/lit/ - Literature

muh prose

2 things: prose, and unreliable narrator. People love Lolita's prose, but what separates it in content and in literary history is the blatant unreliable narrator. This is more direct in Pale Fire, but Lolita is a lot more accessible.

>>6217457
>1984
>masterpiece
is this a new meme?

>>6217500
no it's a really really good book, and most people tend to agree with me when i say its a masterpiece

>>6217495
why is the unreliable narrator so special?

>>6217500
>dae read it in high school so it sucks xd

Ulysses is just about 2 guys walking through Dublin.

1984 is just about a guy getting arrested by his government.

The Odyssey is just about a veteran returning from a war.

The Great Gatsby is just about a millionaire stalker who doesn't get what he wants (but he turns out alright, in the end).

To Kill a Mockingbird is just about a trial and some kids who's dad was the lawyer (basically the Kardashian daughters in the OJ Simpson case).

The Sun also Rises is just about some classy rich fucks in Paris who go see a bullfight in Spain.

>no spoilers here

But Lolita isn't "just" about a pedophile. It's got more depth to it, like any other well-written work of literature. Read it and judge for yourself.

>>6217506
>appealing to the proles

L O L F A G G O T

>>6217515
It's an interesting shift in narrative perspective. I think Nabokov's unreliable narrator is especially important because it solidifies the technique from "oh the narrator is biased" to "DON'T BELIEVE HIS LIES".

>>6217506
>>6217521

It doesn't suck, but it's certainly not a masterpiece. Step your lit game up, boys.

>>6217564
>too mainstream

>>6217570
*tips fedora*

it ended a genre.
'i'm gonna write about a totalitarian dystopi- oh wait'

>>6217596
>it ended a genre.
Yeaaaah I don't think so. Totalitarian dystopias are literally the easiest way to grab some cash right now

>>6217628
>>6217628
huge difference between what YA books make bank and what books /lit/ takes seriously.

>>6217644
Lit doesn't take 1984 seriously Lel. It's 1st grader trash

1984 is an average novel with a great message.

Orwell could think and could write essays, but he was not great novelist.

>>6217628
>implying YA is literature

>>6217506

I mean it's a fun one, but masterpiece? Why did you lump it with Ulysses? Have you read Ulysses?

... have you even read Lolita, the book in question?

>>6217457
This book is praised for its content: Lolita is about seduction of the self and of other's - the content is a psychological process, just like 1984 is about a political process.

1984 didn't give us this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KW2LOaCHhOg

>>6217457
>Can someone just explain the importance of this book in literary history?
The whole book is like a scavenger hunt for literary nerds. It's got alliteration, it's got Poe references, Goethe references, it's got parodies of popular fiction, it's got invented words like "nymphette" and "mauvemail," like James Joyce Nabokov fashions his puns from literary sources, from any of the several languages available t him, from obsolete words, or the roots of arcane words. Even the name, Humbert Humbert, shows careful craft behind it. It sounds both French and vaguely royal, and the repetition makes it sound sexual, like a revving engine, this is the sort of care that went into the novel and the sort of thing only truly careful readers will pick up on.

>>6217651
>great message
You bein real rn

>>6217457

ITT: A bunch of steam being blown and shit being flung, yet zero rebuttals.

>>6217975
ITT: That one faggot, who has not read the thread yet comes with the ebin "no rebuttal XDXDXD" meme


also caring about the subject of the story and not how the subject is dealt with should automatically redirect to r/books

>>6217457
>This is just a book about a pedophile
So? Ulysses is just about some fucker strolling through Dublin, does that devalue it?

>>6217707
"Nymphette" is not a made-up word, you mental retard. (The rest of your post is equally retarded, but I don't care to pick nits.)

The fact that abusrd reductionism like "The book is just about x!" gets so many replies only tells you how far is /lit/ from becoming a serious board.

>>6218481
"the board" isn't what you should be looking at
there are turds like this, but if you use the catalog you find the gems and hang out
it's alright

>>6218486
i know, i just felt like posting scaruffi pasta

Have you read it? It is a very convincing love story, first off. Second, what makes the book a great novel is the language. Nabokov is a master of flowing.compelling language. For genre its all about content, or what you are write--but for literary fiction is how you write is as important as what There is just something very elegant and ecstatic about his prose.

>tfw read Lolita and didn't find Humbert unrealiable at all

liked it a lot too.

I mean that part towards the end where he became paranoid as fuck and the dreamlike scene where he finds the mastervillain at the mansion that was probably a metaphor for something i'm too dumb to understand, what was so dubious about the Hubert's account? as opposed to any first person narrative like that.

i think that book is about a lot of stuff. as an euro i related hard to the "foreigner in America, hate it and love it at the same time" angle.

>>6217651
>message

vomitinganimegirl.jpg

>>6218593

you didn't think his overly gushy attitude towards the whole thing made his descriptions of actions with the girl questionable?

heres what i thought

i thought it was a good book and i liked it because it had good style

heres the thing about nabokov

he believed literature should not be topical and should not have a moral lesson

so with that said you are judging his work the wrong way

nabokov cared about beauty which is why is style is so good and why his books didnt carry a political message or anything like that

by the way orwell is revered because of its message and not as a great work of art

if you judge orwell as an artist hes only mediocre

anyway thats all

deuces,

~mark figman

>>6218593
>fw read Lolita and didn't find Humbert unrealiable at all
He was never even trying to be a reliable narrator lel

>>6218621
you mean morally questionable? or questionable as in they actually even happened? or questionable as in he brutally raped her and later described it as "her seducing him"?

is that what all the "unreliable narrator" crap boils down to? people wanting to distance themself from pedophilia so they can't even for a second consider Lolita could also be flirtatious/seductive? she was 14, not 9.

i dunno, i bought most of his story. i've never read a Lolita thread on /lit/, maybe this is where the conversation degrades into pedo apologism etc.

again explain how it differs from any other first-person narrator that makes it just so "unreliable" like is always touted

>>6218635
>He was never even trying to be a reliable narrator lel

i don't understand what you mean.

yall niggas dont know what unreliable narrator means, read Wayne C Booth or something

>>6217506
dude, there are mlp fanfictions that cover the same concepts with better prose, and in half the time.

