There's an interesting article in Slate that re-visitis Nabakov's great novel Lolita. I read it in college, but somehow I think I'd probably get more out of it now:
Lolita turns 50 this year, and having stayed so perverse, it remains fresh as ever. To fully appreciate its perversity, though, one must first appreciate that it is not obscene. Your run-of-the-mill obscene masterwork—Tropic of Cancer, say—demands that you, enlightened reader, work your way past the sex and excrement to recognize how beautiful it is. But with Lolita, you must work past its beauty to recognize how shocking it is. And for all its beauty, for all its immense ingenuity and humor, one easily forgets how shocking Lolita is. To wit: Later in the narrative, Humbert has settled with Lolita in a small town called Beardsley and set up a semblance of a normal suburban life. Humbert is called into Lolita's private school for a parent-teacher conference, where he is told that she is "antagonistic, dissatisfied, cagey" and "obsessed with sexual thoughts for which she finds no outlet." In essence, Humbert is being offered an inventory of the damage he has wrought on his stepdaughter, but all he can do is sneer inwardly at the messenger, a psychobabbling crone named Pratt, and then … and then … well, what happens next is so shocking, and yet so calmly and economically detailed, it had somehow absented itself from my memory of the novel.
Click here to read the rest.
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