I don’t know any people like the latter, but plenty of the former. And, as I said, people who pretend to have read good books are far more common than those who actually have. So, yeah, it’s one halfassed anecdotal diagnosis against another.
I read the book. It was ok, and it’s not a bad read for people who are interested in the craft of writing and taking a critical approach to the author’s relationship to the protagonist and the reader’s relationship to the protagonist. But having gone to a liberal arts school and gotten a liberal arts degree, I couldn’t square the book’s popularity with its content. It simply wasn’t that great a book. And yet, when talking to guys about what their favorite books are, that book appeared a little too often for my comfort. I just didn’t find the prose that stunning or the characters that compelling. It just got really creepy after a while.
Lolita is a book that most quality authors would be pleased to have produced on their best day, and the baggage that being a pop culture phenomenon as an idea has attached to it is purely an unintended consequence that sometimes comes about when people produce magnificent things. I’m surprised that you’ve read it and only have generic criticisms to offer about something that has clearly proved so meaningfully distasteful to you.
I’m not sure why you’re mentioning your liberal arts credentials, since that could really mean anything and has little bearing on the overtly fallacious implications you appear to have drawn from an inordinate concentration of pretentious creeps in your life.
Where have I said I find the book distasteful? I said it was ok. It was good, not great. My issues with the book come from having too many conversations with guys who couldn’t offer up anything better than the most generic of praises for the book. And as those conversations took place in my liberal arts days, and not, say, a book club for recently released sex offenders, it was worth a mention.
I’m surprised you reacted so strongly against a post that read a whole lot more like “people’s interpretations to this book is creepy” than a criticism of the book per se.
Whenever a guy tells me that Lolita is one of his favorite novels, I usually don’t feel too bad about assuming he’s a creep and a perv.
Lolita is one of my favorite novels. I don’t find it titillating, but it does happen to be the single most accurate, convincing expression of the agony of unrequited or doomed love that I’ve ever encountered in literature. That it happens to depict this experience through the funhouse mirror of a mad protagonist committing unspeakable acts upon an innocent girl may be at right angles to its aesthetic purpose or intrinsic to it – I’m not critic enough to say. I can only acknowledge the enormous power of Nabokov’s vision, as I perceive it.
And as far as prose style goes, it is the best piece of purple prose I’ve ever read. Some people don’t like purple prose, and beginning writers attempt it very much at their peril, but when it’s done as well as Nabokov managed it there, I surrender to it.
I pretty much agree with this. One of the major components of the Iliad is Achilles’ humanization - as I think Bernard Knox put it in his introduction to the Robert Fagles translation, Achilles and Helen are the only mortals in the poem that (at some point) possess the same stature or power as the Gods. By the time the Iliad opens*, Helen has already returned to mortal status - but Achilles’ (justified) wrath remains intractable even to the persuasions of Nestor and company. Unlike a mortal, his rage is subject to nothing, his pride and honour are paramount. With his surrender of Hector’s body to Priam, we see him relent and the poem ends.
Part of the tragedy, I think most readers agree, is that Hector is absolutely not a villain. Perhaps I’m biased in my readings, but in my experience he’s typically regarded as the best of men in the Iliad - a great fighter, leader and family man. In battle he’s second only to Achilles, and Achilles is arguably something both more and less than human. I don’t have my copy to hand, but I recall that the very last line of the poem is about Hector being laid to rest. I’ve honestly never encountered anyone who considers Hector a villain.
I’ve gone on far too long but in summary, I think the Iliad is too sophisticated to consider as merely a war story where the good Greeks defeat the evil Trojans who kidnapped the beautiful Helen. Even Agamemnon who is arguably the closest to a “villain” (he has marshalled the armies for reasons more pragmatic than honourable; his jealousy causes him to slight Achilles by taking Briseis**, thus lengthening the war and arguably forcing the eventual dual between Achilles and Hector over Patroclus’ death) is given moments where he acts with great courage and skill. While the Odyssey may be more straightforwardly entertaining (it can be read as a simple adventure story, which is of course why there have been so many more adaptations and versions of it), I ultimately find the Iliad more interesting and sophisticated.
Now, to write 10000 words on Lolita so that I seem not just like a lunatic but like a creepy lunatic.
*I once talked to someone about the film Troy, and they told me they thought the scene where Paris seduces Helen from Menelaus was handled with much greater sophistication in the novel [sic], which is akin to George Costanza being consoled by Holly Go-lightly getting together with George Peppard.
** Who, as Agamemnon tells his intermediaries to convey to Achilles in Homer’s luminous idiom: “I totally didn’t touch anywhere it counts. Just a bit of frenching.”
I admit, at some point, you do have to say goodbye to the characters, e.g. the way Fritz Leiber said goodbye to Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, but O’Brian’s books were just so very well done, and there was certainly room for at least a few more books…
I know exactly what you mean, but I also rebel against the idea. It’s certainly harder to play up their literary merits when they’ve got this massive, sprawling, plot-for-plot’s sake 20 book narrative. But what the hell, that’s kind of a silly reason to deprecate them anyway. I was always glad there was more until I ran out.
I’m surprised that you’re surprised. This is Nabokov, 1/3rd of my holy trinity, and I don’t like to stand idly by when he’s being held hostage to the image of one of his works held up by people that are unlikely to have even read it. If this was “opinions about people who like certain books” it might be less incendiary. As it stands, the gauntlet was tossed and I had no choice.
Here’s an unpopular opinion, although it’s more “unpopular by omission”. John Gardner is an amazing fucking writer and it’s incredible that, for the most part, the canon has completely ignored him.
“The Wreckage of Agathon” by itself should cement his place in history.
I’d like to agree, because it’s a weird little work, and just considered analytically, it should seem both pretentious and twee at the same time, but I can’t. I really like de Saint-Exupery, even in translation. It’s just a shame he should have lost a P-38 like that.
That book on writing (“The Art of Fiction”, I think) is the only thing I read by him. Not to be confused, by the way, with the British genre fiction writer of the same name who did some mediocre James Bond novels.
Your off-kilter interpretation of the work notwithstanding, this confuses the hell out of me. I would never think to describe Lolita’s prose style as “purple prose.” It’s an unreliable narrator narrating in-character.
I read an interesting theory that posed that the Oddyssey is the first book about a hero in a more modern sense. Before it, every tale told was about a hero who was always bigger, stronger, faster, or in some physical sense better than his opponents. I mean, Achilles is a nearly unstoppable killing machine. He’s boring.
Odysseus has to use his brains. It’s the first time that a hero thinks his way out of situations, where being witty and a trickster is not a vice - and indeed the Odyssey remained exceptional in this for centuries after. For these reasons, it has the more interesting and culturally significant and resonant narrative.
Odysseus angers a god, suffers and deals with the consequences and keeps fighting through.
Achilles is pretty much a god, other than his heel, and because of the heel you know what’s going to happen and what the tragedy will be. The writing may be better, but the story isn’t.
Well, there’s the first lengthy story that was ever recorded, that of Gilgamesh. Not about an unstoppable hero so much as about the heartbreak of loss and grandiose attempts to avoid it.
