/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.10979303]

I'm trying to discuss Lolita with a friend but I'm having trouble thinking of good talking points. What are some things/questions/etc that you'd recommend to discuss about it?

[Anonymous No.10979428]

>>10979303
You can't think of one thing?

[Anonymous No.10979453]

c.q. as a critique of postwar antisemitism

[Anonymous No.10979477]

>>10979303
Humbert's reliability as a narrator.
If someone snapped a photo of Humbert at The Enchanted Huntress, why wasn't he in the picture in the local paper?
What's up with all the dogs at key moments in the book (Charlotte's death, The Enchanted Huntress, last meeting with Dolly)
The problematic nature of the introduction.
Why is Humbert's showdown with Clare Quilty so comicly grotesque (see passage where Humbert is described as jumping like a kangaroo and the fact that Quilty is pumped with bullets and doesn't die).
What is the significance of the haircut (Nabokov said it was the key to the novel and that he spent the most time writing and editing that passage)

[Anonymous No.10979498]

>>10979303
Here's a good talking point. Society supports ad sublimates pedophilic tendencies through the romanticism of youth. From movies about high-schoolers getting laid to the fact that Teen porn is one of the most popular categories on the internet. Humbert is a terrible character but what's so revolting is the universal truth of obsessive masculinity, the need to destroy something innocent and how sick society is under the surface of established cultural customs and laws.

[Anonymous No.10979511]

>>10979303
>Is H.H. the rapist or the therapist?

[Anonymous No.10979528]

>>10979498
>yes let me apply the culture of today to a book written in the past when none of this was relevant
Presentism is a sign of being a brainlet.

[Anonymous No.10979532]

>>10979498
>The desire for a clean shaven partner is the unconscious desire for a prepubescent.

Society is fucked yo

[Anonymous No.10979548]

>>10979498
"Teen porn" is actually acted out by 18+ yo women... Dude. DUDE.

[Anonymous No.10979555]

>>10979528
It was shocking at the time it was written just as it is today. Culture hasn't changed much in that respect. A true brainlet refuses to draw connections or ruminate on timeless literary themes because they believe that they live in an alien future where people have totally changed morally.

[Anonymous No.10979557]

Discuss attached.

[Anonymous No.10979563]

>>10979557
>It's evolution, baby!

[Anonymous No.10979571]

>>10979548
I mean, they act out looking young with pigtails on beds with teddy bears, looking young as fuck. They may be older, but the message is clear and disgusting desu. Men are pigs

[Anonymous No.10979587]

>>10979555
If you genuinely believe that Lolita advocates the underhand acceptance of pedophilia in society you need to stop reading literature.

[Anonymous No.10979589]

>>10979571
But the important issue is that they're adults. It legally doesn't matter if they "look" young. Not for me, anyway, m8.

[Anonymous No.10979707]

>>10979303
Discuss these quotes, because somehow too many readers and even critics seem to miss them:

"We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country, that, by then, in retrospect, was no more than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires and her sobs in the night—every night, every night—the moment I feigned sleep."

"Unless it can be proven to me—to me as I am now, today, with my heart and my beard, and my putrefaction—that, in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, life is a joke) I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art."

[Anonymous No.10979722]

>>10979587
no dumbfuck that was not what I was saying at all, it raised discussion about something no one was ready to talk about. And pedos actually like the fucking book, ironic but all the same, it does in some sense romanticize evil

[Anonymous No.10980158]

>>10979303
idk, the way Humbert uses euphemisms for sex ie " a quick connection".

[Anonymous No.10980209]

>>10979303
He killed his wife

[Anonymous No.10980253]

>>10979303
The part after the book is over where Nabokov says that books don't need to be particularly "about" anything and that looking for something deeper in a book is dumb.

[Anonymous No.10980274]

as a ruski anglo speaker myself whatever

its a interesting linguistic treasure as it was written in russian, and written in english, not translated by a another party.

you could also use the following: just replace why did the chicken cross the road with "why did the grown up man have sex with the underage girl?"

