Book Club

[cjbreed]

I might join in for round 2. Lolita just seems too out there and dark for my current depressive state.

i know it seems odd but imo this book isn't that dark at all. i had never read it before (and will have to struggle to finish by the deadline) but i was surprised to learn that it is actually very funny. of course the subject matter is horrible, but still, it's fuckin' funny...

ok, I haven't finished yet. Barely halfway but going pretty quickly now.

One line I just came upon and think is great:

"My habit of being silent when displeasured, or, more exactly, the cold and scaly quality of my displeasured silence, used to frighten Valeria out of her wits." p.94

ha! how pompous! What overly dramatic, self aggrandizing rephrasing! "cold and scaly quality"

I love how thoroughly Nabakov communicates the obsessions of Humbert. With himself and Lolita.

and this is why it is so funny. i love the charming nature of HH's casual arrogance and snide superiority. then coupled with his own self loathing and desperate powerlessness, I strangely find myself feeling sympathetic....for a twisted pedophile.

"why am i supposed to dislike HH? Oh right, because he rapes that little girl 3 times a day"

[habia]

Just finished. one day early at least...

I liked it. Very disturbing to me though, more so than perhaps any book I have read before. Humbert invoked absolutely no sympathy or fascination from me. The only redeeming factor Nabakov has given him is Humbert's intellect, and intellect only gets one so far...

The edition I read (Everyman's Library 1992) has an introduction by Martin Amis. I am familiar with some of Amis's work particularly concerning monsterism and humanity so this heavily colored my reading of the novel.

I paid a lot of attention to Humbert as a monster during my reading. His own self obsession and love but also the self deprecating moments. the use of animal traits in metaphor and simile for all characters also caught my attention.

more in depth reactions and thoughts later...

[landho]

Spent the last two weeks traveling and working. Was in Chicago doing interviews for a documentary. Stepped in a puddle of urine at a rest stop in Iowa. (Iowan rest stops are surprisingly nice.) Almost finished with Lolita; have a lot of thoughts on part 2 that I would like to share and discuss.

[habia]

"But instead I am lanky, big-boned, woolly-chested Humbert Humbert, with thick black eyebrows and a queer accent, and a cesspool full of rotting monsters behind his slow boyish smile." (p.46 part 1 chapter 11)

I am always interested by how people self identify. Here HH describes himself in relation to the perfection of tender childishness and eerie vulgarity of Lolita.

"lanky" "big boned" hairy. Humbert first focuses on the physical differences between himself and Lolita; between adult and child. Then he describes mentions his eyebrows and accent, which are two of the most obvious differences from the perspective of a child. Lolita looks up into his eyes when he speaks to her in his foreign voice and sees his thick eyebrows. Due to absence of Harold Haze, her true father, Lolita must be surrounded most of the time by women and other children thus having little experience with a mature, male complexion like Humbert’s

What stands out most to me however about this line is the guilty confession at the end. Humbert understands he is a monster and that nothing good comes from him, yet still he hides behind his smile and cunningly shapes himself to appeal to his adored nymphets.

Throughout the rest of the book HH repeatedly references himself using monstrous animals in metaphor and simile; “spider†(p. 57 and 148), possessing claws, talons, “cold and scaly†both of which are unhuman, reptilian (or fish?) attributes (p. 94) “tiger†(p. 117), talons and wings like bird of prey (p. 214), “ancient beast†within him (p. 285), attributes of hornet and kangaroo (p.321).

Then on page 145 Humbert describes Lolita as having “little claws.†I see this as a major turning point where despite his best intentions (can we even say best intentions about HH with a straight face?) he has unrevokably given Lolita claws and turned her into a monster like himself. Reminds me of the scene in the Mystic River movie (not read the book yet, is it good? I really like the movie) where Tim Robbins talks about pedophiles as vampires. That once child abuse is in you it doesn’t come out.

[terrible!]

Would like to join the next round...

[landho]

Part 2, Chapter 8

Remember thinking that this chapter was very unsettling, as HH's thoughts echo those of both an overprotective father and a jealous lover.

