/lit/ - Literature

What the fuck I always thought it was "Lolito", everyone always called it that and I remember reading the wiki article and it was spelled that way

Mandela Effect what the fuck

>>18042434
you're retarded

>>18042434
>he's on /lit/ and yet knows Lolita only from a wiki article
Based retard. This board is so full of shit

>>18042434
That's a different novel ya dunce
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18169682-lolito?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=XdQoEbqWhz&rank=1

That's true, pretty cringe if people unironically try to say that. He had been in America for like 20 years but he was in Russia even longer and born in Russia. I hope Frenchies don't try to claim Samuel Beckett either

>>18042434
A new traveler just arrived boys.

>>18042419
I've never heard this called the great american novel. Most people would say that is Moby Dick

no one calls the CP novel the great american novel. It's obviously moby dick

>>18042434
it's actualy spelled lolite. it's about a guy who reads in the dark and it ruins his eyesight so badly that he ends up accidentally fucking a child.

>>18042419
No one says it's the great american novel because no one is stupid enough to think that he wrote in the american literary tradition.
>>18042458
Beckett's writings follow the french tradition though, so calling him a french author actually makes sense because he saw himself as a continuation of flaubert, Proust, briefly influenced by joyce and kafka.

>>18042551
>the american literary tradition

> the great American novel
> it’s not

>>18042516
Underrated

>>18042419
>novel written outside America
>about pedophilia and manipulating someone less intelligent than you
>considered Great American novel
Sometimes the jokes at the expense of my country seem to write themselves

>>18042626
Yes good job dumb frog poster

>>18042735
>>novel written outside America
Incorrect btw

>>18042735
Look around. America IS a joke.

>>18042735
Nabokov had been America for like 15+ years when he wrote this retard. I don't consider Nabokov American, but there is basis for people saying stuff like that

>>18042497
The big 3 are Huck Finn, Moby Dick and The Great Gatsby. There are many contenders though because USA is very diverse culturally and geographically. If I had a gun to my head and had to name just 1, it would probably be Gatsby because the theme of the American dream. Even though the book is a cautionary tale, the dream is one of the biggest factors in USA being seen as the land of hope. Sadly, as the middle class dissolves, and upwards mobility becomes tougher, that dream may be dead. It is still alive for a lot of foreigners though

>>18042419
>implying pedo shit deserves the title of great American novel

>>18043271
>implying lolita endorses pedophilia

Uooooh

>>18043349
all men are pedophiles

>fifteen year-old boy meets a middle-aged woman
/ss/ is only hot with 25 years old women

>>18042516
Kek

An American would prattle on about pop culture and personal circumstance. Nothing good has ever come from the colonies.

>>18042497
Lolita is better written, though.
I agree Moby Dick is greater in its conception, but Nabokov was the best word craftsman to have appeared in the tradition of the American novel.

>>18043239
How can Huck Finn and The Great Gatsby be the great American novel if they are not great novels?
Mark Twain in particular is quite mediocre stuff, written for kids.

>>18042419
I can name like 20 American writers better than Nabokov

>>18043857
Name them.

>>18042419
you must have absurdly low standards to think dime-store trash written by a terribly prose stylist and storyteller is "great" in any regard, let alone the quote great american novel unquote.

>>18042516
Jej ilybb

>>18043816
>Nabokov was the best word craftsman to have appeared in the tradition of the American novel.
I've heard so many people say this and I really just don't get it. The prose style of Lolita is completely unremarkable outside of the opening paragraph. The rest of the book reads like some kind of bargain bin romance novel. Get real.