Lawful Good: "Good for that entropy fighting chicken, go chicken go!"
Neutral Good: "Why does everyone focus on the chicken? Why isn't it "there is a road about to be crossed by a contemplative chicken."
Chaotic Good: "Go find a fucking chicken and a road and keep to yourself."
===
Lawful Neutral = It is none of my business why that chicken chooses to cross the road.
True Neutral = "Why did the chicken cross the road?"
Chaotic neutral = "Life is nothing but chickens and roads man, when you really boil it down."
===
Lawful Evil= "So what we do is, yes let the chicken cross, but then we eat it and stop thinking about silly nonsense."
True Evil= "What a magnificently ambiguous riddle!"
Chaotic Evil= "Simple, We go back in time, exterminate the chicken that inspired this riddle, exterminate the man who was inspired by the chicken and depave that fucking road. When we return, we depravely delight in asking people about chickens and roads in a non contextual timeline"=

[Anonymous No.10980293]

havent read it but the little girl is an agressor who takes advantage of an innocent man

[Anonymous No.10980303]

i never understood the appeal of Nabokov. pedophiles have been with us since the beginning, they are weaker homosexual men who use sexual gratification with unwilling subjects as a way to exert their control into the world. they are like people who beat their dogs.

the only reason to write a book about is to normalize it, which is exactly what it did.

if Nabokov really wanted to challenge himself as a writer, he would've written a first person account of Adolf Hitler with the justifications for his actions leading up to and during and after the holocaust. blaming the Jews for what they brought onto themselves, and explaining how this sort of apocalyptic thinking is only par for the course, and how Hitler was really their messiah, send by god, as his actions gave them back Israel. That would be intellectually stimulating since he was a Russian Jew. Sex with children is hardly a controversial thing inside Jewish communities, it happens in Hollywood and there is Talmudic law which clearly proscribes it. Admitting you are partially responsible for what happens to you, well, that's a transgression that is unthinkable.

[Anonymous No.10980315]

>>10980303
>pedophiles have been with us since the beginning, they are weaker homosexual men who use sexual gratification with unwilling subjects as a way to exert their control into the world. they are like people who beat their dogs.
Pretty sure Humbert has sex with a few adult women. He is not in any way, a homosexual.

[Anonymous No.10980334]

>My my that little girl looks cute, that reminds me I read the most fascinsting book the other day..
Easy opener

[Anonymous No.10980341]

>>10979303
>I'm trying to discuss [book] with a friend but I'm having trouble thinking of good talking points.
t. me after reading any book, i literally don't have a single thing to say most of the time

[Anonymous No.10980351]

>>10979303
You can talk about their quasi-incestuous father-daughter parody of a relationship.

[Anonymous No.10980440]

>>10980315
a lot of homosexuals in the 50s married and had kids, it was a different time with respect to self-expression.

[Anonymous No.10980451]

>>10980440
He wasnt a homo, Anon. He had sex with females for pleasure.

[Anonymous No.10980607]

>>10979571
Sounds like current-day mores are incompatible with the male sexuality that built the Enlightenment.

[Anonymous No.10980684]

>>10980451
The Chad faggot only turns to men once his wife has ruined her vag through childbirth and is hitting the menopausal wall.

[Anonymous No.10980694]

>>10979428
Yeah I'm retarded.

[Anonymous No.10980853]

>>10979557
I want to disagree with this, but in my personal experience it has proven somewhat true.

[Anonymous No.10981090]

[Anonymous No.10981101]

Humbert did literally nothing wrong.

[Anonymous No.10981149]

>>10979303
- talk about prose
- the discomfort of finding someone as deplorable as humbert humbert as reasonable and human
- humbert humbert's reliability of a narrator - what is he lying about and to what extent (i.e. nobody's real name is a first name twice except dj Khaled he's literally called Khaled Khaled )
- "hey also it's just a damn good book where else would you want to go after reading that got any reccs dude"

[Anonymous No.10981153]

>discussing literature irl to sound smart and educated
Stop

[Anonymous No.10981189]

>>10979477
Tell me about the haircut.

[Anonymous No.10981203]

>>10979303
Tell him about how the whole book can be read as a meditation on the nature of literature

[Anonymous No.10981309]

>>10979707
Those quotes really catched my attention when I read the book (I was 15). It's weird how most people seem to miss them but I think they want to see the book as a romance novel or anything but the tragedy it is. It really hit me how he was responsible for Dolores' loss of innocence and yet he rarely acknowledges it. Those two paragraphs plus the ending are the only parts of the book where he admits what he did was wrong. It shows how deluded he was, but also that he was aware of his actions. H.H. becomes more hateful when you notice this

[Anonymous No.10981328]

>>10981309
Or else the story is nuanced and like any living person his perspective of his situation changes and you choose to emphasize the tragedy because it conforms to your maudlin victorian moralism

[Anonymous No.10981356]

>>10981309
>>10981328

If you're looking for "themes" to talk about, Humbert's occasional brief moments of horrified self-awareness definitely give the book an edge.