>>6217655
Ulysses is shit tier

>>6218860

because you haven't fucking read it

>>6218762
you are just screwing with people now. to get a rise out of them. lol there is no fan fiction with better prose; if there were they would be the famous literary master and we would be talking about their book right now

lolita always wanted it

>>6217506
If plebees like it i am therefore obligated to dislike it; more, i am musted to hate it and despise it

>>6218878
I've read it.

That's how I know it's shit tier.

I wouldn't say that otherwise.

>>6219053

turning the pages and looking at words isn't the same thing as "reading"

Don't defend yourself. We both know you there wasn't a word you weren't ignorant of in that book, and that you made no effort to change that. You haven't read it.

>>6219077
I read it.

I'm sorry it butthurts you so much that I can read something you like and still not like it, but trying to change "reading" to "reading it and liking it" to win just by changing a definition is really fucking gay.

I read it.

It's SHIT TIER.


"YOU DIDN'T RLY READ THE BOOK OR YOU WOULD LIKE IT DAHURHURUHR YOU COULDN'T UNDERSTAND DA WORDS" - Anon, on any book that anyone says is shit tier, including shit tier books, including anything he has ever written

>>6219081
Why didn't you like it, anon? I'm curious.

>>6217650

you are fucking retarded. how long have you been on /lit/?

>>6219081

suit yourself, I really do suggest you read it again and focus on the words rather than your father's cock, but it's not my job to sway morons

>“It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.”

Underrated line.

>>6218514
Why do people call it a love story? I thought it was pretty obvious that for most of the book HH didn't care about Lo as an actual person, he just saw her as a sex object, with the exception of maybe the very end of the story. It's more about lust and obsession than love.

>>6219384
I agree, the famous opening paragraph is already more about lust and her body than love:

>Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

Lolita is a story about love in the later-half of the 20th century, a changing world where East and West were becoming more and more isolated.

Nabokov and family, a Russian citizen exiled by the Communists after 1917, was no stranger to being persecuted, dislocated, and being controversial.

His crowning achievement, Lolita, is like a time capsule between two different eras. As Western morals were fortifying themselves, perhaps even being established anew after the moral failures and life-loss caused by two cataclysmic World Wars. Skirts were longer. Blouses less revealing. Couples on t.v. slept in two different beds rather than together.

And then, in 1955, Nabokov inadvertently set off a pornographic, poignant, and poetic powder-keg when Lolita was published.

The so-called "free love" movement of the 60's and on was yet to come, but despite this, Lolita was born of a reaction to increasing Soviet censorship (while not in Russia at the time nor published in Russia, Nabokov still knew how hard writing and thinking was in his native Russia)

Nabokov's "Humbert Humbert" character is perhaps mentally altered in the idea that he loves-perhaps even lusts after-a 12 year old girl, Dolores Haze. HH could be interpreted as a "self-insert" of Vladimir Nabokov himself, although I am pretty confident Nabokov was not a pedophile. However, I do think HH bears some of Nabokov’s opinions on the changing sexual attitudes of the (mainly Western) World.

If HH is truly a pedophile, then he must be a self-aware one, as he can’t seem to control his actions in his quest to become one with his precious Lo. He commits murder for her, sees her as a sex object, and in one undeniably creepy scene he crawls into her (empty) bed to read her letters when they are away.

Throughout the novel, HH becomes more and more obsessed with Dolores, and Dolores herself sees HH as a friend, a family member, a kind of eccentric uncle-figure. At the climax of the story, Dolores sees HH for not what he is, but what has he become. This is a metaphor for evolving sexual ideas and practices in the 1950’s and an allegory for what it would become. Who knew in the early 21st century our carnal identify would be defined by pulpy fan-fiction tier rape porn?

Who know what the future will bring us?

/rant

>>6217457
Fuck you.

>>6217457
Did you read it?

>>6218593
Humbert Humbert lies directly to the audience. He describes how he can't bring himself to kill his wife and then later he goes to jail for shooting someone. How did you not catch this or something like it?

>>6217544

>(but he turns out alright, in the end).

Does he?

>>6219472

Can't even imagine being this naive

>>6218593
lol whether or not a narrator is unreliable isnt really subjective

if you didnt find an unreliable narrator unreliable, then you fucked up m8

>>6218687
in 'reality' lolita could very well have been the seducer

doesnt change the fact they he did it with a 14 year old, doesnt change the fact that he is aware of how that would sound to the audience hes writing for

>>6219081
especially when it comes to people who dont articulate their opinions, when you shit on a canonically upheld masterpiece, people are generally going to give the book the benefit of the doubt, rather than you

>>6220058
Lo is 12 when he starts sleeping with her, not 14. So, even worse.

>>6219497
>it's hard to kill someone you have feelings for as opposed to some random guy
Wouldn't you know. Soldiers must leave you confused too.

>>6220077
So that's not even legal in Japan, noice.