Inderjit Sanghera

Waterstones have a 3 for 2 sale (on every book in store) on in their Birmingham stores.

Indeed, this final scene, perhaps because it is one of the few moments when H.H shows some 'real' emotion, adds a lot of depth to his character.

Fair enough. There are, however, no 'explicit' sex scenes. Humbert the pervert is quite the prude.

I also loved Cocteau's version of 'Beauty and the Beast'-such magnificent sets! And of course, Jean Vigo, a masterful director. Thanks for the links to the other movies.

That was certainly not my intention! However, I think that it is worthwhile reading Lolita as a forceful moral argument against the 'disturbing sexual content' you refer to-Nabokov is too great an author to descend into a one-dimensional characterisation of Humbert as being 'evil', and he is too intelligent a moralist to make his moral message obvious-he frequently denied having any and derided what he saw as careless, glib, in your face moralising, on the part of other authors, he makes us work hard to read the 'message' behind the book, Lolita needs to be re-read and re-read, pref. in the annotated version, to be truly appreciated. As Kylie stated, Nabokov has one of the most beautiful English prose styles of any writer, and his other works, for example, Speak, Memory and Pale Fire are certainly worth reading, as well as Ada, which is his most difficult book to read.

Anybody else a fan of French new wave cinema, such as Godard,Truffaut, Resnais? My fave new wave films are 'Jules et Jim', 'Last Year at Marienbad' and 'Breathless' in that order.

I think you may have fallen into Humbert's trap, katya. Humbert wants us to believe that he is 'touching' that he is sensitive-I made a similair argument on another forum, and, due to my own laziness, I will copy and past this here. I agree, in part, with the assesment of Humbert as being, in a sense, enslaved to his own desires-he could not help being what he was. But he was a cruel and malicious individual in other ways-notice his treatment of his sily and stupid first wife, his treatment of Lolita's utterly phillistine mother-note the way in which he describes them, as being idiotic creatures who deserved what they got-remember it is Humbert who is narrarating the events, Humbert who is describing the characters, Humbert who is describing the actions of various characters, it is Humbert who traps us into thinking that his wives were idiots, that Lolita was manipulating him, that he was a victim of his own perversity. Humbert does not allow Lolita to grow up-he wants her to reflect his ideal image, his Annabel Lee, it is Humbert who drugs and rapes Lolita. Humbert fails to see Lolita outside of his own narrow and arbitary prism of what Lolita should be, he only loves and desires Lolita insofar that she reflects his own personality and tastes. Humbert is a true despot. Lolita's 'freedom' is not too dissimilair to the 'freedom' of citizens who live under a autocratic regime. You say that Lolita has a degree of choice-but what choice does she have? Both of her parents are dead and she is kidnapped by a perverted lunatic and taken on a long road trip, followed by a stint at a place where she knows nobody-Humbert withdraws her from the place as soon as she begins to show the slightest semblance of recalcitrance, of independence, of wanting to be a 'normal' teenager. She could have gone to somebody for help, but she was just a young girl, and I as I mentioned before, a lot of people tend to forget that and think that she is a lot older simply because she was raped by an older man. As Lolita's mother notes, deep down she is just a 'normal girl' however bourgeoisie that may sound to Humbert's tendentious ears. People also tend to forget how Lolita was often treated like an unwanted child by her 'victim' mother (Or as Humbert may describe her; car crash, dead.) Humbert was a master manipulator, right from the word go- Humbert's narcissism is apparent from the start, note for example his hilarious statement that the McCoo's house burned down due to the "the synchronous conflagration that had been raging all night in my veins"-ironic, perhaps, interesting nonetheless. Also note his description of the dog which is nearly run over by the car he is travelling in, the kind of dog that will always be at risk from being run over my cars, in any case he is tempting fate as his conclusion is an oddly prophetic summarisation of his own relationship with Lolita. (And ironic, considering the fact that the car that runs over Dolores tries to avoid a dog and thus hits her.) He immediately sets upon Charlotte-best get the description out of the way as quickly as possible-accusing her of philistine vulgarity, all American pretension and drabness a book-club bourgeoisie if ever there was one. Perhaps he was right, but he fails to notice the fakeness behind his own "old world politeness" how is equally constrained by the image of him as a old world intellectual and how he needs to keep this image up in order to hide his inner, perverse nature. Baudelaire once claimed that the devil's greatest trick was to convince the world he didn't exist and Humbert's trick echoes the devil's deceit. He deceives Charlotte into thinking he is in love with her-that is coldness is a old world idiosyncrasy, rather than being a manipulation of Dolores, supposed instantaneous, attraction to him. When she threatens to send Lolita to boarding school he knows that he cannot beat her into submission like he did to Valeria, twisting the wrist she once broke, he had to manipulate her, and make it out as if it was she who always made the decisions, that Charlotte wore the trousers in the house and that Humbert lived in a state of perpetual acquiescence, poor, vulnerable Humbert! He tricks his rather bland next-door-neighbours, Jane and John (even their names are a reflection of bland, dour Americana!) into thinking that he had an affair with Charlotte year before and that he was in fact Lolita's real father-not that he lets us see this in a negative light, it was an act of cleverness, rather than a string in the web of Humbert's deceit. But even the subtlest spiders have weak points! He fails to differentiate the difference between a moth and a butterfly when he picks up Lolita and he convinces her that if she leaves him she will only end up in a cold, loveless home, where she will rot amongst the drudgery. He fails to see how much Lolita desires normality, how she wants a father figure in her life-instead he deceives us with his nebulous neologisms, he sexually manipulates Lolita when she is sick and constantly tricks a wide range of people-priests, psychoanalysts and naive neighbours and teachers-as well as Lolita herself in delaying the news of her mothers death. Also notice Lo's maturity at then end of the novel-she is certainly 'morally' superior to H. I think what Nab does is undoubtedly one of the greatest tricks in literary history-to make us think that a teenage girl is a pest, a phillistine and and ignoramous, simply for being a teenage girl.

