand and can't appreciate, in the hopes that it will click for us later. I honestly don't know if that really works, or if it's just cargo cult. I do know that I considered my English classes, and now I run a Shakespeare theater troupe. Much of my goal there is to present the Shakespeare that would have appealed to me at the time. I can't tell if I'm here because, despite, or totally disconnected from my education.
    - leetcrew 6y ago
      > Much of my goal there is to present the Shakespeare that would have appealed to me at the time. I think there's something to this idea. I remember we first read the apology in translation sometime in early highschool. everyone thought it was boring af and no one cared. totally different when we read it later in my ancient greek class. the teacher really knew how to play to her audience, and at every bit of (mostly untranslatable) wordplay she would stop to point out how socrates was roasting his interlocutors. to be fair, it's a certain kind of student that self-selects into highschool ancient greek, but the class definitely got a lot more out of it that time around. you might not like to teach the apology as "the story of socrates the chad", but you gotta meet your audience where they are.
Bodell 6y ago
I too read this around 14 and have revisited recently at 30. I was most intrigued by the but I fully written sentences when I was younger but now I’m older see it in a much more complicated light. A good sort of complication. I think of Lolita as a puzzle of a story. There are quite a few clues that lead to a metaphor that make since of HH’s proclamations at the end. I think Nabokov was satirizing himself as an artist through HH’s character. This view makes Delores the incarnation of “art” and HH the artist. The artist “loves” art as it affirms his whole life and reason for being. He seeks to control art, own it, and manipulate it for his own purposes. HH does not realize till the end that art/Delores lives and breaths on its/her own and that this autonomy outside of his control is truly what makes her her and art beautiful. Her struggle becomes real to him in the end, even if only a glimpse he does to me seem to actually recognize her as something separate not something he owns. He sees that seeking to calcify art only kills what was special about it in the first place; something like worshiping a corpse. It reminded me of a statement David foster Wallace said once. (I’m paraphrasing heavily here) when I’m done with a book I’m dead and the book lives on through the readers. I think he was trying to say that he does not control the ultimate meaning of his own work and if he did it would be the other way around his book/art would be dead. Amy Hungerford has 3 lectures on Lolita this is the 2nd one given by a guest speaker. I suggest all of them (Hungerford is a great literary analyst) but this one is a compelling argument for the above. https://youtu.be/QPnxLNFzA8s https://youtu.be/QPnxLNFzA8s

whateveracct 6y ago

when a story stays with you like this, you know there's something to it. all my favorite films and books had me thinking about them months after the fact. even if it was just one part.

grey-area 6y ago

It is a remarkable story on many levels. It's also very disturbing, as it manages to make you feel sympathy for an odious character. I did end up wondering how Nabokov could so completely imagine this world and this character, which was also troubling. I don't think anyone is ready to read this as a child, not because it is going to corrupt children (who are routinely exposed to exactly this sort of manipulation in their teen years), but because there are so many levels you'd miss. Truly a masterpiece, in spite of the icky subject matter, some parts are really dark in retrospect, but it's handled with such a light touch it's hard to look away.

BayAreaEscapee 6y ago
My father reads voraciously. Whenever we talked about a book I was assigned in high school, he would say, "Literature is wasted on the young." Now I understand what he meant and I agree with him. I understand so much more of literature now that I am well into adulthood.
- javajosh 6y ago
  The median age of working adults is probably around 40 or so, including those who's job it is to evaluate literature for use in schools. So it makes sense that you'd appreciate their choices more when you turn 40 or so. This is an interesting situation, because it creates a reading list that is a "projected aspiration". We hope, I guess, that kids will read precociously. Education is, after all, the teaching of civilization's most important messages compressed into a fixed, very short time-span. School gets kids "caught up" on the civilizational conversations about things. But so much of the art and literature of humanity is like Lolita, in that it requires lots of actual living to appreciate (unlike algebra), so its position is...odd. I wonder if, by being exposed to these things at a young age, we give kids a "shared coordinate system" to interpret and express their world, and so shape their choices in it.
- jfengel 6y ago
  Literature, history, and math are all wasted on the young. We get exposed to a lot of things that we don't understand and can't appreciate, in the hopes that it will click for us later. I honestly don't know if that really works, or if it's just cargo cult. I do know that I considered my English classes, and now I run a Shakespeare theater troupe. Much of my goal there is to present the Shakespeare that would have appealed to me at the time. I can't tell if I'm here because, despite, or totally disconnected from my education.
  - leetcrew 6y ago
    > Much of my goal there is to present the Shakespeare that would have appealed to me at the time. I think there's something to this idea. I remember we first read the apology in translation sometime in early highschool. everyone thought it was boring af and no one cared. totally different when we read it later in my ancient greek class. the teacher really knew how to play to her audience, and at every bit of (mostly untranslatable) wordplay she would stop to point out how socrates was roasting his interlocutors. to be fair, it's a certain kind of student that self-selects into highschool ancient greek, but the class definitely got a lot more out of it that time around. you might not like to teach the apology as "the story of socrates the chad", but you gotta meet your audience where they are.

Bodell 6y ago

I too read this around 14 and have revisited recently at 30. I was most intrigued by the but I fully written sentences when I was younger but now I’m older see it in a much more complicated light. A good sort of complication. I think of Lolita as a puzzle of a story. There are quite a few clues that lead to a metaphor that make since of HH’s proclamations at the end. I think Nabokov was satirizing himself as an artist through HH’s character. This view makes Delores the incarnation of “art” and HH the artist. The artist “loves” art as it affirms his whole life and reason for being. He seeks to control art, own it, and manipulate it for his own purposes. HH does not realize till the end that art/Delores lives and breaths on its/her own and that this autonomy outside of his control is truly what makes her her and art beautiful. Her struggle becomes real to him in the end, even if only a glimpse he does to me seem to actually recognize her as something separate not something he owns. He sees that seeking to calcify art only kills what was special about it in the first place; something like worshiping a corpse. It reminded me of a statement David foster Wallace said once. (I’m paraphrasing heavily here) when I’m done with a book I’m dead and the book lives on through the readers. I think he was trying to say that he does not control the ultimate meaning of his own work and if he did it would be the other way around his book/art would be dead. Amy Hungerford has 3 lectures on Lolita this is the 2nd one given by a guest speaker. I suggest all of them (Hungerford is a great literary analyst) but this one is a compelling argument for the above. https://youtu.be/QPnxLNFzA8s https://youtu.be/QPnxLNFzA8s