November 8, 2009
Clusterbook #2: Lolita
So a few months back, a bunch of us got together on skype and talked about Lolita. There were all sorts of network difficulties and the sheer strangeness of a bunch of disembodied voices speaking out into the ether, but we got talking, and we talked a lot. I boiled all that down to about 20 minutes, which you can hear below, largely sound snippets of various opinions about the book, rather than a single argument or theme.
(Quality note: There’s some background noise, mostly around the start of the recording, and a general sense of echo throughout.)
Then a few days ago, Sheila and I had another chat about Lolita, and I think that some things we discussed in that conversation would be useful to include in this edition of Clusterbook, so you can hear an edited 15 minute version of our conversation below.
Feel free to get involved in this discussion. I still feel we have barely scratched the surface. If you’ve read the book, or you have a response to anything we’ve said in either conversation, you are very welcome to contribute your opinion in the comments. I would love to hear more diverse voices.
So without further ado, I hereby declare Clusterbook #2: Lolita to be…. open! The clusterflock book club rides again!
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21 Responses to “Clusterbook #2: Lolita”
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Thank you Lucy! A fascinating 35 minutes. Makes me want to pick it up and try again.
thank you, Lucy. I can’t wait to listen.
okay, it was great to hear this again, and to hear the passion with which you and Sheila reinvestigate the conversation. thank you so much for the effort required in putting this together. also, how come no one has ever told me when I speak I sound like an echo location chamber, with a Texas accent.
Lucy, I’m a-gonna listen later today. Meantime, chérie, thank you so damn much for the energy and the plain hard work you brought to this second ‘episode’. You are a source of continual joy, you are.
(Deron, people are just being polite, albeit in a misguided way, perhaps. They never told me I sounded as though I were speaking from inside a metal box on the far edge of a large ocean.
Oh. Wait. I was.)
Wanna do more of this.
In the second clip, Lucy reads (beautifully) a sentence that we came to recognize was at the heart of much of what she and I had been discussing. If you’d like to read that sentence for yourself, it’s here, one of a tiny set of photographs inspired by Lolita.
Dedication to duty: I am currently in Humbert Humbert’s hometown. Well, I wish it could have threaded together a little better; the group chat is just a series of soundbites, really, but it is what it is and we go on…
Lucy, you did a brilliant job. We salute you.
I do think that, what with all those voices and our shared uncertainty about cues (not to be confused with Clare Quilty), your ’sound-bite mix’ is quite right.
And I really do want Us to do more of This Sort of Thing.
And –
I know that many, perhaps most, of us have a Thing about The Telephone and its variants. But, you know, people, it’s not all that dreadful — and Skype, for one, is still free. Having enjoyed a few private Skype chats with Lucy, I felt quite free and easy nattering on about “Lolita” with her.
What this means is that I may be calling more of y’all more frequently so we can dispense with this phone aversion.
At least till we all descend on Cindy and Daryl in Marfa.
I like the ’snippet’ with which the first recording concludes — Deron’s observation about persevering with books whose language is compelling even if the ostensible ’subject’ leaves him cold.
Of course, I would like that, as that’s my way as well. Dreary prose repels me. I’ll read the confession of a kitten-killer if the language compels me.
(Smiling here as I recall Humbert’s claim that “you can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.” That observation is either more or less straightforward than it appears.)
I want to say a little more about why I quit on the book. I alluded to it in some comment here, or email I sent to Lucy or Sheila (I apologize for not remembering the particulars, forgive me, please) but I said something like, “How much dessert can one eat in one sitting?” I adore Nabakov’s ability/agility with the working of the word.
I’m reminded of Economics class years ago, The Law of Diminishing Returns. My professor put it this way (and I’ll wildly misremember the exact quote yet quote it as if I remember it word for word) “You might sit and have a Whopper and it might be the most delicious thing you’ve ever tasted. You might have paid $3.95 for it. After you’ve finished it, you get offered another for half-price. You take it and it is still good. You might be offered another for half the half-price and you buy it, but you’re not so sure you want it. But you start eating again. At some point, even if you are offered one for free you won’t want another, even if it is just as perfect as the first one. At least in that sitting. ”
Now, I might be ready for another helping. Sheila and Lucy, I now want to read the “road story” that comes after I gave up. It sounds like there is something delicious there.
