/lit/ - Literature

>>3874627
It's good.

Obviously overrated.

Checked it out to see how graphic the pedophilia would be and i'm surprised by how tame it was. Roadtrip was the only interesting chapters.

its a period piece and a weak misreading

don't bother, read shakespeare instead

Is there an illustrated version?

I had to read it for class but I could not get into it because of the subject. I don't care how beautiful the prose is. Pedophilia is not something I care to read or understand.

enjoy getting put onto a watchlist the instant you buy it

>>3874723
Admit it, you had a raging boner the entire time.

>tfw no tacitly accepted pederasty
>tfw no RomanLAD lifestyle

>>3874731
Absolutely not. What's worse is we where then shown the movie, both versions. That was brutal.

OP, /lit/ loves this book cuz it's very good

>>3874723
Jesus, what the fuck are you? A fucking 15 years old girl with a blog about books? Hurr durr he is a pedophile!!! OMG!!! So awful!!!

>>3874752
Humbert Humbert pls go

>>3874752
Sorry, I just can't read about an old man who loves his lolis. Not everyone on 4chan is vile. And, if my opinion is childish, so be it.

>>3874752
It's called an American.

It isn't as good as the novel Lolito

>>3874627

You will go out disappointed if you go for the morbidity like >>3874666

this kind of people really bores me, the folk that goes to portnoy's complaint, gravity rainbow, bovary and such with that in mind. I'm not playing the snobbish card, but if that's the only thing that moves you into it you will prolly satisfy your needs for raucous action and graphic displays more eficiently anywhere but in books, critical acclaimed ones on top of that.

It has a solid narrator capable of keeping you engaged and tries to sell his case quite good if you don't know better.

I found funnier the narrator in Despair (is way more ridiculous and neurotic) but I like both very much.

>>3874766
Saying Lolita is "about an old man who loves his lolis" is like saying Brokeback Mountain is about butt sex, or Clockwork Orange is about bustin's skulls and stealin' shit.

In short: you a dumb, faggot.

>>3874766
You read about murder, I presume, and all sorts of vile acts? Yet would you say these books were condoning these acts? Would a book about World War One with brutal detail on death be seen as an endorsement? And would you recoil from the book because of the subject matter? You sire, or madame, appear hopelessly insincere.

Good day.

>>3874766
D'you think your passionate repulsion of the book and its subject is testament to the book itself?

It's fiction. And I think it's worth another read if nothing else.

>>3874766
I thought this would make the book better since you'd get a stronger emotional reaction. When I read all those bits I was just like, meh.

OT-fun fact: I saw the results for a survey on /a/ the other day, and fully 50-60% of them were into lolicon. The least popular fetish was scat at 10%. I mean really, worse than guro, shot, and bestiality? Wut. \o_o/

>>3874777
>Saying Lolita is "about an old man who loves his lolis"

OK, let's stop with the misrepresentation, that's not what he said at all. He only said he doesn't want to read "about an old man who loves his lolis." If he doesn't want to read about pedophiles, it doesn't make him a dumb faggot.

The prose is beautiful but the topic was too weird for me, much rather read something less pedoish.

>>3874792
lolicon != pedophilia

drawings hurt no-one.

>>3874797
Pedophilia=/=sexual abuse

>>3874797
I get what you mean. But if you're attracted to underage girls technically that is pedophilia. (although I assume most people that are into that stuff are more into the depravity of it than anything).

>>3874797
>>3874797
you're right, sexualizing little girls hurts no one, but it leads to people abusing them.

>>3874808
that stuff being shota/loli. Not actual CP.

>>3874811
>it leads to people abusing them.
[citation needed]

I think it's just as valid to claim that lolicon gives people attracted to children a sexual outlet that makes it easier for them to refrain from actual CP or from molesting a child.

>>3874822
>>3874822
http://www.parentingscience.com/sexualization-of-girls.html

i mean its common sense really.

Holy shit, /lit/ really is bad during them summer.

>>3874680
This is the best post in the thread so far, although I don't think I agree with the spirit of whoever wrote it.

>its a period piece
This is absolutely true, and one of its charms in my opinion. Lolita as a novel could be the definitive sample "Americana," if only for the "roadtrip." Of course it works on other levels too... Other than the obvious (outsider/insider, immigrant relations, old world/new world, etc.), glossing it as an effort to typify certain sociocultural aspects of its "period" is one of the only ways I can think of to make sense of such elements as the entire (dubious) existence of Quilty (i.e., we can explain Quilty as a literary stereotype characteristic of the setting, like how we'd expect to find an evil witch and a princess in a fairy tale).

>a weak misreading
I don't understand what you mean by this. I'm not sure how a novel can be a reading of itself, let alone a misreading, unless you're talking about the narrator's ability to "read" the events he describes, and indicating your opinion that his (mis)reading of such is "bad"-ly given. If that's what you mean, I don't agree. I think anyone would agree that it is at least very well written.

>read shakespeare instead
Well, maybe you're right. There isn't much point in reading Lolita if you aren't willing to read Shakespeare. I don't know about "instead" though. Maybe "first," but even then I'd have some qualms.

Does anyone have any suggestions for more works in the vein of Lolita?
Ones that deal centrally with the theme of pedophilia?

