Having Lolita as your favorite book is odd but can be defensible, describing it as a “love story” is something fucking else. It’s like calling “The Little Matchstick Girl” an “entrepreneurship story”.
Of Mice and Men was a story about two guys who loved animals
“To Build A Fire” is a cool story about hiking in nature.
“Leiningen Versus the Ants” is an uplifting tale about pest control
“Hatchet” is an instruction manual for small hand axes.
No frou-frou symbolism, just a good simple tale about a man who loves petting rabbits
i was going to play devil’s advocate and say that liking lolita doesn’t say anything bad about a person, but a love story??? holy shit, it’s all projection isn’t it?
every single God damn accusation is a confession from these ghouls
Every Single Time
I haven’t read Lolita but I understand that Humbert Humbert is an unreliable narrator who you’re not supposed to sympathize with, so I was willing to give her some slack but a great and tragic love story? Uhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Oof. I was going to say the same thing; Lots of people see their own lives in the story and the way Lolita was failed by the people around her, yadda yadda. But now, Rowling always has to go below and beneath.
I haven’t read it either but I’m told that if you have any critical thinking skills it’s very obvious that what’s his ass is the villain and Lolita is very much a child being abused by an adult. idk how you get either pornography or “a great and tragic love story” out of that.
Lolita had a lot of weird cultural moments back like 20 years ago when it was a favorite of a lot of goth girls I knew. I never really understood why. Looking back I’m about 50/50 on if they were just trolling and being transgressive, or if it was something about how society objectifies young women and puts enormous contradictory demands on them all while subjecting them to abuse.
You need to just not be a pedophile yourself. It’s not subtext here, it’s text. Your 50/50 regarding goth girls you knew liking it is accurate but in thst half were being transgression and the other half is the latter. I’d heard essentially what you had before and gave it a read, the Kubrick movie is what people are generally thinking of, not the book. There is no way you could read that book and take it as an endorsement of pedophilia
is it worth reading?
yeah the prose is outstanding
Nabokov never wrote one likable character in any book. Someone above said Lolita has a “narrator who you’re not supposed to sympathize with”, but you’re not supposed to sympathise with anyone, his is a worldview where people are morally low and sadistic manipulators, or else pathetic rubes being manipulated
The void of the street, revealing nothing of my wife’s departure except a rhinestone button that she had dropped in the mud after preserving it for three unnecessary years in a broken box, may have spared me a bloody nose. But no matter. I had my little revenge in due time. A man from Pasadena told me one day that Mrs. Maximovich née Zborovski had died in childbirth around 1945; the couple had somehow got over to California and had been used there, for an excellent salary, in a year-long experiment conducted by a distinguished American ethnologist. The experiment dealt with human and racial reactions to a diet of bananas and dates in a constant position on all fours. My informant, a doctor, swore he had seen with his own eyes obese Valechka and her colonel, by then gray-haired and also quite corpulent, diligently crawling about the well-swept floors of a brightly lit set of rooms (fruit in one, water in another, mats in a third and so on) in the company of several other hired quadrupeds, selected from indigent and helpless groups. I tried to find the results of these tests in the Review of Anthropology; but they appear not to have been published yet. These scientific products take of course some time to fructuate. I hope they will be illustrated with photographs when they do get printed, although it is not very likely that a prison library will harbor such erudite works.
It’s actually pretty fucking good. The problem is being someone who has it around their house while you’re reading it.
or if it was something about how society objectifies young women and puts enormous contradictory demands on them all while subjecting them to abuse.
SA
A good portion of this category have been assaulted themselves and are looking for explanations of how/why this sort of thing even happens. Just being like “oh, his twisted brain is just broken” isn’t really a satisfactory answer when thinking about something horrifying that’s happened to you. Bear in mind common stats point to 1 in 3 women being sexually abused in their lifetime.
It doesn’t sound like this necessarily aligns with Rowling’s experience. Or if it does, she picked the absolute worst way to cope.
you have any critical thinking skills
From what I understand you don’t really even need that, the book makes it pretty blatant that what the dude is doing is beyond fucked up. The reputation is has is mostly due to bad adaptations of it.
Its emphatically not a love story.
Describing Lolita (a great novel btw) as a great and tragic love story is such a fundamental misreading jfc
damn i’ll DM Lionel Trilling to inform him of his fundamental misreading.
Do you think Lolita is a great and tragic love story?
Yes and 9/11 was a love story too
So romantic how much those planes and buildings loved eachother.
A double-date made in hell.
Does this mean Building 7 is a third wheel?
Remember Me (2010)
If she’s so reclusive then why are we constantly hearing her spout TERF bullshit?
and i thought people who say Romeo & Juliet is a love story were missing the point… yeesh
Wait so what’s the takeaway from Romeo and Juliet otherwise? Let dumb family feuds ruin your life?
If you keep up your dumb family feud, your dumb teenagers are gonna drink poison about it. The feud was over nothing, and it took the pointless deaths of their children for the families to recognize it.