Rick, I remember your comment about reading Lolita! You included it in an email message sent to all of us clusterbookers a while before we convened in the ether.
“We’ll have to talk about how much dessert (on the writing, reading-wise) one can ‘eat’ in one sitting,” you wrote.
Made sense then. Makes sense now, though it does not jibe with my own experience of reading the book.
I sense that your response to Nabokov’s style speaks to something subtly different from Deron’s expression of his and my distaste for banal prose. Did you perhaps step back from what felt like a certain relentlessness of narrative voice (which may be another way of saying ‘an unvarying quality’)?
In other words, did you feel as though you were trapped in a room with the guy and wanted to step out for some air?
As for the road story, there is a distinct though not dramatic break in the middle of the narrative. It does signal a change in direction.
“You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.” End of Part I.
Part II: The road trip (and subsequent events).
This, by the way, is how I imagine the motels at which Humbert and Lolita stayed.
Well, the way I see this book is that it needs to be savoured. I read a sentence and look around. And another, and another. I have never read more than a few pages of it at a time. It’s probably the slowest I have ever read a book, and I am a slow reader. It’s not about ‘finding out what happens’, so I’m not racing ahead in any way. It’s not much of a page turner, it keeps me fixed on each sentence I’m reading, and rather than creating a meta-narrative in my head, which is often what books can do, it’s a kind of vibrant presence that challenges and makes pause. I wouldn’t say I’m reading it ‘for the language’ either, though, but I think this is probably just a semantic distinction. Any more than I read Shakespeare ‘for the language’, though his use of language is wildly exciting. It’s the insight, the humanity of it, not expressed baldly, not eager to let everybody know how humane it is. It’s the subtlety of it. The book is breathing.
Yes, stepping out for air is a good way to put it. And savoured, yes. I too was compelled to read slowly. I am no speed reader (there are times I wish I was) but I am a steady reader and there is in my nature a compulsion to finish things I start (unless I start to feel the effort becoming hopeless), but one Saturday morning I determined to “power through” and read as far as I could. After an hour I had read 10 pages and was utterly exhausted. I laid it aside, intending to pick it back up later in the day for another “session.” Later I walked by the table where I had laid it. “Nope, not anymore today,” I thought. The next day I felt the same. After a couple more days when I noticed it laying there, I felt a mild contempt. And guilt for walking away from it because I knew I had.
I’ve been far out of pocket, but I just want y’all to know how much I’m looking forward to listening to this (this weekend, if I’m lucky).
I was a ferocious speed-reader when I was a kidlet. I gobbled up books as though I were bingeing on Hallowe’en candy.
Then, throughout my college years, I began to narrate audio books for a Library of Congress program for the blind, and I gradually came to believe that anything truly worth reading is worth reading aloud — or at least worth hearing in my mind’s ear.
I am currently reading this impassioned paean to the genius of Nabokov, written by Martin Amis. I love what he says about nympholepsy and his epiphany on trying several times to read “Ada”. Also fantastic for Borges’ description of how Finnegan’s Wake was received in ‘39, with “terror stricken praise”. Oh God, it’s just beautiful.
Okay. Fixin’ to read a paean.
Whew. I am still reading.
All I can say now is that my mid-stream retreat from a career as a curator of the ‘literary manuscripts’ of dead writers calls forth no greater regret now than it did then.
I said that only with respect to The Original of Laura.
Just now embarking on the ‘nympholepsy’ section of the Amis piece.
Have a look down the bottom of the page when you’re done, there are links to other articles. Bastard about it, though, is that they change when you click on one and then go back to the previous page. If you find the one that is summarised by “The Nabokovs were penniless until his wife persuaded him to publish Lolita”, send me the link. I’m currently reading the review of Pnin by David Lodge.
I can’t find the specific article you note — but I do know that the Nabokovs would have had an even harder row to hoe than they did if not for Vera’s efforts.