It really isnt. I couldn't call any book that is so messed up that its actually darkly funny, a great American novel

>>18043975
Just sticking with fiction
1. Herman Melville
2. Henry James
3. Nathaniel Hawthorne
4. William Faulkner
5. Gertrude Stein
6. William Gass
7. William Gaddis
8. Philip Roth
9. John Hawkes
10. Harold Brodkey
11. Robert Coover
12. John Crowley
13. Don Delillo
14. Tennessee Williams
15. Edith Wharton
16. Zora Neale Hurston
17. James Agee
18. Toni Morrison
19. Eugene O'Neill
20. Raymond Carver

>>18042419
Nabokov is American

>>18044159
I don't know what bargain bin romance novels you've been reading but I would love some recommendations, the ones I've read have worse prose than your average agendaposter ranting on 4chan

>>18044311
He isn't. But his long time of living in America obviously influenced his writing a lot, and his works were produced in America. You can even call him Russian-American if you want, but he is not simply and solely, "American"

>>18044258
based literate anon

>>18043816
Bullshit. Nabokov's pompous aristocratic tone is frequently insufferable and Melville's lyrical ability absolutely crushes him.

>>18044329
>You can even call him Russian-American
Ok that's fine. Still American.

>>18044329
I consider Nabakov to be a Russian born American writer. Lolita was written in English, with American characters, and while he was living in USA. On the flip side I think Henry James is an English writer who happens to be born in America.

>>18044258
>>18043975
Can either of you explain what makes these authors better or worse than Nabokov?

My image of a toy got deleted but the fucking masha photo who was literally a child porn model is still up???

Nabokov was in Germany almost as long as he was in America. 15 years in Germany, 21 in America

>>18043834
Some retard on this board thinks they are not great =/= they are not great.
Gatsby is a perennial presence in any greatest novels discussion. Take a look at any greatest novels ever list composed by publishers and writers, Gatsby is almost always higher than Moby dick. Just because the zoomers here shit on it doesn't make it mediocre.

>>18044382
Not them but I’m sure most posters on lit correlate what they like with what is good. They don’t take taste and preferences into account

>>18044445
This. Anyone who dislikes TGG when they read it when they were somewhere between 16 and 22 needs to reread it when they are older. It’s a book that you need some life experience to understand. It may not be the most entertaining novel, but it is pretty close to perfection

>>18042434
retarded faggot effect

>>18044258
You are certainly joking!

>>18044382
>>18044524
Nabokov had a very deep knowledge of literary structure, which enabled him to not only structure novels such as Lolita very intelligently, but also to create new ways of writing a novel. Besides, he had a very good ear and a feeling for musicality - his works abounds in polished melodies refined by a careful, slow rhythm.
Lastly, and most importantly: metaphor. No American prose-writer could devise such intricate metaphors as Nabokov did, and dress them in such perfect words.
The fact that the other anon considers Philip Roth better than Nabokov shows that he doesn't know how to read. He probably reads for the plot, as if he were watching a television series, passively, without a pencil on his hand, without a critical eye, trying to find out "what happens next" and to "relate to" the fictional character - a thing that doesn't exist.

You can see his ignorance by the fact that he mentions mediocrities, complete mediocrities, like Neae Hurston (!), Agee, Morrison (!), Brodkey (?), Hawkes (?), T. Williams (!), and Wharton (!), instead of mentioning someone like Fitzgerald, Hemingway or Pynchon, who would be decent competitors, although the three of them are inferior to Nabokov.

Needless to say, no literary critic considers DeLillo or those nobodies whom he mentioned better than Nabokov.

Imagine being an American and believing that Toni Morrison and Philip Roth can write better than this:

>Upon hearing her first morning yawn, I feigned handsome profiled sleep. I just did not know what to do. Would she be shocked at finding me by her side, and not in some spare bed? Would she collect her clothe s and lock herself up in the bathroom? Would she demand to be taken at once to Ramsdale to her mother‟s bedside back to camp? But my Lo was a sportive lassie. I felt her eyes on me, and when she uttered at last that beloved chortling note of hers, I knew her eyes had been laughing. She rolled over to my side, and her warm brown hair came against my collarbone. I gave a mediocre imitation of waking up. We lay quietly. I gently caressed her hair, and we gently kissed. Her kiss, to my delirious embarrassment, had some rather comical refinements of flutter and probe which made me conclude she had been coached at an early age by a little Lesbian. No Charlie boy could have taught her that. As if to see whether I had my fill and learned the lesson, she drew away and surveyed me. Her cheekbones were flushed, her full underlip glistened, my dissolution was near. All at once, with a burst of rough glee (the sign of the nymphet), she put her mouth to my ear but for quite a while my mind could not separate into words the hot thunder of her whisper, and she laughed, and brushed the hair off her face, and tried again, and gradually the odd sense of living in a brand new, mad new dream world, where everything was permissible, came over me as I realized what she was suggesting. I answered I did not know what game she and Charlie had played. “You mean you have never?” her features twisted into a stare of disgusted incredulity. “You have never” she started again. I took time out by nuzzling her a little. “ Lay off, will you, ” she said with a twangy whine, hastily removing her brown shoulder from my lips. ( It was very curious the way she considered and kept doing so for a long time all caresses except kisses on the mouth or the stark act of love either “romantic slosh” or “abnormal” .)
>“You mean, ” she persisted, now kneeling above me, “you never did it when you were a kid?”
>“Never, ” I answered quite truthfully.
>“Okay, ” said Lolita, “here is where we start.”