Was very struck by this: "...for there is nothing more conservative than a child, especially a girl-child..." Very insightful observation about the behavior of children, who feel the need to belong perhaps more than any other demographic.

[landho]

Part 2, Chapter 10

"...how I longed to...take your head between my unworthy hands, and pull the temple-skin back on both sides, and kissed your chinesed eyes..."

Part 2, Chapter 11

Miss Pratt's long-winded monologue is pretty revealing of Lolita's character, as we're given a glimpse of her behavior beyond the auspices of HH. She is smart but lazy, has little use for authority, deceitful, and indifferent (to point of appearing naive, of all things) on the subject of sex.

Something that's especially disturbing is Lolita's nonchalant attitude toward sex; she obviously realizes that she is in a monstrous situation and has perhaps been brainwashed by HH's threats, but there she is at the end of chapter 12, trading a handjob in a classroom for "sixty-five cents plus the permission to participate in the school play."

[landho]

Part 2, Chapter 12

A good example of autobiographical strains flittering into the text (although Nabokov has gone on the record saying that Lolita was his more supreme achievement because the narrator, HH, is so far removed emotionally from Nabokov himself): HH bought Lolita a bicycle and History of Modern American Painting. Lolita, however, did not take to high culture quite as HH hoped she would:

he wanted to know if the guy noon-napping on Doris Lee's hay was the father of the pseudo-voluptuous hoyden in the foreground, and could not understand why I said Grant Wood or Peter Hurd was good, and Reginald Marsh or Frederick Waugh awful.

Reminds me of "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," in which Seymour Glass is married to a girl whom he called "Miss Spiritual Tramp of 1948," or of Frederick teaching Lee in Hannah and Her Sisters, or (especially) of Sibylla refusing to speak further with her son, Ludo, until he can tell her why Liberace is bad.

Am thinking of HH's old-world, aristocratic leanings, which of course Nabokov had in spades. Lolita's reaction could be said to be typical of middlebrow America, but then again, it could also be typical of a young teenage girl. Some critics view HH and Lolita's relationship as the relationship between Europe and America--between the corruptive, worldly, older HH and the young, crass, impressionable, and debauched Lolita. Don't necessarily agree, but thought I should mention it.

[landho]

Claire Quilty and the Parodying of the Detective Novel

I should briefly mention this while I'm still thinking about it; when I first read literary criticism on Lolita, the writer mentioned that Lolita parodied the detective novel. I thought that Nabokov was parodying the detective novel by bringing Quilty out of nowhere (other than a few obtuse appearances) to be the main culprit. Little did I realize till much later that Quilty's appearance and presence actually pepper the entire manuscript. Throughout part 2, anytime that Lolita is not with HH, she is almost certainly either meeting up with Quilty or making contact with him--a furtive phone call here, a man in a car there, etc. These, of course, could be the result of HH's fevered and paranoid imagination, but then we have to consider the dual nature of Lolita itself: it is at once a memoir, written by HH fully after everything has happened (and so we have to assume that he has, in a way, full authorial omniscience [insofar as this is possible], excepting the excerpts from his diary), but at the same time the novel progresses linearly, with information and the plot being revealed over time. So it's a bit of a puzzle, as HH is fully aware of what is going to happen as he writes them down, but he chooses to reveal everything dramatically, as if he (the central character in his own manuscript) does not know what is going to happen.

[cjbreed]

I liked that HH let the story unfold the way it did, as if he did not know what was going to happen.

I believe he did this partly because he wanted to write a good story, to impress his audience (whom he addresses directly as "the Reader"). I think he intended this to be a popular book, in addition to being a confession to a jury.

Also, even though it is entirely a recollection after the fact, it is written as a bit of a diary, in chronological order, so he recounts it as accurately as possible in that, at the time, he actually didn't realize what was happening with Lo and Quilty...

[landho]

Part 2, Chapter 20

"I suppose I am especially susceptible to the magic of games. In my chess sessions with Gaston I saw the board as a square pool of limpid water with rare shells and stratagems rosily visible upon the smooth, tessellated bottom...."

