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

[Carl Remick]

>From: joanna bujes <jbujes at covad.net>
>
>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.

Yes, it's instructive to look at, say, Christopher Hitchens as a Humbert 
Humbert for our times -- a debauched, world-weary, Euro-sophisticate preying 
on the dewy-eyed idealism of childlike Americans with his seductive dreams 
of imperial glory ;-)

Carl