Joanna
Carl Remick wrote:
>> 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
>
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
> .
>