This made me think of Nabokov himself, who wrote the ending to Lolita first and then worked forward toward that ending, creating as he wrote a feeling of inevitability and rushing emotion. But it also allowed him to craft all the wordplay and self-references that are woven throughout the book. (Nabokov was also a famous writer of chess puzzles.)

Also, did anyone else find it ridiculous that Quilty ran onto the tennis court for a few minutes and played a doubles match with Lolita before scrambling off? I certainly laughed.

[cjbreed]

^^i wasn't sure at the time if that was real or imagined or a false memory or what actually

[landho]

I have to think it was real, at least real in the world that HH created. Like the weird encounter HH had with Quilty outside of The Enchanted Hunters on the night when HH finally had sex with Lolita (part 1, chapter 28):

"Where the devil did you get her?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"I said: the weather is getting better."

"Seems so."

"Who's the lassie?"

"My daughter."

"You lie--she's not."

"I beg your pardon?"

"I said: July was hot. Where's her mother?"

"Dead."

"I see. Sorry. By the way, why don't you two lunch with me tomorrow. That dreadful crowd will be gone by then."

"We'll be gone too. Good night."

"Sorry. I'm pretty drunk. Good night. That child of yours needs a lot of sleep. Sleep is a rose, as the Persians say. Smoke?"

"Not now."

And of course the way Quilty behaves when HH shows up to murder him; his trading his sports car to that rabble of teenagers for a Chevrolet, which he tended kept switching out; etc.; his behavior is very bizarre (and hilarious), and I think running on to the tennis court is just the sort of thing he would do, especially since he's aware that his poor form will nettle HH so. (And he of course seems to know HH so well; look at the entries that he leaves in the hotel registries.)

[landho]

Part 2, Chapter 21

Additional intimations of Lolita's own aggressive sexuality (she is not wholly innocent):

And I also knew that the child, my child, knew he was looking, enjoyed the lechery of his look and was putting on a show of gambol and glee, the vile and beloved slut. As she made for the ball and missed it, she fell on her back, with her obscene young legs madly pedalling in the air; I could sense the musk of her excitement from where I stood....

And also of the sickness from which HH will eventually die:

I started to say something, and then sat down on the grass with a quite monstrous pain in my chest and vomited a torrent of browns and greens that I had never remembered eating.... And the next morning I felt strong enough to drive on (which in later years no doctor believed).

Funny because I tended to glance over bits like this when I previously read Lolita, so engrossed was I on the other aspects of the novel (the pedophilic, allusive, emotional, psychological, etc.) that I neglected the framework story. Also, Nabokov is such a careful writer that he never includes something that's not purposeful.

[cjbreed]

Part 2, Chapter 21

Additional intimations of Lolita's own aggressive sexuality (she is not wholly innocent):

And I also knew that the child, my child, knew he was looking, enjoyed the lechery of his look and was putting on a show of gambol and glee, the vile and beloved slut. As she made for the ball and missed it, she fell on her back, with her obscene young legs madly pedalling in the air; I could sense the musk of her excitement from where I stood....

Funny because I tended to glance over bits like this when I previously read Lolita, so engrossed was I on the other aspects of the novel (the pedophilic, allusive, emotional, psychological, etc.) that I neglected the framework story. Also, Nabokov is such a careful writer that he never includes something that's not purposeful.

The above passage stood out to me as well. It is sad because Lo's ability to relate with men is forever twisted as a result of being raised without a father in the home, and then this incestuous (she calls him dad) and abusive relationship with HH. In her mind she may only be able to illicit approval and interact with men in a sexual way, albeit remarkably childish in nature, even if she is not conscious of it.

It is also always a kick to listen to HH's mad jealous rants...

[landho]

Part 2, Chapter 22

And here, Lolita disappears. At the hospital, the nurse gives HH all the books that he gave Lolita. She has left them there. Another sign, perhaps, that he really didn't know her at all and that they really had nothing in common. (Sounds a little strange when you consider her age.)

Part 2, Chapter 25

HH enters into a two-year relationship with Rita, who is a small, attractive woman with faintly childlike qualities. She's also a wreck.

Part 2, Chapter 27

HH here rhapsodizes about the stasis that every literary character is doomed to. The irony here, of course, is that HH himself is a literary character.

