Lolita Revisited (spoilers)

Whilst reading the first portion of this book, I felt that it was important (because it was important to the author) to read Lolita again.  If any of you have read my initial response to this book  there is no doubt what my initial feelings where.  But after reading Nafisi's thoughts on the book, and also learning about unreliable narratives from my course How To Read A Novel, I saw that maybe my initial response was biased by my own personal experiences and feelings and that maybe I had missed something.  So I did it... again.

This time, to make it easier, I decided to listen to the audio book narrated by Jeremy Irons (who was also Humbert Humbert in the movie) and he was a perfect choice (for the narration...I'll never see the movie so I can't say how he was in that).  

It was just as disagreeable for me to listen to as to read, maybe more so because having the story read to you by someone you can picture in your mind, and someone who can act who adds emotion, depth and dimension to the role making the novel almost graphic.  Despite all that I tried to listen to it objectively, I wanted to try and see what Nafisi saw, and perhaps something more.   

So what I am going to do now is something I usually avoid... I am going to get into specific details, dig a little deeper than before to see beyond my original perceptions of this book.  

I have to admit, I didn't see too far beyond what I already saw the first time, but before I talk about that I want to say that this time around I was more aware of Humbert Humbert and his perfect understanding of how much of a monster he really was.     

In a nutshell Lolita is about desire, the unhealthy desire if an older man for a tween aged girl, and the lengths he went to, to get this girl.  He moved into her house as a border, married her mother so that he could stay there (and gain access to his Lolita).  The mother discovers, his predilection, but dies before she can do anything about it, so now Lolita is Humbert's for his own pleasure.

Here are some specifics.  I stated in my first blog that I thought that all of these characters (husband, mother and daughter) were awful, selfish and spiteful and I still believe that.  If the mother had not felt threatened by her own daughter's growing sexuality, if she hadn't tried to get rid of her so she could enjoy Humbert for herself, if she hadn't been so selfish, if she had thought more about her daughter's welfare rather than her own needs, things would have been very different.    

 Lolita was a very spiteful and selfish young girl and I still believe that to be the case especially after she initiated sex with her step-father.

While I do agree with Nafisi that Humbert raped her, and continued to use her for his own selfish needs, there was something very wrong with Lolita as well.  She seduced her mother's new husband!  How did she think life would be like after that?  Did she think she could go home from camp and play Happy Family with Mom and her new Daddy-O?  It's pretty clear in the book, she didn't know her mother was dead when she had sex with Humbert, so what was she thinking?  Obviously (hopefully), she wasn't, and Humbert, as the predator he is, just couldn't resist his obsession.

Sadly, for Lolita, it was what I would call some very severe consequences for that particular action and she paid for it for the next two years of her life (basically being kept as Humbert's little sex slave), though I think she remained complicit because of his manipulations and her own fears of having no where to go.  

So I have concluded, after doing this re-read, that my own personal perception of this novel hasn't changed a jot, but I do have a deeper understanding of the characters involved.  I think that when I also re-read the section in the book Reading Lolita in Tehran concerning Lolita, I will have a better understanding of Nafisi as well.  One last thought... this book was written from Humbert's honest, twisted, manipulative, and highly nauseating point of view, could you imagine what it would have been like from Lolitas?

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

                                  
About one day in the life of the protagonist, I spent one day reading it.  I only paused to make a pot of lovely, nourishing vegetable soup (with six vegetables in it!) and a lucious fresh spinach salad (with avocado sliced on top and a home-made dressing) to go with it. I only go into detail because Ivan's soup was not so good, but at the end of his day, he was extremely happy to eat his cabbage soup with very tiny bits of old fish, a piece of mealy potato and his portion of black bread.
I was immersed in this story, drawn in like I have been with an Orwel novel, and just as fascinated with a culture I know very little about, and an era I have always struggled to understand. 
Solzhenitsyn drew from his own life experiences to write this book, and I have learnt a little about him from reading this, it is interesting how I seem to see facets in this man that I have yet to discover in Alice Munro (who still eludes my understanding).
Back to the soup and salad, I haven't enjoyed a meal more than that one in a very long time, after reading about Ivan's day feeling his hunger and his suffering from the cold, and seeing what he had to do to survive day after day.  I savoured every bite, grateful for what I have.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

                              
I have, for most of this month,  been taking a reading holiday.  This means that I have, at a whim, been reading what I want and it has not been too challenging, or inappropriate to the holiday just  barely finished.  I looked for inexpensive kindle books to read (mostly Pride and Prejudice variations which I will probably write about at some point after I have had the chance to re-read them again...which will most likely also be at a whim and when I need to take a break), and some Christmas themed stories (with one or two of them also a P&P variation).  Naturally I revisited Dicken's A Christmas Carol.
So now that Christmas is over (pretty much), I pulled something out of one of my many boxes of books to read last night and this book, I thought, would be good for an appetizer.  Since I have only read The Great Gatsby, I have no great expectations as to how this story would go not knowing what kind of story was typical for Fitzgerald, so it was a surpise.  The movie brought my attention to the story (though I have never and probably shall not ever see the movie...I just can't bear Brad Pitt and it takes a lot for me to overcome that particular prejudice to see a movie he stars in), and I came across this little gem on a sale table for about a dollar or two (who could resist that?).
It is such a charming little book!  It is almost what you would call a novella.  The illustrations are rich and cheerful, adding that special something to enhance the story, the colours teal and purple unifying the illustrations throughout the book.  I don't believe that I am giving anything away (thanks to movie trailers), but all I will say was that I was curious how this story might have come about...how he would have been born old in the first place (and a fully grown old man at that!) and how his life would have ended (no doubt the movie would have elaborated on that, but I can say no more without giving away too much information).   This edition is worth a look, and I will be keeping an eye out for other pretty editions of the author's work. 

