•  chumbalumber   ( @chumbalumber@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) 
    81•6 days ago

    “There are two books whose final lines make me cry without fail, irrespective of how many times I read them,” Rowling told BBC Radio 4. “One is ‘Lolita.’”

    (The other one, based on the context of the interview, seems to be “Emma.”)

    Like many other admirer’s of Nabokov’s novel of a pedophile who pursues a 12-year-old girl, Rowling loves it for the writing style.

    “There just isn’t enough time to discuss how a plot that could have been the most worthless pornography becomes, in Nabakov’s hands, a great and tragic love story, and I could exhaust my reservoir of superlatives trying to describe the quality of the writing,” she said.

    Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/jk-rowling-favorite-books-2016-7?op=1#lolitaby-vladimir-nabokov-19

  •  uriel238   ( @uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) English
    37•5 days ago

    So part of the significance of Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov is how our society has responded to it, and for a truly deep dive (that I’m in the process of going through, myself), check out the Lolita Podcast by Jamie Loftus which begins with the story of how Daniel Handler (that is Lemony Snicket) suggested Lolita to Jamie when she was still a kid looking for book recommendations.

    Also as noted by Jamie, both the 1967 Stanley Kubrick film adaptation and the 1997 Adrian Lyne adaptation portray the story with Humbert Humbert as a sympathetic character (with James Mason and Jeremy Irons playing Humbert, respectively.)

    So yeah, the story simultaneously invites the reader to walk a razor’s edge between sympathizing with a child predator and watching the story unfold the way one looks at an automotive collision, watching a monster deeply past the moral event horizon justifying his behavior.

    Lolita doesn’t play out as a love story. Delores isn’t precocious or mature nor is she mentally equipped for an adult relationship, and yet Humbert insists his pursuit of Delores is proper and justified, despite not only Delores’ age and minor status, but also the power relationship, with Humbert the legal guardian of Delores. The story is psychological horror.

    And the story plays out showing in older Delores the psychological consequences of child sexual abuse. This is not a story of a May / December couple in love living happily ever after. Despite Lolita being described as an Erotic Novel by critics and literary indexes.

    But then, in the 1980s, one in three American women surveyed were victims of child sexual abuse. Also in 1987 Suzanne Vega put out the song Luka highlighting a long standing culture that whatever happens in your house is none of my business (🐸☕), and before the Satanic Panic and the SRA scares, CSA was not an oft-prosecuted crime (it was assumed incest laws covered them) and the believe was kids who were victimized not by drunken daddy were instead victimized by strangers in white vans offering candy (rather than say, John Wayne Gacy, who held frequent neighborhood barbecues, or the coach of girls’ physical education). Only in the 1990s and the new century have we taken CSA and human trafficking of children seriously, and then, not very, considering how some US states are letting kids work in hazardous conditions and letting children marry. So it doesn’t really surprise me that Lolita is thought of as romantic or erotic even when it is the testimony of an abuser.

    •  Schadrach   ( @Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org ) English
      5•4 days ago

      and letting children marry.

      Most still do so long as the line being drawn is “is there any hypothetical situation in which a 17 year old can legally marry?” Most of those specifically allow older teens (16 or 17 depending on the state) to marry under narrow circumstances, usually requiring any minor have parental consent and/or court approval before allowing it. All states allowed under-18 marriage in some conditions until 2018, and only about a dozen have set a hard 18 limit with no exceptions since then.

      With CA being one of the worst offenders in that it has no hard legal minimum age of marriage at all and relies on parents and courts to prevent serious abuse (no minimum but requires approval from one parent or guardian and the court). MA was very similar with no hard minimum at all until recently passing a hard 18 minimum.

      Which means if you have the right people in your pocket (a parent or guardian and a judge) you could hypothetically marry someone very underage in CA then cart them off to a state where marriage is an explicit exception to age of consent (such as NM) and engage in legal CSA.

  •  Jo Miran   ( @JoMiran@lemmy.ml ) 
    31•6 days ago

    Lolita is a masterpiece in the true sense of the word. I just do not understand how J.K. see Lolita as a love story.

    Yes, the ending of Lolita is amazing but even in it I could feel the “wrongness” of the narrator. Maybe it’s me but you guys tell me if this doesn’t read more like horror than romance.

    The following decision I make with all the legal impact and support of a signed testament: I wish this memoir to be published only when Lolita is no longer alive.

    Thus, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book. But while the blood still throbs through my writing hand, you are still as much part of blessed matter as I am, and I can still talk to you from here to Alaska. Be true to your Dick. Do not let other fellows touch you. Do not talk to strangers. I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come at him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. And do not pity C. Q. One had to choose between him and H.H., and one wanted H.H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.