I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No matter how many times we reopen "King Lear," never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert's father's timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds....

In an interview in Strong Opinions, Nabokov was asked whether during the course of writing a character took over the story and forced his hand along paths that he did not originally intend. He dismissed this notion as preposterous, implying that any writer that allows this to happen is basically a hack and insisting that his characters are basically tools that he uses to shape the novel. So HH seems to be acting as Nabokov's mouthpiece here, but more importantly, he almost seems to imply that his own path--that of kidnapping and sexually violating Lolita over the course of several years, that of murdering Clare Quilty, that of dying sick and alone in prison--is one that has been predetermined for him and that he is a victim of fate and that he has no free will. And in a very strange, very metaliterary way, he's absolutely right.

[landho]

The above passage stood out to me as well. It is sad because Lo's ability to relate with men is forever twisted as a result of being raised without a father in the home, and then this incestuous (she calls him dad) and abusive relationship with HH. In her mind she may only be able to illicit approval and interact with men in a sexual way, albeit remarkably childish in nature, even if she is not conscious of it.

It is also always a kick to listen to HH's mad jealous rants...

It's weird because I have wrestled through my numerous readings with the idea of victimhood in this book. Like Lolita clearly seems like a victim, but then it's revealed that she had a crush on CQ (who is a disgusting [albeit impotent] pervert) before she ever met HH. In fact, HH's resemblance to CQ may have been instrumental in her acquiescence to her being seduced by him.

And HH, who is a monster (albeit a monster who is conscious of his monstrousness), becomes to me a hero by the end of part 2. Whether he is cured of his condition or whether he is simply manipulating the reader with his emotive, seeringly honest and heartbreaking prose, it is impossible to say. But every time I read the last forty pages of this book, my heart breaks and my stomach hurts, so acute are the emotions that are stirred up in me. (This should carry additional weight as others have speculated that, in lieu of a heart, I have an engine, perhaps built by Honda, that sits in my chest and pumps blood throughout my body.)

[cjbreed]

It's weird because I have wrestled through my numerous readings with the idea of victimhood in this book. Like Lolita clearly seems like a victim, but then it's revealed that she had a crush on CQ (who is a disgusting [albeit impotent] pervert) before she ever met HH. In fact, HH's resemblance to CQ may have been instrumental in her acquiescence to her being seduced by him.

That's what I mean, I think it is both. Victim and seductress. In other words, her experiences (at camp, with CQ, HH, etc.) are extreme to say the least, and have released her innate sexuality (which exists in everyone) before she has the mental and emotional capacity to cope with it properly or indulge it or use it in a healthy way.

She understands sex, what its about, the physicality of it, the power it holds (over men) and in her mind, she is just having normal adult relations. And getting what she thinks she wants in return (candy, clothes, money, movies). But she's a child, with the naive mind of a child. There is nothing normal about this...

Hell, she ends up married and pregnant at seventeen. She has been ruled by sex and sexuality and all its potential perversions for many of her developing years. She is jacked up for sure....

[landho]

Part 2, Chapter 29 (the Most Important Passage in Lolita)

HH sees Lolita again after having not seen her for three years:

Couple of inches taller. Pink-rimmed glasses. New, heaped-up hairdo, new ears. How simple! The moment, the death I had kept conjuring up for three years was as simple as a bit of dry wood. She was frankly and hugely pregnant. Her head looked smaller (only two seconds passed really, but let me give them as much wooden duration as life can stand), and her pale-freckled cheeks were hollowed, and her bare shins and arms had lost all their tan, so that the little hairs showed. She wore a brown, sleeveless cotton dress and sloppy felt slippers....

I could not kill

her

, of course, as some have thought. You see, I loved her. It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.

So HH seems Lolita, and she has lost all vestiges of her former nymphethood. Everything he loved about her physically is gone. She bears all the gross trappings of age--glasses, pregnancy, a burgeoning weariness, a disdain for her appearance--and yet he loves her anyway. He loves her so much that he wants her to run off with him and he will raise the child of another man (although we should maybe keep in mind the disgusting and bizarre fantasy that HH had in part 2, chapter 3, of having relations with the daughter that he would with Lolita and with the daughter that he would have with said daughter).