As always God is in the details. Find specific examples and talk about them. I remember several even though it's years since I read the book:

* Early on he says something like he is Humbert Humbert with a "whole cellarful of rotting monsters behind his shy boyish smile".

* At the end of one chapter he says something about even a miserable poverty-stricken existence with an oaf "proved better than the parody of incest which was all I was able to offer the waif".

Just occasionally he realizes who and what he really is, and suppresses it.

[Anonymous No.10981394]

This book brought to you by
"I have a thing for blondes"

[Anonymous No.10981600]

>>10981149
>nobody's real name is a first name twice
Yeah, he explains that he changed all the names in the introduction, m8. He even briefly explains that he chose Humbert Humbert for himself b/c it was "fitting"

[Anonymous No.10981655]

>>10981153
>irl
ew no
Do it over discord or something

[Anonymous No.10981846]

>>10980853
>but in my personal experience it has proven somewhat true.

[Anonymous No.10981857]

>>10979303
It's flawless style
many other writers esp. 20th c. ones are stylistic brainlets

[Anonymous No.10981861]

>>10981846
>implying the FBI aren't all over this truth in their psyops

[Anonymous No.10981876]

Talk about those fine legs on the cover.

[Anonymous No.10981905]

Was the end of the book nearly as good as the beginning/middle? Did the unreliability at the end actually do anything to make the story more interesting? Considering Nabokov's position on what a book should be about, does it even matter? I just got finished with Lolita so the end of the book is still fresh on my mind. Also, can anyone refute that Part 2 Chapter 8 is one of the greatest chapters of the English language? Idk that chapter really spoke to me on how we present ourselves to people

[Anonymous No.10981926]

>>10979477
Very interesting but it's been some time since I've read it.
Can you elaborate on all these points? Especially the photograph, the dogs and the haircut.
I remember reading about another (likely) key to the novel being the hotel room number, but I'm not sure - Nabokov detested numerology as far as I know.

[Anonymous No.10981927]

>>10981876
this is nabokov btw

[Anonymous No.10981961]

>>10981394
Lolita is brunette

[Anonymous No.10982287]

>>10981394
Dolores is a brunette girl.

[Anonymous No.10982293]

>>10981356
>As always God is in the details.
I thought the expression was "the devil is in the details".

[Anonymous No.10982297]

>>10981927
lol

[Anonymous No.10982538]

>>10979571
depends on the type of porn. there is legit teen porn with 18-19 year olds acting like 18-19 year olds and then there's the weird pedo shit you mention. I think most teen porn would fall in the former category.

[Anonymous No.10982603]

H.H. Lolita complex could be originated by the fact , that when he was a preteen boy he had started relations with a girl his age but later she died in a accident. That can be see as him trying to recreate his first true love in his partners. Dolores wasn't that innocent pure child the society wanted to see her. H.H. was just another partner for her. The Hollywood guy spend his life doing only the things he wanted and that ruined him .

[Anonymous No.10982677]

>>10979303
Dolores has extremely little dialogue, and even then it's almost entirely third-person. Relates back to unreliability of HH and "solipsization"

[Anonymous No.10982766]

ah lolita, 10 decades as the only socially acceptable dog whistle for pedos

[Anonymous No.10982787]

>>10979587
>heres my claim but im not gonna back it up or extrapolate it at all so im just gonna use the brainlet meme lol

kys pseud

[Anonymous No.10982789]

>>10979477
>the problematic nature of the introduction
Your post is problematic.

[Anonymous No.10982852]

>>10980303
NABAKOV IS NOT A JEW REEEEEEE

[Anonymous No.10982854]

>>10982852
His mother was.

[Anonymous No.10982860]

>>10982766
what

[Anonymous No.10982877]

>>10980303
the main character is a heterosexual pedophile, most pedophiles are hetersexual. second of all the Talmud at no point justifies or prescribes pedophilic sexuality and all sex outside of marriage is forbidden, especially with males, but this holds at all ages, homosexuality is forbidden. Hollywood is secular, what they do is not directly connected or based off the protocols of the Jewish community, and not even close to everyone in Hollywood, including Jewish producers and directors, are pedophiles. The next thing would be that the Jewish messiah is supposed to come when all the nations of the world are surrounding Israel and Israel has fallen to evil ways, he punished bad Jews and the enemies of Israel. Finally, while the Jewish community tolerates pedophilic behavior in the same hushed-up, obscured, manner that the Islamic community does, and this is especially the case in North africa and West Asia, Jews, especially reformed Jews, are not aware of it, or are not allowed to talk about it, the Catholics have the exact same problem, and its very likely significantly more people have been harmed by Catholic leaders and Muslim leaders than Jews have been harmed by jewish predators in the religious community, just using statistical logic here.