I am not so sure I agree with you re Anna and Vronsky, yes, Vronsky is, as Nabokov pointed out "a blunt fellow with a mediocre mind", but Anna is something completely different. I think Anna Karenina is, in many ways, Tolstoi battling against himself-and the artist in him coming out the stronger. Anna started out as a tepid, rather banal character, but she sprung into life as one of the most beautiful female characters in all literature-she towers above the zero-dimensional characters of Gogol's stories and the one-dimensional Turgenev maidens, Anna soars above all these trite conventions of Russian literature, Anna is the case of Tolstoi's imagination overcoming his own sexist views. Again, Tolstoi tried to emphasise the spiritual affinity between Kitty and Levin versus the sensual and sexual connection between Anna and Vronsky, but their scenes are some of the most poignant and realistic love scenes in all of literature-the passage when Vr. first meets Anna is one of the most beautiful in the book, as well as the scene in the ballroom, the deterioration of their relationship is beautifully done, yes there is a strongly physical aspect to their relationship, but their relationship is also one of the most beautiful love stories ever told, and this is again Tolstoi the storyteller triumphing over Tolstoi the moralist.

Thanks, I really feel I need to read Proust slower than any other writer, due to the painterly nature of his prose and his descriptions, of, for example, the hawthorn berries. I think Proust does best what all true artists aspire to do. His characterisation is also beyond most writers-characters like Albertine, Swann, Marcel, Saint-Loup and of course Charlus are beyond one, two or three dimensional, they are Proustdimensional, utterly unique, utterly individual, as free from cliche's as possible.

I think it is a bit of an exaggeration-or myth-to claim that you need to read, or know a lot about The Odyssey to appreciate 'Ulysses', although Joyce was obviously influenced by the epic, it is not integral to appreciating the book.

The simple answer is that all of the above requisites are also possible in books which are difficult to read, as well as ones which are easy to read-I was not stating that difficult books are x and easy ones y, I was merely stating that as long as a novel has the aforementioned magic formula, it is a matter of indifference to myself how 'difficult' or 'easy' a book is to read. I think the difficulty of Ulysses is, incidentally, hyped up, it is certainly nowhere near as difficult as, for example, Finnegans Wake or (argh!) Gravity's Rainbow. I think it is important, for myself, for novelists to let their readers imagine, as Robbe Grillet said of Dickens etc. sometimes novelists want to explain all of the aspects of their characters, of a plot, of a scene, without leaving it open to interpretation, without allowing readers to use their imagination-Chekhov, whilst writing in a simple style, does this very well, his novels are full of beautiful ambiguites, Nabokov is the ultimate master of this, his novels are kind of like convoluted detective novels, but I am going off on a tangent. I would much rather discuss Ulysses itself. Anybody care to mention their favourite passage? Mine has to be the scene in which Dedalus is paid his wage by the headmaster.

Somewhat ironically, he despised Dostoevskii, and considered Dostoevskii more of a 'Western' (in terms of influence and style) writer than the other great Russians, such as Chekov, Turgenev, Tolstoi, Pushkin, Bely or Gogol. Besides, if Nabokov was influenced by anybody it would have been the Russian symbolists, though knowing Nabokov, he would have denied this as fiercely as he denied the existence of any other influences.

What I am saying is that art should not be made easier just so that it is easier for people to read it, or simpler for people to read ,or even to 'enlighten' people-I see this as a pointless excercise, however, I think that aesthetically I approach art from a different point of view from yourself and Bookjumper. I do not think that art's main purpose should be it's accesiblity, but it should be its originality, its ability to tell a story, to create convincing and well rounded characters, to entertain and to enchant. I borrow most of my aesthetics from Nabokov, though I am not as severe as him, perhaps because I like his literary sensitivity. Indeed, or we could appreciate a sentence for the beauty of the sentence itself, rather than for some epistemological or social end.

I am plodding through the first volume-it is extraordinary-I prefer this translation to Moncrieff's more flowery one, because it is (apparently) more literal. Proust is a very painterly writer, even more so than Nabokov, he is like a painter who cannot paint, but can write, his description of the humdrum, churches, meadows and people, are utterly beautiful, and like many great painters, he brings out a certain light or aspect in a person or object which nobody else could notice, he has the ability, like the narrator's grandmother, to see beauty where nobody sees it, or wants to see it. As sadya mentions, he can also be very funny-his descriptions of his great auntie Leonie, 'a grotesque parody of Marcel himself

I do not understand this predilection with making Ulysses 'accessible' (whatever that means) in order to get its 'message' (what message?) across. First of all, art is not meant to be accessible, secondly it is kind of ironic that people wish that Ulysses was more accessible so that it could be filled with great philosophical ideas, the platitudes of literary mediocrities such as Sartre, which, by their very nature, are inaccessible. As Ben Mines pointed out, such because something is difficult doesn't make it 'pretentious' (you should try 'reading' Finnegans Wake!)-what is the point of reading anything of worth if that is how to approach books? As Ben Mines points out, Ulysses is far from pretentious and it delves into the machinations of everyday human life, from onanism to feeding a cat part of your breakfast. Ulysses is an extraordinary book, in terms of its grammar and syntax, its characterisation, its originality, and the various different forms, pastiches and parodies which run through the work. Somewhat ironically, for people who cannot get through the first few chapters, they are probably the easiest to read.