Vanity Fair famously said that Lolita was "the only convincing love story of our century."

And most crushing of all is the fact that she never loved HH. He is there, a broken man, sobbing before her, begging her to come with him, and she says, "I would sooner go back to Cue." HH mentally supplies the reasoning ("He broke my heart. You merely broke my life").

Lolita's sexual precociousness, however, is on full display, as she was privy to all the things that CQ did--"weird, filthy, fancy things...two girls and two boys, and three or four men, and the idea was for all of [them] to tangle in the nude while an old woman took movie pictures." Of course, Lolita "refused to take part because she loved [CQ], and he threw her out." (Among other things, CQ wanted Lolita to give a bunch of his "beastly boys" blowjobs.)

It is revealed in part 2, chapter 35, that CQ is "practically impotent." So Lolita, while she loved him and wanted to physically consummate her relationship with him, may have been unable to do so. Here you have a love-sex dichotomy; it is echoed in HH's realization that he loves, truly loves Lolita after all, when he sees her again in her least attractive state, and he has no desire to fuck her at all but instead wants only to run away with her so that she and he can live happily ever after in a place far away from the one that they know.

[cjbreed]

I've been gone a couple days and i'm back and wondering where are the rest of you guys?

1. Clopek

2. habia

4. DDML

6. fallen_angels ???

7. Dex_star

8. dolly

9. Meat Grinder

10. Yardsale

11.m1sterko

Also, what is the next book? Are we ready to start on it? I am...

[habia]

I could never forget our Book Club. Been waiting for the 11th to make this announcement.

The next book is Money by Martin Amis. We will finish by September 11th, 2008 then allow one week for discussions and on September 18th landho will announce the next selection.

I am excited to read this book with you guys. From the first month I particularly enjoyed the experience of communally discovering and interpreting Nabakov's work.

Other books I seriously considered:

Burning Chrome by William Gibson

The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathem Lethem

Mr. Punch by Neil Gaimen

The Stranger by Albert Camus

[landho]

Good bump. Habia is supposed to choose the next book!

We didn't get to engage in any discussions of Lolita as a whole. Is this still down like Chinatown? I finished reading the book last week but didn't get a chance to throw in my two cents. It's certainly one of my all-time favorite books.

[cjbreed]

landho - just throw it in. i like to hear your thoughts

habia - cool i am glad u already chose the book. looking forward to it as i probably wouldn't have chosen that book for myself. that's what's cool about book club...

[landho]

Part 2, Chapter 29

The last thing Lolita says to HH is, "Good-by-aye!" Fittingly irreverent. She is the love of his life, but he is not more than a footnote in hers, occupying a two-year blind spot.

Part 2, Chapter 30

"I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past": HH usually comes off as ironic and detached when he is describing himself, but here he describes himself as basically a broken man. Do you think the proximity to HH's writing about Lolita's ultimate rejection of him brought up many painful memories? I mean: do you think that HH the writer was affected by his just having written about Lolita rejecting him that it was transferred to HH the character? (Quite a meta question, I know.)

[landho]

Part 2, Chapter 32

Did anyone else find it hilarious that when HH was reminiscing sadly and wistfully about his relationship with Lolita that he mentions twice how huge his cock is?

There as the day, during our first trip--our first circle of paradise--when in order to enjoy my phantasms in peace I firmly decided to ignore what I could not help perceiving, the fact that I was to her not a boy friend, not a glamour man, not a pal, not even a person at all, but

just two eyes and a foot of engorged brawn

....

I loved you.

I was a pentapod monster

, but I loved you.

HH's humanization continues here. It's funny because I had read Lolita before, and I was confused when I read Clopek, Dolly, et al. talk about what a disgusting human being HH was because that wasn't the impression or the memory I had of him. Nabokov does a wonderful job of making a monster like HH not only human but also sympathetic. And HH himself does a good job of recording the progression of his emotions. (Although, funnily enough, as soon as he is fully realized as a human being, HH drives back to Ramsdale to murder CQ!)

