>>4203 Essential. 20th century classic. Nabokov is absolutely the best English language prose stylist of the 20th C and this is one of his most accessible and successful works.
Anonymous
>>4204 Not inaccurate - but bear in mind that you are saying these things on a board where nobody has the faintest idea about, or interest in, literature per se. If only for that reason, one does better to suggest that they read 'Lolita' - which IS a fine novel - only after they have read some other equally fine novels by Nabokov, like 'Pale Fire' or 'Bend Sinister', so that there is at least a chance that there might be dislodged from their tiny minds the ridiculous idea that 'Vladimir Nabokov was a guy who wrote books about fucking little girls.' But 'Pale Fire'? THESE guys? Yeah, you're right, I'm dreaming.....
Anonymous
>>4205 They should just read Pnin, after Lolita. It's similarly breezy and it exposes the extent to which parts of Lolita are and aren't semi-autobiographical.
Anonymous
Does it portray the lolita as a victim? or is it like in the movie?
Anonymous
>>4207 It is 'like in the movie', but it has the perspective that it does because it is narrated by Humbert, and there are certain parts of the novel that do be -tray him.
Anonymous
I saw this post on leddit, anyone read the book it mentions? Or plans to read. Once photography became accessible we saw a huge shift in art away from photo-realism towards interpretation, abstraction, and non-objectivity. Photography is basically what drove trends in art away from photo-realism.
Similar trends in music, in response to widespread availability of recorded music. Classical music practically died out in the mid 20th century, replaced by avante guard abstract anti-music, designed to be off-putting and impossible to enjoy.
Same in literature when education became universal and popular writing became a mass industry: modernism drove a new level of deliberate obscurity and "difficulty" in novels and poetry.
See 'The Intellectuals and the Masses' by John Carey.
Anonymous
>>4218 I've not read that book, but I'd consider the "shift" in art to be distinct from that of classical music. I do totally dig the idea that photography interrupted the European painting focus on realism and perspective. Cubism does seem like it's deliberately trying to analyse objects from every perspective at once, which the camera could never do.
Have you read Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction "? It's quite popular and deals with that sort of set of ideas.
But the crisis of tonality in music happened before recording became possible, and I don't believe the claim that it's deliberately obscure or difficult to enjoy.
As for literature, the 'novel' was always a cross-cultural threat, allowing the lower middle classes to read about the scandals of the upper classes. Post-modern literature doesn't seem to be a reaction against allowing that directional transfer as much as it is a reaction against the directionality itself.