1/2

>>18044773
You think John Hawkes is a “mediocrity?” You are an absolute fool and a despicable villain for that.

>>18044834
>However, I shall not bore my learned readers with a detailed account of Lolita‟s presumption. Suffice it to say that not a trace of modesty did I perceive in this beautiful hardly formed young girl whom modern co-education, juvenile mores, the campfire racket and so forth had utterly and hopelessly depraved. She saw the stark act merely as part of a youngster‟s furtive world, unknown to adults. What adults did for purposes of procreation was no business of hers. My life was handled by little Lo in an energetic, matter-of-fact manner as if it were an insensate gadget unconnected with me. While eager to impress me with the world of tough kids, she was not quite prepared for certain discrepancies between a kid‟s life and mine. Pride alone prevented her from giving up; for, in my strange predicament, I feigned supreme stupidity and had her have her way at least while I could still bear it. But really these are irrelevant matters; I am not concerned with so-called “sex” at all. Anybody can imagine those elements of animality. A greater endeavor lures me on: to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets.

2/2

>>18044841
No. None of them are. They have all done well in fiction, and went further than most.
But... Compared to Nabokov? Yes, compared to Nabokov they are mediocrities.

>Hawkes took inspiration from Vladimir Nabokov and considered himself a follower of the Russian-American translingual author. Nabokov's story "Signs and Symbols" was on the reading list for Hawkes' writing students at Brown University. "A writer who truly and greatly sustains us is Vladimir Nabokov," Hawkes stated in a 1964 interview.[5]

Well, then.

>>18044858
Actually, I admit I had never heard of Hawkes, not being American myself. He looks interesting. I might read some of his books now. Thanks.
But anyway, I do not expect that he will be better than Nabokov. And of the authors you mentioned whom I have read, not a single one is, with the possible exception of Henry James.

In Nabokov, every single sentence is good, every single paragraph is filled with treasures. Meanwhile, any Roth or DeLillo book will have ups and downs, pages of magnificent writing followed by pages of average fillers. And I quite like both of them. I don't mean it as an insult to say that they are inferior to Nabokov.

>>18044773
>he had a very good ear and a feeling for musicality - his works abounds in polished melodies refined by a careful, slow rhythm.
Care to show it? It certainly hasn't been my impression of the two works of him I've read.
>Banville told the Paris Review. “I love Nabokov’s work, and I love his style. But I always thought there was something odd about it that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Then I read an interview in which he admitted he was tone deaf. And I thought, that’s it–there’s no music in Nabokov, it’s all pictorial, it’s all image-based. It’s not any worse for that, but the prose doesn’t sing.
This guy is regarded as Nabokov's heir

>>18044892
First page of Lolita.

>>18044995
Excessive alliteration doesn't make a work lyrical and musical, especially when that musicality is largely missing for large stretches in the book.

>>18045024
I agree that it isn't lyrical. He's not writing poetry!
But how do you define musicality in prose? It's not just alliteration, Nabokov also has a good command of sentence-length and tone. He could use internal rhymes well too. At least it reads very well to me.