>>3874860
Approximately half of Nabokov's last complete novel published in his lifetime, Ada or Ardor, is made up of very explicit pornographic descriptions of a 14 year old having sex with an 11 year old (and the same pairing 4 years later). Now get out of this board, filth.

>>3874828
parentingscience.com? Come on. Give me something that's passed peer review.

>>3874860
Check out Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. There are no pedo encounters, but it does deal with the fascination and obsessive side of it. It's breddy gud too breh.

>>3874874
>>3874874
pedo located

>Dat awkward moment when you're a gay dude into daddies and bear types but you had a boner basically the whole time reading this.

>>3874900

That's weird. I'm into daddies and bears too but no whyboners from LOLLIE.

>>3874920
I don't know man, I honestly found it scary sometimes, I would just get the biggest boners :/ Idk it could be that I found the whole experience exciting from Lo's side? That actually makes so much sense, why didn't I ever think about it before?

>>3874928

That's probably why. We realize things when we're ready.

>>3874942
b-but... ;__________ ;

>>3874967

Don't worry about it, unless you start to think about following through on thoughts of scoring with young girls or boys.

>>3874991
It would be with daddy dudes though. I'm supposed to be Lo. I have no desire to be with young boys.

>>3874897
Oh noes, my source was shot down! Better insult the guy!

Get it.

Your first time reading it, expect to be put off, although not really for the reason you'd expect. The book has three rough sections to its plot. It begins, after a brief invocation of sorts by Humbert, with him talking about his childhood, in some scenes of striking beauty and achingness. Then it ratchets up the ick-suspense to a near breaking point, and then it breaks, but not in the way you'll be thinking it will.

During all this, you (or at least I did) will have a hard time not reading it as being "about" the way the "vicious vigilance"* of the traditional Western family fucks up everything it touches. And euphonious prose. Most people stop reading somewhere in this section out of squeamishness, because really.

The second section is a rather straightforward road novel, during which Humbert actually comes out and says not much happened. On one level, it's an ode to American freedom, postwar American kitsch and Humbert the Intellectual wallowing in "exhilarating" "philistine vulgarity." It's also building a lot of major subthemes for the book, and setting everything up more, but I don't really think I should go into that. You spend a good bit of time in lulls waiting for Nabokov to go into full awesome pyrotechnic aching prose mode. The unsqueamish, sophisticated reader might stop reading during all this, and you'll probably at least slow up.

Then there's a big plot turning point, but that section keeps going for a little bit. Then, late in Part II, there's one perfect, miraculous chapter (29) where everything clicks, everything is self-consciously seen to be arranged perfectly, and you the reader are suffused in "a quiet little explosion of familiar warmth," extending backwards and forwards through time, through the whole plot of the novel, through your own life and relation to the world. I reread it aloud three times before continuing my first time reading it, and I would've read it more if I didn't want to get to the finish. The book largely sustains that same transfigured note 'til the end.

It's a linear narrative in a realist novel, but somehow it's still probably the most ambitious and risky construction of anything I've read. But it pays off so well.

Oh, and you'll really want an annotated version. This is a showy learned-ass polylingual European-American writing a novel where the narrator is a showy learned-ass polylingual European-American who's a douche, on top of all the actually evil stuff he does.

* The book. Everything after is from Nabokov writing about the book in a small piece called "On A Book Entitled Lolita."

>>3874995
>I have no desire to be with young boys.

Get a load of this guy.

>>3874627
Good voice, is generally engaging, occasionally beautiful. Read it when I was 16 and that was pretty tough but if you're well read it's a good read by a very good Russian author

I always kept my phone near me to look up words I was unfamiliar with
But don't let that turn you off it's a great read

>>3875739
>16
Christ, no one gives a shit how old you were when you first read the book. He wasn't even asking if it was challenging or not.

>>3874627
Beautifully written.
But it's about a pedophile who gets away with it, so you have to deal or not with that aspect.

>>3874766
come out of the closet

>>3877401
>But it's about a pedophile who gets away with it

But he doesn't.

>>3877401
>>3877424
Actually he does. He's writing a confession about the murder, but adds the information about Lolita. He confesses in the end, but wasn't caught.

I think it's deservedly well regarded.

I'd hate for you to not get it on account of people saying it's overrated or, worse, that it is somehow apologetic to paedophilia; read it, & the worst you can do is join those people.

>>3874627
It's one of the finest works of prose that I've read recently. Personally, it doesn't seem to me that Nabokov has much concern with philosophical or moral issues beyond the use of them to complement the already heighty beauty in his work.

And god, it is beautiful. His description of Lo playing tennis is pure poetry:

"I remember at the very
first game I watched being drenched with an almost painful convulsion of beauty
assimilation. My Lolita had a way of raising her bent left knee at the ample and springy start
of the service cycle when there would develop and hang in the sun for a second a vital web
of balance between toed foot, pristine armpit, burnished arm and far back-flung racket, as
she smiled up with gleaming teeth at the small globe suspended so high in the zenith of the
powerful and graceful cosmos she had created for the express purpose of falling upon it with
a clean resounding crack of her golden whip."

>>3874777

True, although Brokeback Mountain was mostly just about butt sex

>>3877745
Even the author admitted it was a "spinach" story where the goal was to make straight people face butt sex and the related intolerance. And that's really all it is.