Also, Nabokov was not a Jew

[Anonymous No.10982883]

>>10982854
Any proof?

[Anonymous No.10982903]

>>10982883
his mother’s maiden name is russian, she was not Jewish. they’re flat out lying, he has no Jewish features. Eastern euro jews look vaguely like Germans and Slavs but Slavs have distinct noses and orbitals. He is not a Jew

[Anonymous No.10982912]

>>10982883
Wikipedia says she was jewish. Suspicious.

[Anonymous No.10982925]

>>10982912
Must have been a butthurt Dostoevsky reader

[Anonymous No.10982931]

>>10982603
Agreed for the most part. But what was it about Lolita that made Humbert so obsessed with her as opposed to any other Nymphet he knew? Was it simply the fact that he had convenient access to her?

[Anonymous No.10983271]

>>10980274
This was autistic and had nothing to do with the subject at hand.
Has a tabletop geek and as a mostly sane human being your post made me wince from embarrassement, it's the first time this happened on 4chan even though I've been a regular for 7 years now

[Anonymous No.10983302]

>>10982931
wasn't it that she reminded him of anabelle?

[Anonymous No.10983303]

>>10983302
yeah, same hair color, same age, etc.

[Anonymous No.10983314]

>>10983302
>>10983303
also his access to her and that she was perhaps the first to pay him any attention and that the 'games' they played were what really made her such a prize for him.

[Anonymous No.10983966]

>>10981926
I can elaborate on them, but I too don't have my book so I'm going from memory. I should also add a year ago I was enrolled in a class that focused solely on Nabokov. My teacher was a scholar on Nabokov and the points I outlined were things we discussed in class. Also I may make a new thread solely for discussing these points.

>Humbert's reliability as a narrator
I feel this one is too obvious to discuss. But reread John Ray's forward, The "seduction scene" at The Enchanted Huntress specifically paying attention to the "petting games" Dolly was used to and how Humbert takes it too far, initiating Dolly unwillingly into the adult world. Also reread "the couch scene", paying close attention to Nabokov's choice of words, and ask yourself just how did Dolly really get that bruise?
>If someone snapped a photo of Humbert at The Enchanted Huntress, why wasn't he in the picture in the local paper?
It can be argued Humbert dreamed everything up. Although the point where the dream begins can placed at different points. I can't remember the exact words but when Dolly tells Humbert it was Clare Quilty, Humbert says something about a watch. This is a reference to when Humbert thought about drowning Charlotte and he was still wearing his watch. If look at these passages again, you can argue that it's a dream. Humbert fails to drown Charlotte, then when they're lying on the beach he imagines what would happen if he did. The watch is the key. So if it is truly a dream, this would explain why Humbert is not in the photo at the Enchanted Huntress. It's just an interesting part of the story. A photo of Humbert is taken by the newspaper, but when he checks the paper he's not in the photo.
>What's up with all the dogs at key moments in the book (Charlotte's death, The Enchanted Huntress, last meeting with Dolly)
I don't really have anything to say on this. But our teacher tried to get us to discuss this. He pointed it out to us and wondered if we had any thoughts. He didn't really have anything definite either. Read into it what you will.
>The problematic nature of the introduction
Read these essays. Specifically on the sections that address John Ray Jr.
https://journals.openedition.org/miranda/2591?lang=fr
https://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1304&context=div3facpubs
>Why is Humbert's showdown with Clare Quilty so comicly grotesque (see passage where Humbert is described as jumping like a kangaroo and the fact that Quilty is pumped with bullets and doesn't die)
This really just goes back to the dream/imagination theory. Though for this one you can shift when the dream begins. For simplicity's sake, the dream begins after Humbert meets Dolly for the last time. He imagines himself getting revenge on Quilty for taking away his "Lolita". This would explain the blatant artifice of the whole scenario, the literal "poetic justice" for one. But also it's important to note how comical the entire thing is.

