(August 10, 2020 at 12:54 pm)Rev. Rye Wrote: Not going to lie, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita is one of my favourite novels, and the biggest reason it is so is because of what happens once you read between the lines and realise that Humbert is completely full of shit and is bending over backwards to justify his abhorrent desires. Don't blame me, I have a disease that makes me want to fuck little girls! Besides, it's perfectly normal to want to fuck little girls; Petrarch became enamoured of Laura when she was 13 (note: one of the key points in my figuring it out is that this is flat-out wrong and Humbert, as a lit professor specialising in European poetry, should probably know this). And who said anything about little girls? I'm only attracted to nymphets! There's a difference, even if it does exist only in my own head! Hell, Lolita seduced me! And yet he still plays the reader like a fiddle.
Sadly, this is probably why neither of the two film adaptations really succeeded in capturing the essence of the book, even if one was directed by Stanley Fucking Kubrick, and the other didn't have the Hays Office to dilute the content, because to pull that off, you'd probably need to change the book's structure pretty radically, probably making it more akin to Fight Club or Election, because there's no moment of realisation like in the former and no room for alternate perspectives like in the latter.
When I first read the book, I was young and rather naive to the many harsh truths of the world, which is why the meaning of their relationship had to be explained to me.
