Lolita turns 50
It seems odd, doesn't it, to mark the anniversaries of books in such a way. Like suddenly Lolita is a near-senior citizen, complete with frizzy hair, cheap lipstick spreading up the creases around her mouth in which a cigarette seems to be glued.
NPR did a two-day story on the novel recently that is full of some good bits, as well as the requisite input from Azar Nafisi (which is great, by the way). I am still amazed how much Nafisi's read of Lolita sticks with me as much as the novel. The retelling of how this novel finally got published is amusing; Nabokov was so grateful for ANYONE to accept the novel, that he never knew until it was too late that Olympia press in France published pornography. In part 2 of the NPR story, one of his former students relates how he first saw the book in a store in France, in a plain green cover, displayed between truly and obviously pornographic books (One is called Make her scream or something like that), purchased it (probably out of interest, prurient or otherwise, that his respected professor had this secret life as a writer of graphic porn) and was initially disappointed to realize it was real literature.
My own copy is packed up somewhere yet to be found, so in reading reviews and watching the Kubrick clip on the NPR website, I am trying to jar my memory--isn't Humbert the only person that calls Dolores Haze Lolita? Isn't that part of his invention, to provide her such a name?
Anyway, for my own observance, how about an Ambrose-a-Rama Lolita re-cap?
NPR did a two-day story on the novel recently that is full of some good bits, as well as the requisite input from Azar Nafisi (which is great, by the way). I am still amazed how much Nafisi's read of Lolita sticks with me as much as the novel. The retelling of how this novel finally got published is amusing; Nabokov was so grateful for ANYONE to accept the novel, that he never knew until it was too late that Olympia press in France published pornography. In part 2 of the NPR story, one of his former students relates how he first saw the book in a store in France, in a plain green cover, displayed between truly and obviously pornographic books (One is called Make her scream or something like that), purchased it (probably out of interest, prurient or otherwise, that his respected professor had this secret life as a writer of graphic porn) and was initially disappointed to realize it was real literature.
My own copy is packed up somewhere yet to be found, so in reading reviews and watching the Kubrick clip on the NPR website, I am trying to jar my memory--isn't Humbert the only person that calls Dolores Haze Lolita? Isn't that part of his invention, to provide her such a name?
Anyway, for my own observance, how about an Ambrose-a-Rama Lolita re-cap?
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