>And again next day a thinly populated sky, losing its blue to the heat, would melt overhead, and Lo would clamor for a drink, and her cheeks would hollow vigorously over the straw, and the car inside would be a furnace when we got in again, and the road shimmered ahead, with a remote car changing its shape mirage-like in the surface glare, and seeming to hang for a moment, old-fashionedly square and high, in the hot haze.

Also, being done deaf has nothing to do with it. Yeats was supposedly tone deaf, yet his poems are among the most musical in the English language.

>>18042419
>Tonal poetry
State of lit etc

>>18045056
I don't trust the horseshit that passes as lyrical and musical propagated by Jew publishers. Anything eloquent with alliteration couple of passages apart is labelled as lyrical, which is bullshit.
The example you posted is better but it is not representative of Nabokov's signature style, the passages above are better exponents of it
>>18044834
>>18044843
For musical prose McCarthy and Melville are best exponents imo. Both BM and MD are filled with passages where the rhythms are very prominent:
>The night sky lies so sprent with stars that there is scarcely space of black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs so it is there numbers are no less.

>Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme downtown is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there. Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?—Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep

>Setting forth in the faint moonlight, the tinker now at her elbow and her carrying the child wrapped completely from sight, they appeared furtive, clandestine, stepping softly and soft their voices over the sandy road in shadows so foreshortened they seemed sprung and frenzied with a violence in which their creators moved with dreamy disconcern.

These are from my memory, so pardon if they aren't 100% accurate. I don't think lyrical prose needs to be musical all of the time but the prosody should be discernable. Nabokov is eloquent but lyrical only in patches, to my ear anyway.

>>18045148
Some of those are mostly alliteration and internal rhyming, the same techniques used by Nabokov.
What exactly do you think makes them better than Nabokov? Please explain.

But you are anti-Semite and it seems clear to me that you dislike Nabokov based on moral reasons.

>>18045210
>you are anti-Semite and it seems clear to me that you dislike Nabokov based on moral reasons
Lol.
The internal rhymes are prominent in the passages I posted. I cannot see the rhythms in the passage you posted.
Please point that to me.
Let's take the third passage:
The alliteration is obvious so I won't point that out. So, let's see the prosody and rhythms:
It's mostly down to phonetic words and syllables and how they are strewn in the sentence.
>light (in moonlight)
>child
>sight
>tine (3rd syllable in clandestine)
>road
>ow (2nd syllable in shadow)
>sprung
>concern (in disconcern)

>>18045253
Not him, but the distance between these words varies so much you could hardly call that a rhythm. "Child" and "sight" are three words apart while "moonlight" is 10 words ahead of "child". Such ireegularity seems like the opposite of a rhythm IMO.

>>18045279
It is prose so you can't expect even distribution of syllables and words but read the passage outloud and you can listen to the rhythm. If there was a strict meter it would be poetry not prose. There is no "lyrical and musical" prose writer (your Joyces and Prousts) that adheres to it. The standards in prose are different.

>>18045253
You're showing internal rhyming. That's not rhythm. Rhythm is basically meter, which can show up in prose now and them.
But mostly, I think, good rhythm in prose is determined by how natural and readable it sounds, in terms of sentence length. I'd say that when we're talking about how words are combined it has more to do with harmony, or even melody, than rhythm - specially because some combinations may have a great rhythm, but not be harmonious, such as some cacophonies, which become bad not because of how they sound, but because of the unintended meanings they might have*.
By my standards, Nabokov sounds very readable to me. Then there are the artifices - such as the ones we're talking about - which can be used to give prominence to certain combinations of sound, stressing them in the sentence, thus allowing the reader to pause awhile and enjoy those combinations.
But internal rhyming and rhythm are not the same thing.
Rhyming is not necessary for good rhythm. The Roman poets didn't rhyme. You should study basic versification.

But yes, Nabokov does use rhymes and repetitions of sounds as well as of groups of sounds. He also plays very well with the vowels of Lolita's nickname. Here are some correspondences:
"glare - square"
"and again - in again"
"sky - car"
"blue - would"
"Lo - road - remote - clamor - hollow - old"

Not to mention the alliterations, of course.
*But the rhythm is not that.* The rhythm is determined by how the sequences of words follow each other. Nabokov has a great rhythm. For instance, notice how a slower opening period is followed two shorter ones and then by a slower one (a pause provided by an adverb), and finally by another one, also slower, which ends with the words "in again" a description that started with "and again"; then the car moves. See? There is a great balance in describing those actions, a classical beauty of patterns and correspondences.
How is that not good rhythm?