Of Mice and Men

 

   Since I did not study this book in highschool it was shocking to realise just how much this particular book has invaded popular culture.  It immediately occurred to me on reading certain lines spoken by one of the protagonists, Lennie,  that Looney Tunes had parodied this character and it was disturbing to realise that, because this story is so profoundly sad, that the folks at Warner Brothers thought it darkly amusing to feature this in a children’s cartoon.

I have always been reluctant to read Steinbeck.
Of Mice and Men was simply awful.  Well written, but about such an ugly topic.  I was impressed by Steinbeck’s imagery of the outdoors at the beginning and end of the book (it is curious that he did it that way instead of establishing scenarios throughout the story and changes of scenes).  It is almost as if he can see only beauty in nature and that humans are not worthy of the same effort.  The book was clearly written as something to be acted out in a play, and I can honestly say that I will not be attending any performances.  I was left feeling nauseated, sick at the ugliness of human nature which even Steinbeck’s descriptions of the scenery in the last act did nothing to cleanse from my heart.  
I hope that rest of his work is unlike in character to this one, but I suspect it will be.

Siddhartha

Wow!  Something that I have struggled to express and explain for many years has come together in a simple explanation within just two chapters in this book.  I almost cried from the revelation (I still might).   
Siddhartha was not what I expected.  Just the title and the cover told me everything (or so I thought).  It's not what you think.  This isn't the story of the Buddha, it's a story about a man named Siddhartha.  He still has a spiritual journey and it is quite similar to the Buddha but their enlightenment is achieved in very different ways.

   "When Siddharta listened attentively to this river, to this song of a thousand voices; when he did not listen to the sorrow or laughter, when he did not bind his soul to any one particular voice and absorb in his Self, but heard them all, the whole, the unity; then the great song of a thousand voices consisted of one word: Om-perfection."
                                                                                Siddhartha by Herman Hesse

It is such a beautiful sentence, so deep and sigificant, piercing into my heart. It makes me want to weep with joy. It would take me years, probably my lifetime, to explain everything that is in my heart, how I see the world and everything in it.  Though I have not really tried to reveal that to anyone, that inner Self, just tried to show it by deeds instead.  I have tried to 'be' the world I wish to see, and be true to my beliefs by acting in a certain way.  It's very personal and vitally important for everyone all at the same time, because understanding the nature of myself, is the first step to finding my heart and being able to share what I am.  But that's okay... I don't expect anyone to understand or see the world as I do, which is part of the whole as I see it anyway, it's that infinite diversity thing (no comments from the peanut gallery thanks).  Which impresses me more about Siddhartha because it is so much of what I would like to say, and what I want in an ideal world.  But don't take my word for it, read the book!

Tarzan of the Apes

I can't believe that I waited until I was forty three before I finally read this book!  When I was a kid there was this tv show which I have very vague memories of...  Tarzan's call and some kind of strange control over the animals in the jungle... pretty stupid I think, but then, when you are making a television show you have to make up stuff to keep the kids interested right?
Thankfully, the book was way more interesting, and considering the cavalier attitude that Rice Burroughs had to writing, it was very well done.  While I haven't seen any movies of this book (which is quite puzzling to me considering that my favorite, Christopher Lambert, played the role in one of them), I have always had a vague idea of how the story went.  It was good to finally have the whole story as it was intended, and oh boy was I pleasantly surprised!  There is a romantic element to Rice Burroughs that I had not really expected (having only read A Princess of Mars so far).  This guy knew the good stuff and he has been exciting and enthralling people (like Ray Bradbury) for nearly a hundred years.  I mean at some point to go and read some more adventures of Tarzan, because romantic as it was, it wasn't the end of the story. 

The Great Gatsby

 It took three tries before I got into the swing of the book (it was a bedside read initially so I was always too tired to really get into it), so this morning I just sat down with my lap top and re-read it from start to finish.  Fitzgerald was a smooth writer, very similar to P.G. Wodehouse, it felt very restful to me no matter what the subject matter was.    The writer worded it better than I could possibly do when he wrote about the effect of one of his character's voices in the novel, "It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again".  See?  Lovely.    The book is just chockful of such flowery lines, but not so much that you feel a little sick from all the sweetness... it seemed just right to me, like one perfect piece of chocolate cake. It is worth a re-read and I will definitely be looking at his other works.