I like to think of HH having an epiphany when he sees Lolita again, aged 17 and pregnant and yet the girl he loves. Once he realizes that, he begins thinking about what he actually did to her. His sins are no longer abstract; they are no longer subordinate to his monstrous desires; and the singular enormity of what he has done finally dawns on him. And in fact, when he comments that he was simply eyes and a penis to her, she was little more than a lithe body and a pussy to him. He really didn't know her at all. (I think anyone who is reflective and has been in a relationship dominated by sex rather than affection or companionship can relate.)

t struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not know a thing about my darling's mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate--dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions, for I often noticed that living as we did, she and I, in a world of total evil, we would become strangely embarrassed whenever I tried to discuss something she and an older friend, she and a parent, she and a real healthy sweetheart, I and Annabel, Lolita and a sublime, purified, analyzed, deified Harold Haze, might have discussed--an abstract idea, a painting, stippled Hopkins or shorn Baudelaire, God or Shakespeare, anything of a genuine kind.

And HH admits being conscious of how perverse his relationship with Lolita was:

But I admit that a man of my power of imagination cannot plead personal ignorance of universal emotions.... It had become gradually clear to my conventional Lolita during our singular and bestial cohabitation that even the most miserable of family lives was better than the parody of incest, which, in the long run, was the best I could offer the wait.

Also, apropos of nothing, HH gets a shot in against psychoanalysis:

Mid-twentieth century ideas concerning child-parent relationship have been considerably tainted by the scholastic rigmarole and standardized symbols of the psychoanalytic racket....

[landho]

Part 2, Chapter 36

CQ reveals here that he's "practically impotent," which brings up a sex/love dichotomy in Lolita. (Lolita does not love HH but has sex with him; she does love CQ but does not have sex with him.) Of course, CQ doesn't love Lolita at all and views her instead as simply a plaything; he throws her out (she reveals in part 2, chapter 29) when she refuses to go down on some of his boys. So in Lolita, there is some truth to the notion you want what you can't have; Charlotte loves HH, who doesn't care for her; HH loves Lolita, who doesn't care for him; Lolita loves CQ, who doesn't care for her.

[landho]

Part 2, Chapter 37

One of the most poignant things I have ever read in my life:

What I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapor of blended voices, majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic--one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etches streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her from that concord.

I often think of this passage when I think of kids drinking, doing drugs, fucking.... I sound like an old codger, I'm sure, but why are they in such a hurry to grow up? It makes me sad whenever I think about it.

HH intends that the book not be published till after all the important parties involved are dead. This occurs within two months of his finishing the book. (Remember, Dr. John Ray, Jr., wrote, "Mrs. 'Richard F. Schiller' died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest.") HH spends fifty-six days writing Lolita, and during the course of this writing his heart breaks, both figuratively and literally. (Dr. Ray notes that HH died of coronary thrombosis on November 16, 1952.) "...I thought I would use these notes in toto at my trial, to save not my head, of course, but my soul," HH writes.

And one of the most poignant (not to overuse that word) endings in all of literature:

And do not pity C. Q. One had to choose between him and H. H., and one wanted H. H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.

I wonder whether HH knew his heart was going to give or whether because he was at the end of the manuscript he felt compelled to finish it as fast as he can; there is a certain breathlessness and urgency to this very last passage; HH even abbreviates his name and Quilty's name, to save on time.

And of course the hopelessly striking thing is that in the end, we have no real explanation for why HH loved Lolita. He simply craved her at first, but then somewhere along the line he realized that he was madly, madly in love with her. Not her looks, not her personality, not her intellect, but her being; the sort of unrequited love that's usually reserved for a parent to his or her child. So even though it's romantic love, it's also parental love, and in the end, the parody of incest that defines the relationship between HH and Lolita becomes transcendent--although in this case the love is one way, it's the purest kind imaginable.

[landho]

P.S. Sorry for writing so voluminously on Lolita.

[landho]

Picked this up tonight. Have read only some of Amis's criticism (he's a big fan of Nabokov!) and none of his fiction. He is widely considered one of the best British writers today. Plan on beginning this tonight.

[broneck]

i fell off hardcore and am ashamed. will buy next book tomorrow and finish it on my fishing trip !