Yeah but then it’s still a love story, just one with a takeaway beyond “love good”
Love is pointless if you don’t communicate. If you don’t trust your partner enough to tell them about your exit plan, maybe it wasn’t meant to be.
A reoccurring thread in the narrative is that Juliet is just Romeo’s most recent infatuation and that he has a history of getting obsessive around women like that.
“Is Rosaline, whom thou didst love so dear, So soon forsaken? Young men’s love then lies Not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes”
damn really? crazy
Rambling, pretentious screed. Probably best to ignore this.
There’s a lot of different themes in Romeo and Juliet and it’d do it a bit of a disservice to say it’s about this one thing in specific.
But, Romeo’s fickleness is a consistent through line.
Like, the first scene Romeo appears in is an argument between Romeo and his cousin Benvolio. Romeo is still pining over Rosalind rejecting him, and Benvolio tells Romeo that he’ll thinks he’ll fall for the next woman he meets.
“Be ruled by me, forget to think of her. By giving liberty unto thine eyes; Examine other beauties.”
Romeo tells Benvolio that he’ll never love another woman (note: this is dramatic irony, the ACT 1 prologue speech has already informed the audience he’s going to fall in love with Juliet):
“The precious treasure of his eyesight lost: Show me a mistress that is passing fair, What doth her beauty serve, but as a note Where I may read who pass’d that passing fair? Farewell: thou canst not teach me to forget.”
Romeo’s closest friend is Mercutio. When he sees Romeo making a beeline for Juliet during a party they’ve snuck into he has this to say:
“Nay, I’ll conjure too. Romeo! humours! madman! passion! lover! Appear thou in the likeness of a sigh: Speak but one rhyme, and I am satisfied; Cry but ‘Ay me!’ pronounce but ‘love’ and ‘dove;’ Speak to my gossip Venus one fair word, One nick-name for her purblind son and heir, Young Adam Cupid, he that shot so trim, When King Cophetua loved the beggar-maid! He heareth not, he stirreth not, he moveth not; The ape is dead, and I must conjure him. I conjure thee by Rosaline’s bright eyes, By her high forehead and her scarlet lip, By her fine foot, straight leg and quivering thigh And the demesnes that there adjacent lie, That in thy likeness thou appear to us!”
And, like, other than those two, the only person Romeo confides in is Friar Laurence (who I quoted in my previous comment).
So, both the events of the play and exposition from characters closest to him all take pains to highlight Romeo’s tendency to fall into obsessive infatuation, only to immediately forget about them the moment the next object of his lust crosses his view.
That’s not to completely invalidate interpretations of Romeo and Juliet as a tragic love story, just that it interpreting solely as that requires flattening out a lot of the wider themes.
Sorry for the text wall.
Romeo and Juliet is just Lolita v0.
It’s a good book tbh
I would give a great deal to master a second language as well as Nabokov mastered English, the prose is incredible. but it is definitely not a “love story” 🤮 and describing it as such says volumes
famously reclusive millionaire writer
Maybe if she’d stayed that way she wouldn’t have to whine about being cancelled and being put through a witch trial or whatever
JK Rowling has a lot of issues and every interview I’ve seen of her unravels it more and more
I was prepared to say “ehhhh, weird choice for a book to gush about to the media, but it does have really exceptional prose” until I got to “great and tragic love story.” I guess I shouldn’t be shocked that she doesn’t have very good reading comprehension since her books aren’t known for their subtly either, but damn. That’s the kind of fundamental misreading that you rarely even see in high school English classes.
I read an excerpt from one of her newer books, it was introducing a character and within like a paragraph it says something along the lines of “and the weird shape of his body made you wonder what his dick looked like”.
You do not, under any circumstances, have to hand it to that book
The book is fine. It does not at all empathize with the pedophile, it doesn’t sexualize Lolita. Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation however, is totally fucked up. The book is about a fucked up subject for sure, but it absolutely condemns it.
Whatd Kubrick do to the adaptation?
From what I understand, while the book is told from the perspective of the pedophile, who is proven to be lying or wildly distorting things in a brief moment when the victim gets to speak, the movie mostly plays it straight, with the child seducing a grown-ass man.
Someone else got to it first. The movie is where the heart shaped sunglasses and lollypop imagery came from and absolutely sexualizes a child.
The problem isn’t the book inherently, but the inevitable reception when put in the hands of pedophilic cultures like those of the anglosphere. Nabakov was adamant, for example, that the cover should not depict Lolita (the character) in any literal sense (or any person, iirc), for obvious and correct reasons. You can look up what cover art has nonetheless been used if you are feeling masochistic.
I blame Kubrick. He brought in the heart shaped sunglasses.
Reading any book 20 times should get you institutionalised
Nervously glancing at my battered copy of Blackshirts and Reds
I consider it more like an extended pamphlet
Look we all need help every once in a while, being sent to an
asylumrefuge shouldn’t be a bad thing. Also reading from cover to cover is different from “looking in it to figure out what the dude said about this specific thing”Yeah true I think I’ve read it cover to cover only twice or three times. I just have referenced it a million times and skimmed through it to find a certain passage I remembered