[Anonymous No.10983974]

>>10983966
[Continued]
Quilty is banging away on the piano, and doesn't react to a gun being pointed at him. The descriptions are fantastical. It's unreal in the literal sense. There's also something to be said about the people who show up at Quilty's house as well. They have descriptions that deserve a close reading.
>What is the significance of the haircut (Nabokov said it was the key to the novel and that he spent the most time writing and editing that passage)
I don't really have much to say on this. But Nabokov said it was the key to the book and that he spent the most time writing and editing this passage. We didn't really reach a conclusion about this in our class, and our teacher said no one in the critical/academic field has really tried to tackle this question. I think we talked about how the death of the barber's son was important or something to do with the son being a baseball player. But you'd need to reread that passage for further elucidation.

[Anonymous No.10984004]

>>10982766
>10 decades
>2018-100=1918
I didn't realize this was Nabokov's first novel. Really enlightening desu.

[Anonymous No.10984037]

>>10979707
The first one hit me like a truck when I read it a month ago. It literally makes the rest of the novel 10x harder to read.

[Anonymous No.10984333]

>>10979571
You do know that that's also a fetish for women, right?

It's called being a "babygirl" look it up, a lot of women are into it.

[Anonymous No.10984336]

>>10984037
It's the quote Nabokov's wife Vera was referencing when she said "Lolita cries in her sleep every night, and yet the critics have not heard her." At the time there were so many assclown critics calling it a great love story, or blaming Lo for everything, that she was disgusted.

[Anonymous No.10984355]

>>10984336
Do you have a source for that quote? I can't seem to find anything

[Anonymous No.10984360]

>>10983302
If you believe his story. The name, the details, turns of phrase, make it seem like a made-up story based on Poe's Annabel Lee poem. It would appeal to Humbert to gain false sympathy with a textbook early-trauma story of the kind every pedophile is supposed to have, based on an American author--and why Poe? Because he secretly married his cousin Virginia (he was 26 and she was 13), and they were in love before that, and of course she died at 24 (according to several scholars, still a virgin). When we say Humbert is unreliable, we're not fucking around.

[Anonymous No.10984370]

>>10984355
Sorry, I paraphrased from memory. She said Lolita “cries every night, and the critics are deaf to her sobs” (qtd. in Pifer, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita: A Casebook, 197).

[Anonymous No.10984401]

>>10981356
Excellent examples. Nabokov's prose is so precise it's easy to miss even important points (like Quilty's identity: "waterproof," for Christ's sake, because your mouth looks the same saying "waterproof" as "Quilty") the first time.

[Anonymous No.10984475]

>>10979303

What if Lolita was about Ayy Lmaos abducting and interbreeding with humans? What if that's an Ayy Lmao in the cover?

[Anonymous No.10984490]

>>10984401
>like Quilty's identity: "waterproof," for Christ's sake, because your mouth looks the same saying "waterproof" as "Quilty"
What does this signify? I don't recall anything about "waterproof"

[Anonymous No.10984584]

>>10984490
Really? The word that sent most of us flipping madly back through the book?

“Do you really want to know who it was? Well, it was—”
And softly, confidentially, arching her thin eyebrows and puckering her parched lips, she emitted, a little mockingly, somewhat fastidiously, not untenderly, in a kind of muted whistle that name that the astute reader had guessed long ago.
“Waterproof.”

In this passage, located in the middle of Chapter 29 of Part Two, Lolita solves the novel’s mystery by revealing the identity of her kidnapper and Humbert’s pursuer. Yet Nabokov still plays games with the traditional mystery genre. Like a good mystery writer, he builds suspense with the large string of adjectives describing Lolita’s answer—all of which (mocking, fastidious, not untenderly) indicate her feelings for Quilty. Then, even at the end, Nabokov withholds the answer, giving not the name but the shape of Lolita’s lips making the name, something that the enamored Humbert would no doubt focus on. Nabokov does not reveal the name itself, and though Lolita will describe Quilty and their circumstances in more detail later, at this point the reader is supplied only with the word waterproof. Though seemingly out of context, waterproof refers to a comment made by Charlotte at Hourglass Lake about Humbert’s watch, just as Jean Farlow began a story about Ivor Quilty’s dangerous nephew Clare Quilty. The story was never finished, but it was the first time that Quilty was referred to in the novel.