*I can't think of an English example. A famous one from my language, by Camões: "Alma minha gentil que te partiste" - rhythmically, it is beautiful, but "-ma minha" can be read as "little tit".

>>18045409
Sorry, just noticed a mistake of interpretation in my post. He's describing them moving towards the car (how the car appears when they move towards it), it's not the car that moves. Doesn't change what I was saying.
I had read only the first part of the sentence with any attention, hence my mistake. I took it completely at random from the book.
Yes, I am sleepy and not paying attention to my posts.
Goes to show that even a random sentence still sounds quite good.
Here's another one, at random:

>Slowly her head turned away and dropped onto her unfair amount of pillow. I lay quite still on my brink, peering at her rumpled hair, at the glimmer of nymphet flesh, where half a haunch and half a shoulder dimly showed, and trying to gauge the depth of her sleep by the rate of her respiration.

Also, I need to say that the Camões verse didn't sound like that back in the day. The funny meaning didn't exist back then, as far as I remember. But it still works as an example of a cacophony that sounds good, but is bad because the words don't go well together semantically, thus creating a bad music with a good rhythm.

I had to read this shit for class once, I was listening to it as an audiobook at work. Suddenly, the character mentions ordering furniture from an address in Philadelphia. IT WAS THE EXACT ADDRESS I WAS WORKING AT, I couldn't believe it, in a novel written 50 years ago in a different country, they mentioned the exact address I was currently at. Fuck. Only good part of this book.

>>18045409
>Rhyming is not necessary for good rhythm. The Roman poets didn't rhyme. You should study basic versification.
The Roman poets didn't rhyme words but there is clear rhyme in their syllable use which is what I am showing in my examples, that's why I broke them into syllables and I didn't delve further than necessary anyway; and please, I know my poetry. Check out Milton's paradise Lost. It doesn't rhyme verses either but it's rhythmic qualities are very prominent still.
>Here are some correspondences:
"glare - square"
"and again - in again"
"sky - car"
"blue - would"
"Lo - road - remote - clamor - hollow - old
These are not good examples imo. You are using a very broad definition of rhyme and repetition to justify them in the passage which do not mesh for the intended effect at all. (Lo-hollow sounds good when the words are beside each other but not so well in the passage). I can justify Franzen being musical and alliterative this way.
When I say rhythm, I am following prose standards of it. I shoud clarify that.
This passage might not have meter but you can't deny that it is rhythmic (structured repetition of phonetic sounds that is):
>The night sky lies so sprent with stars that there is scarcely space of black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs so it is there numbers are no less.
The rhyme is very prominent, which lyrical prose should have imo.
>think, good rhythm in prose is determined by how natural and readable it sounds, in terms of sentence length. I'd say that when we're talking about how words are combined it has more to do with harmony, or even melody, than rhythm - specially because some combinations may have a great rhythm, but not be harmonious, such as some cacophonies, which become bad not because of how they sound, but because of the unintended meanings they might have
Then we have very different definitions of musicality and lyric. Your claim that Nabokov is so much better than those other twenty writers has no practical grounds to stand upon. By your own metric Faulkner, Stein, Hawthorne etc. are two heads above him.

>>18042434
Hola

>>18042434
Lurk for another 2 years, then you'll get it right.

>>18045683
>You are using a very broad definition of rhyme
Partial rhymes are a thing, and they're very prominent in some poetic traditions - for instance, the Iberian one.

