[lbo-talk] Lolita [was light of my life...]

joanna bujes jbujes at covad.net
Fri Sep 17 21:11:33 PDT 2004


Carl Remick wrote:


>> Watch it, you can get a nasty cut waving Occam's razor around.
>> What's amusing, though, is that the original Lolita was very much a
>> European archetype -- Humbert Humbert and his creator Vladimir
>> Nabokov are about as Old World cosmopolitan as you can get. E.g.,
>> Humbert on his family background: "I was born in 1910, in Paris. My
>> father was a gentle, easy-going person, a salad of racial genes: a
>> Swiss citizen, of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of
>> the Danube in his veins." Humbert is a creepy character but very
>> funny, especially in his acerbic comments on the vapidity of US culture.
>
I don't like Nabokov much, but I thought Lolita was a sad/lovely/interesting book. IHe not only did a great/honest/insightful job with the oedipal/child molestation plot, buthe was also able to use that plot to represent/examine the relationship between old/Europe and young/U.S. Masterful really.

Joanna


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