The presence of the word waterproof, as a substitute for the easy answer of “Quilty,” indicates that Nabokov expects the reader to be an active participant throughout the novel. He includes dozens of references to Quilty before this point, and, as Humbert states, an astute reader who participates in the games in and patterns of the novel would have guessed this name long ago. Humbert himself was too blinded by desire and his own lack of self-awareness to see his double in Quilty. The use of waterproof as an answer also indicates Nabokov’s method of linking fact with memory, which comes not in clean lines, but in instinctive recollections and associations. The name Quilty brings Humbert back to the moment where he might first have realized the danger Quilty represented to him and to Lolita. Nabokov uses the word waterproof to evoke memory instead of explicitly alluding to the scene at Hourglass Lake. Memory and thought, for Nabokov, are less scientific and rather a matter of jumbled images and moments.

[Anonymous No.10984739]

Lolita was so well written that it made me laugh in delight at times. Of particular note was the line about young girls becoming entombed within the flesh of older women (or something to that effect).

Gold!

[Anonymous No.10985770]

>>10984739
I felt the same. A particular favorite sentence was this

>try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let’s even smile a little. After all, there is no harm in smiling. For instance (I almost wrote “frinstance”),

Which is when he's about to molest Lolita at some point. He says to smile despite the horrible circumstances and then gets me with that line that makes me smile. He's just so charming despite everything.

[Anonymous No.10986232]

>>10984739
For anyone who was interested I found the passage

>I had no intention of doing so, since, as I have once remarked in the course of these confessions,there are few physiques I loathe more than the heavy low-slung pelvis, thick calves and deplorable complexion of the average coed (in whom I see, maybe, the coffin of coarse female flesh within which my nymphets are buried alive); but I did crave for a label, a background, and a simulacrum, and, as presently will become clear, there was a reason, a rather zany reason, why old Gaston Godin’s company would be particularly safe.

[Anonymous No.10986281]

>>10981149
>Normalfags are confronted with having to face the fact that pedophiles are human.

[Anonymous No.10986377]

>>10986281
The fact that you're a human doesn't necessarily mean that you shouldn't be thrown into a chipper for your crimes.

[Anonymous No.10986390]

>>10984401
>>10984584
>mouth looks the same saying waterproof and Quilty
I don't know, anon. Am I mispronluncing something? There's a likeness but I don't think it looks the same.

[Anonymous No.10986393]

>>10986232
Humbert was a true patrician.

[Anonymous No.10986439]

>>10979707
Can you tell me what page i can find these quotes?

[Anonymous No.10986536]

>>10986390
It should be indistinguishable in a mirror, just in terms of lip movement.

[Anonymous No.10986554]

>>10986439
That depends on your edition. The "sleep" quote is the last paragraph in Part Two, Chapter 3, and the "palliative of articulate art" is at the end of Chapter 31, Part Two.

[Anonymous No.10986571]

>>10986439
Flip to any page, there's a good quote

[Anonymous No.10986600]

>>10979707
>her sobs in the night—every night, every night
That line hit me like a truck when I first read the book. His wife has a quote about it, which I'm having trouble finding, but she says something to the effect of:
>Lolita cries in the night and the critics ignore her

[Anonymous No.10986626]

>>10986600
Yep. Discussed above.
>>10984370

[Anonymous No.10986634]

>>10986626
For the original source of that line: "She cries every night, and the critics are deaf to her sobs. - Véra Nabokov's “usual plea for Lolita's humanity”, Les Nouvelles Littéraires, 29 October 1959 (as quoted in Stacy Schiff's Véra: Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov (p. 255)

[Anonymous No.10986876]

>>10986554
>The sprinklers coming out of her ass

what was meant by this?

[Anonymous No.10986884]

>>10986554
This ruins the magazine.

[Anonymous No.10986972]

I'm 34 years old and I have been in a very intimate discourse with a 15 year girl for over 3 years. It was only yesterday that she turned 18. Very intelligent and so very sure what she wants in life (oh sir, I can see you laughing!) but I imagine the typical response would be " you groomed her", which is the only defense most people have but none of that, I was attracted to her and she knew it. When she was 16, she told me she read Lolita but didn't finished it because she felt that she wasn't ready! This was prior upon me meeting her for the first time.

There is nothing wrong with it, the people who say it's "disgusting" are probably women who envy the young or for the men who say, presumably stuck with their ugly wives but who knows, who can say! Age is only a number, as they say. In fact, 14-18 is fine.

