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October 27, 2005

Comments

Michelle

I don't know if I would call this review "wrong-headed." Even though Lolita is now a widely respected canonical work, it doesn't mean that people aren't entitled to have their own opinions about it. There are many works in the canon that I personally don't like. It doesn't mean that the canon is "right" and I am "wrong." Just like the Village Voice isn't necessarily "wrong" in its assessment of Lolita. (And in fact, many people I've talked to have said that although they found the language in Lolita beautiful, the subject matter--pedophilia--ultimately ruined their enjoyment of the novel.)

Therese

Certainly everyone is entitled to their own opinion. I find it rather unsettling, however, when people are unable to divorce the subject matter from the author, or refuse to accept the work because it offends their idea of what is moral.

brian patricks

I have to support Therese, especially if we are to read that Nabokovs intention was not to make pedophilia more acceptable, but to indict the American obsession with youth. Especially, because that obsession continues, has deepened and has infected more and more countries ...
Also, Village Voice does not criticize the pedophilia factor at all! This is all in your little head ... ;)

Besides people not being able to separate the content from the author, It is sad that people cannot grasp the practical joke herein.

It would be blatantly ridiculous for me to distill some advocacy of large-scale whale hunting from Moby Dick. Just the same, it is silly to get all worked up about Lolita because of the relationship between the older man and the younger girl, since nowhere it is clearly stated what the nature is of this relationship. He tricked the General Public, and they fell for it wholesale. Including our Michelle ...

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."