>structured repetition of phonetic sounds that is

Nabokov also repeats sounds. I've just showed that. What do you mean by structure? I discern no hidden structure in the passage you've quoted, just repetition. It does sound good to me, but so does Nabokov.
Basically, you are reducing rhythm to alliterations and internal rhymes, when in reality it is way more than that.
Borges barely ever rhymes, but his sentences have a very good rhythm and flow extremely well.
In fact, in some languages - such as Portuguese - internal rhymes are often considered a defect, because, being descendant from Latin, there are too many rhymes (for instance, thousands of adverbs will end in - mente, all verbs in the infinitive will end in -ar, -ir-, -er, or -or). This is perhaps one of the reasons why our tradition values partial rhymes and rich rhymes (i.e. rhymes in which the words do not belong to the same classification, e.g., a noun rhyming with a verb would be a rich rhyme). When writing in Portuguese, I always avoid internal rhymes.
To me, you seem to be overvaluing internal rhyme and undervaluing alliteration and sentence length.

>Then we have very different definitions of musicality and lyric. Your claim that Nabokov is so much better than those other twenty writers has no practical grounds to stand upon. By your own metric Faulkner, Stein, Hawthorne etc. are two heads above him.

We are talking exclusively about rhythm, though. This is not even the most prominent aspect of Nabokov's writing.

>>18045729
>Nabokov also repeats sounds. I've just showed that.
It isn't just repetition of sounds. Maybe there is a difference in how you and I perceive it since you have latin leanings, but those repetition of sounds don't sound out of the ordinary at all. I don't think a native will see anything musical about the first passage you posted because it is very commonplace in anglo literature.
>and Lo would clamor for a drink, and her cheeks would hollow vigorously over the straw
As I said, Lo, clamor and hollow may have some lineage when put beside each other, but in the passage it simply comes out as ordinary with no internal rhyme to speak of. That is what I meant by structure. It isn't about having phonetically similar words, but when they come and after what.
Nabokov flows very well, I agree. But I personally make a demarcation between being musical and being fluid. That's why I made the rant about publishers classifying anything semi eloquent as lyrical prose. Your assessment of using sentence length and emotional tone is fair, but any major writer worth his salt uses them to great effect. Faulkner is perhaps the best at exploiting the drama of varying sentence length, It doesn't set Nabokov apart from others imo.
I might be a little too strict with my criteria but it is what it is.

>>18045850
Well, maybe we have different ears, then.
However, internal rhymes seem to me something of a cheap effect (though they can be used well too). I much prefer alliteration, because I find that it doesn't distract as much. It is, so to speak, a midway between the absence of sound correspondences, and the use of rhyme.

For instance, when McCarthy writes

>at all and they fall all

I believe that is distracting. He is placing too much musical attention on something which, semantically, at least according to my interpretation, is not that much important to his sentence. I am not sure that it is a good effect. It sounds very good, but is it in harmony with the meaning?
Meanwhile, with alliteration sometimes it's just one letter that is repeated, so it is not too distracting: heat - head - her - hollow... The patterns are there, but they are less prominent and therefore do not distract from the meaning as much. Notice also how Nabokov rhymes "glare" and "squared" which, in my view, are important words to his meaning, because he is describing the car in a hot day, and those words are important components of that visual description.

But I agree that McCarthy has a very good rhythm. In fact, he is a worthy rival of Nabokov, and the best living American writer, in my opinion.
I'd rate those two sentences perhaps equally from a rhythmic perspective.
But what I like the most about Nabokov is his imagery, for instance:

>her cheeks would hollow vigorously over the straw

I love that. It describes perfectly a girl sucking on a straw as she is seen by the one who's looking at her (most narrators would just say "she'd suck on a straw", but Nabokov gives the image of her cheeks hollowing while she sucks, a precious detail). It is almost pornographic while not even being erotic. It is not only a good description, but also a good suggestion.
Meanwhile, the images in the McCarthy sentence are beautiful: a sky with stars falling in arcs. However, this does not strike me as visually fresh. I have the sensation I've read that in Shakespeare somewhere, but with Nabokov the image is quite new, at least for me. I've had my penis sucked a fair amount of times, yet I never had paid particular attention to the hollowing of the girl's cheeks. Now, thanks to Nabokov, I will. He has enriched the way I experience the world, and this is what I look for in great literature.

>>18043239
I'd throw On the Road in there too.

