This link has been bookmarked by 2 people . It was first bookmarked on 22 Apr 2008, by Clay Burell.
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31 Oct 13
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It's a post-war road novel, the odyssey of a venerable European man and a prepubescent American girl
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trying to outrun the past and find a future that doesn't exist
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The prose is by turns passionate and playful, while the narrative is simultaneously lyrical and unsettling and erotic and violent
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child molester
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he book, which can be viewed as an allegory for Europe's relationship with America, offers a depiction of love that is as patently original as it is brutally shocking.
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Even if we would never condone his vain and deadly infatuation, we understand it.
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finding Humbert's soul on the page, we also find, like it or not, a little of our own
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22 Apr 08
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Readers always read, I think, out of a tremendous curiosity about other human beings, we're looking for another soul on the page, and that's what Nabokov has so fearlessly, so complexly, so gorgeously given us. In a lesser writer's hands, we could easily dismiss Mr. Humbert as a monster, but Nabokov denies us that all-too comfortable option. Even if we would never condone his vain and deadly infatuation, we understand it. We're complicit in his sins, and our complicity is seductive and terrifying. "Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury... look at this tangle of thorns."
To be sure, this novel isn't for the faint of heart, but neither should prospective readers retreat to any kind of moral high ground. Nabokov, in fact, threads an unexpected and affirming emotional serenity through his portrait of obsession. His enigmatic narrator leaves us in spellbound rapture. Because for all of its linguistic pyrotechnics -- as Humbert confesses, "you can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style" -- and for all its controversial subject matter, Lolita is one of the most beautiful love stories you'll ever read. It may be one of the only love stories you'll ever read. This is the most thrilling and beautiful and most deeply disturbing aspect of the novel -- and it's what most persuasively recommends the book -- that in addition to finding Humbert's soul on the page, we also find, like it or not, a little of our own.
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