My only advice is this, get out of your moral bubble.

[Anonymous No.10987027]

>>10986972
Humbert...

[Anonymous No.10987035]

>>10986972
Humbert, man... where do I begin.

[Anonymous No.10987037]

>>10986972
in the Tale of Genji, the prince essentially abducts a 10 year old girl and raises her to be the perfect wife.

An an individualistic age, such behaviour is strange.

[Anonymous No.10987121]

>>10986390
That's not what it is. It has to do with his waterproof watch. He contemplated killing Charlotte at the lake, but didn't do it. Then when him and Charlotte found out Jean Farlow was watching them she tells Humbert he forgot to take off his watch. Charlotte says it's waterproof. They then discuss Clare Quilty and Jean Farlow is about to reveal a dirty secret about Quilty before they have to leave. That's the connection between waterproof and Quilty. Not the fucking shape of the mouth.

[Anonymous No.10987145]

I don't know French and sadly my copy isn't annotated. Guess I missed a lot...

[Anonymous No.10987149]

>>10987145
Not really. Half the time Humbert writes French phrases he repeats then after in English and even when he doesn't there's no earth shattering revelations. The French is mostly for color.

[Anonymous No.10987200]

unreliable narration
metafiction

[Anonymous No.10987204]

>>10987145
Nah, not really. He himself admits they're just cliché phrases, like joie de vivre (joy for life) or stuff like that.

[Anonymous No.10987263]

>>10984739
One of my favorite lines in the whole book is "I produced Delicious." I don't know why, I just love the sound of it in the context it was in (when they're on the couch)

[Anonymous No.10988543]

wtf Humbert

[Anonymous No.10988574]

>>10988543
Did he just hint he would fuck his own daughter and grandaughter?

[Anonymous No.10988643]

>>10988543
this fucking book

[Anonymous No.10988652]

>>10988574
it was more of a nudge and a wink than a hint.

[Anonymous No.10988657]

>>10988574

Hint? He most certainly laid out his clear wishes of doing so. The book is full of that if you haven't read it, and what makes it well written is that Humbert's justifications for his acts are so elaborate that it ends up being a mirror for whoever reads and is also a pedophile (from this thread, clearly a lot of people). Humbert is the textbook case for unreliable narrators, and everyone in this thread claiming Dolores was fine with it and/or consenting is also lying out of their faces.

[Anonymous No.10988660]

>>10988574
Pretty much. "Salivating" gives it away.

[Anonymous No.10988679]

>>10983974
Not the other guy but thanks. This makes me like Lolita a little bit more.

[Anonymous No.10988708]

>>10988657
>The book is full of that if you haven't read it, and what makes it well written is that Humbert's justifications for his acts are so elaborate that it ends up being a mirror for whoever reads and is also a pedophile.
Yeah, totally this, he tries to normalize his degeneracy. All the "romantic" things he says about Lolita could also be applied to grown women and it'd be totally fine, but the pedo aspect makes anything rotate 180 degrees, which is also why it's such an importan piece of fiction.

[Anonymous No.10988717]

>friend asks me my favorite book
>let slip "Lolita"
>friend is intrigued and asks me to explain
>I'm just a closet pedo
>mfw I'm OP

[Anonymous No.10988744]

>>10986554
Thanks, i'm writing an essay about the importance of the narrator in Lolita for College, and every scene where it shows how much H.H. is unreliable as a narrator is important. First time i've read Lolita, the sleep quote didn't hit me as much as reading it again now.

[Anonymous No.10988928]

>>10988717
I'm reformed so it's fine.

[Anonymous No.10989227]

>>10987121
It's both. Read Nabokov's notes on the novel.

[Anonymous No.10989413]

>>10984584
>tfw you recognize this wall of text because it's what you saw when you looked up "waterproof" online

[Anonymous No.10989418]

>>10985770
I think the scary thing about Nabokov is his ability to manipulate emotions.
The first few chapters are delightfully playful, and that only makes the death of his first love all the more out of place and morbid.

[Anonymous No.10990669]

Can someone remind me of the scene with the dog/s in the enchanted hunters?

[Anonymous No.10990701]

>>10979557
This entire post is glorious lmao

[Anonymous No.10990771]

>>10982677
To add onto this, her name itself is a clever trick of Nabokov's, Dolores deriving from Latin "pain" or "sorrow." Affixing and referring to her almost exclusively as "Lolita" is analogous to Humbert's ignoring of her suffering.