>>18045988
Maybe it has something to do with the differences in English and Romance languages. English doesn't possess the internal rhythms of romance languages as prominently, which explains my dislike for "lyrical" prose which doesn't sound lyrical even if it is pretty good. Writers in English have to put more effort to make the prose more poetic.
Rest I agree with. Nabby is pretty great in his own right and even without the musicality (to me) he writes better than most greats.

>>18046051
Only stoner grandpaps would agree with you.

>>18044383
>the fucking masha photo who was literally a child porn model is still up
have you considered that normal people might not be as familiar with child porn as you are

>>18046097
No because this is 4chan unless you got here after 2008

>>18044773
>probably reads for the plot
Not surprisingly you want to downplay plot, as the plot of L is laughable, hastily stuck together to support this obvious author-insertion pedo fantasy.
The "great American novel" must have, not merely fine writing but also a careful plot, not to mention well-drawn characters and, dare I even suggest, a message. Lolita simply fails to meet all these criteria.
>metaphor
You seem to be the sort of person who'd buy a car because you liked the paintjob, without bothering to even look at the engine or check the brakes.

>>18047082
nigger please. you're not showing off your child porn knowledge because you're an oldfag, but because you're a fucking degenerate. hiding behind board culture won't fly anymore.

>>18047244
You clearly can't read. You couldn't discern a good plot from a bad one other than through your petty emotional reactions.

>a massage

For God's sake... Shakespeare doesn't have a message. Every character contradicts the other and, as Harold Bloom says, every idea also exhibits its opposite. Where is Shakespeare's message? There isn't any.
Dante does have a message, but it is false and frankly ridiculous. That's not why we read him.
Go back to high school. Seriously.

>>18047244
>downplay plot

Shakespeare's plots are worse than Nabokov's worst plots.
That doesn't affect Shakespeare's quality, not in the least.
And Don Quixote's plot is full of contradictions. Cervantes clearly didn't care about it. As Sterne didn't care about the plot of Tristram Shandy. And what's the plot of Ulysses? A guy goes out and comes back home to his cheating wife. Big deal. Who cares?

Plots have no relevance. I could copy a plot out of Boccaccio (like many great authors have done, actually) and the result could be absolute shit, or it could be a masterpiece. What would determine its quality? The style. Style is the only thing that counts. If you can write well, your writing makes the plot irrelevant; if you can't write well, not even the best plot will save you.
Greek playwrights, French playwrights and Shakespeare have all stolen their plots from myths and history, like thousands of others have done, but only Shakespeare is Shakespeare, because only him could write like Shakespeare; and only Racine is Racine, only Aeschylus is Aeschylus, and so on.

People who care about plots tend to read little, or read hastily, or never to reread, because plot is the thing that wastes itself more easily in literature.
I don't mean to say that the art of the plot is irrelevant. Clearly, it is a difficult art, with its own techniques (information delay, lateral information, multiple perspectives, plot twist, and whatnot) that should be mastered or at least somewhat studied by any author, but honestly it's the most superficial thing in literature. It's the thing you do to attract readers, and for no other reason. It's like all those beautiful girls in the movies: you put them there in order to sell, not because they are necessarily the best actresses (they're probably not).

Besides, even the supposedly well-crafted plots have big holes in them. Nabokov himself exposed the holes in Madame Bovary's plot, not as an insult, but as a proof that even "realist" novels are nothing but fantasy, like all novels are (and should be).

>>18047244
>hastily stuck together to support this obvious author-insertion pedo fantasy
lolita doesn't condone pedophilia, and is frankly only superficially *about* it. you've failed to parse the novel on a basic, schoolboy kind of level. i hope for your sake that you're just shitposting without having read it.

>>18047244
I'm pretty sure you didn't even read the damned book lmao.

>>18043816
>Lolita is better written
it's absolutrly not. Moby Dick has substantially better prose

>>18042419
just finished this book and im starting to think this humberg nigga was a pedophile

>>18044258
lmao illiterates on suicide watch

>>18042419
Isn't the theory that Nabokov was basically describing himself?

>>18047695
a lot of people argue vehemently against this but i think he had to be at least a little bit of a pedo

>>18042419
Is this book hot?