[Anonymous No.10991231]

>>10979707
People also tend to ignore the opening, which, for my money, is one of the greatest examples of compressed prose in all of english literature. It is from here that Nabokov shows his true cards: 'Humbert Humbert' is a cognomen; Haze is not her real name; though these people did exist, their existence was far more sordid, etc. In fact, buried in the prose, we get a very brief, utterly devastating sketch of "Dolores'" final fate:

> '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.

Nabokov placed this sentence in the middle of a summing-up paragraph; it's not even given a place of ultimate significance at the end, and is therefore extremely easy to miss. And yet that is the true end of Dolores "Lolita" Haze, whom "Humbert Humbert" so devalues. As someone said earlier in this thread, it really is as though the critics never read this book; her tragic death is on the second page for God's sake.

[Anonymous No.10991237]

>>10986377
>being a pedophile is a crime.

[Anonymous No.10991260]

>>10988657
I am a pedophile although, desu i haven't felt any of that kind of attraction for about 4 or 5 years now, i just sort of "got over it" as soon as my niece was born.

His justifications are honestly paper thin and his actions almost never match up with his words. He constantly says he loves her even though her very clearly doesn't even like her.
He bribes her into doing things she doesn't want to, threatens her, imprisons her, forces her, literally rapes her.
Book is honestly not as subtle as people make out, you'd have to be pretty fucking dense to misunderstand.

[Anonymous No.10991396]

>>10979707
>because somehow too many readers and even critics seem to miss them
Maybe because the author tried very hard to hide them.

In their way, the critics are right. Nabokov sprinkled some get-out-of-jail cards throughout the text, it's true, but his *real* goal was to write a sordid pedoporno tale that women and soymen will find kinky. Because that's what sells.

[Anonymous No.10991412]

>>10991396
not that i think it's a lesser work in nabokov's ouevre, but lolita as a bestseller aware of itself is an interesting angle. i don't know how much of his wealth he managed to transfer out of russia, or his economic situation when he came to america. in any case, the filth and the fury of lolita surely set nabokov up for life

[Anonymous No.10991446]

>>10979571
>Men are pigs
If men are pigs you're also a pigu. Oink.

[Anonymous No.10991457]

>>10991260

While I agree and can concede to that, and other people have pointed this out (like her tragic fate being commented at in the second page), I'd say people are indeed, very very dense. His elaborations are good enough (and very) for these people, and perhaps I should have segregated them into the category of rapist pedophiles in particular? I don't know, I have to concede it's easy (perhaps far too much) to simply mix both rapist and pedo under a single umbrella.

I'd also have you elaborate on how you have grown out of it. As it appears to me, what you described in the second paragraph IS the "common" behavior, where common does not necessarily mean widespread but rather the behavior we see. Now that I think of it though, perhaps this is the only behavior we see because obviously only the bad cases surface to press. I can't imagine what a good case would be like though, since children in general are hard to negotiate with (not impossible I'd say) sans some minor or major degree of mind manipulation. Said "manipulation" might work for a position of teacher/student where it is assumed a priori one part has a superior standing in matters of knowledge, but in a relationship? There could never be an equal (or at least fair) footing, presumably.

[Anonymous No.10991512]

>>10979498
Aren't you turned on by sexy teen high schoolers? Age of consent being in the 14-16 age range is fairly common in Europe, and the mean age for losing virginity in nordic countries was around 16~.

>tfw you will never experience clumsy teen sex during hormonal peaks

[Anonymous No.10991621]

>>10991457
>I'd also have you elaborate on how you have grown out of it
It's hard to say, a combination of moving on to other fetishes and the realisation that children were not how i imagined them, they're really stupid and naive. I always pictured myself on an equal footing, as a child as well. I can't even get hard to it anymore.
>There could never be an equal (or at least fair) footing, presumably.
Especially when you have someone who desperately wants to hide their sexual activities. The power dynamics are really dangerous.
At the same time you are allowed to have sex with a retarded person so i don't know really.

[Anonymous No.10991630]

>>10991621
And eve if a "positive" experience did happen, the kid would be made to believe that they had been irreversibly defiled.
I can't imagine an actually fulfilling relationship with a child though, maybe if you were a bit mentally retarded yourself.

[Anonymous No.10991682]

>>10989413
Yep. Too lazy to write it all out myself. My Annotated Lolita is a great thing, but transcribing it onto threads is too much work.