>>18042419
me on the right

>>18042419
"Lanz was interested in everything—music to mathematics, logic to aesthetics, international affairs to community problems. And yet, a colleague later recalled, “Although not, in any conventional or merely external sense, a religious man, Professor Lanz was something of a mystic. Frequently, when one met him in the Quad, the warm and friendly smile that would light up his face seemed to break through an otherworldly look which signified more than professorial absentmindedness or (what his colleagues in philosophy liked, jokingly, to chide him about) his ‘disorientation to the space-time world’—a look which seemed to mean that to him the affairs of this life, even academic ones, were not worthy of too much concern....”

Over the chessboard, Lanz confided a dark secret that Nabokov told biographer Field: the memorably dapper professor led a double life. On weekends, he drove to the country to participate in orgies with “nymphets.” He forced his wife to dress as a child. Another prominent Nabokov scholar and biographer, Brian Boyd, also concluded that Lanz was a “nympholept” after reviewing Nabokov’s extensive correspondence in the New York Public Library.

Lanz was best known for his 1941 book, In Quest of Morals.

Was Lanz Humbert? Nabokov both denied and affirmed it to Field: “No, no, no. I may have had him in the back of my mind. He himself was what is called a fountainist, like Bloom in Ulysses. First of all, this is the commonest thing. In Swiss papers they always call them un triste individuel. And I was always interested in psychology. I knew my Havelock Ellis rather well....”

>>18047718
only the first quarter is lewd

>>18047707
what i would argue vehemently is that derailing literature discussion with gossip about authors is for illiterate faggots

@18047759
yea is that right?
*turns 360 degrees and talks to someone more interesting*

>>18042434
(it's alright anon I called it DomiNO for years only to find out it was DolMIO)

>>18042500
>cp novel
You haven't even read the book
>>18043379
You can always tell someone is a midwit that doesn't even read when they make blatant assumptions when they are so confidently wrong.

you're told the story from the point of view of Humphrey Humphret, which sounds like a fake name already. So this Humphrey dude is obsessed with a sexual experience he had when he was young but he was cock blocked. So anyways he's chilling at a swimming hole and sees Lolita he gets obsessed with her and starts stalking her. Her mother approaches. They become friends. He ends up marrying Lolitas mother. He sits in his study all day writing about how he wants to fuck Lolita.he tells Lolita never to enter his study. Lolitas mom one day looks in the study and finds all the writing about him wanting to fuck her daughter and how he only married her to fuck her daughter. The mom freaks out and writes a letter and is about to mail it but she is "hit by a car" now Humphrey doesn't say who was driving that car but most assume he pushed her to make it look like an accident so he wouldn't be exposed. So he goes to his doctor, asks for sleeping pills. Kidnaps Lolita before the police catch on. Takes her to a hotel. He drugs her food with the sleeping pills then he rapes her. He then continues to travel across America as he rapes Lolita repeatly. The book never goes into to much detail which im glad because it would turn your stomach to much to be able to read it. Anyways as he's travelling he becomes more agitated and thinks someone is following him. So when he is at a camp group and he noticed some guy eyeballing Lolita whether this guy is real or not is disputed. He attacks the guy or something the guy ends up taking Lolita. Humphrey ends up tracking some guy down he blames for Lolita being taken from him and he shoots him. He visits Lolita a few years in the future and she's living in a shack. The story ends with him in jail and her being completely fucked up.

>>18047917
This real? Im a midwit that doesnt read and i expected the novel to be about a relationship between an adult male who is attracted to little girl while the girl is somewhat into the man herself. Based on your description id guess it is cp. Very lewd too

>>18047753
So not worth it?

>>18043379
Based masha poster

Lolita told in reverse perspective

>>18048501
is this you, anon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdB0W9l6Dew

>>18042434
Did you think it was about a boy or something?

>>18044159
>The prose style of Lolita is completely unremarkable outside of the opening paragraph.
I still remember the analogy of him being a spider in the house, listening to every move and the whereabouts of Lolita. Shit's beautiful throughout

>>18047917
I'm sure that the end was a bit darker.