CHOAM Nomsky 💭: This is great and fuel for my conspiracy theory that a lot of prominent people who praise important novels either haven’t read them or haven’t finished them

This is great and fuel for my conspiracy theory that a lot of prominent people who praise important novels either haven’t read them or haven’t finished them

I was angry and wrote about it.

Andrea Robin Skinner reminds us that monsters lurk within classic Canadian literaturewww.theglobeandmail.com Skinner is reshaping a narrative that turned a woman’s terrible decisions into near-literary sainthood, reminding us that character isn’t correlated with great art

what in God’s holy name possesses you to declare LOLITA a story of true and genuine love after reading this passage

I suppose a thing that gets lost is that a worrying number of apparently adult people conceive of "love" as an emotion one person feels for another and not a state of mutual being. Love is exclusively mutual; whatever attraction or obsession occurs alone may be interesting but it is not love.

Will no one read "I and Thou"? (answer: no.)

God this is well put. Are you a writer or something?

Hear hear

What about love for a newborn, who is incapable of reciprocating? What about love for an estranged child, who refuses to reciprocate?

I mean I don't know very much about the inner lives of babies! But I'm thinking here specifically of romantic love, which I think is clear by implication. Hopefully that clears it up if not.

whether or not you call it "love" specifically, the experience of loving a newborn is very clearly an extremely different experience from loving another adult human being.

I mean, it's not different from loving an adult child. But yes, it's different from romantic love.

I dunno about this man, my experience of loving my newborn has been qualitatively different from loving the same child when was eight. Worth understanding, to me, how the experience of degrees of mutuality changes the nature of a relationship, and of the emotions that come along with it.

If you don’t think newborns love their mothers, you’re either insane or you have never known a newborn and their mother

By newborn I mean a baby who is literally born that day. They don't step into this world with any knowledge of their mother, yet their mother already loves them. Anyway, it's been made clear we are talking about a different kind of love. Italians even have a special word for it, "amare".

Well, if bourgeois sentimentality expects us to view Humbert as a villain, he must therefore be a romantic hero, no? This is what some literary theorists (not me!) actually believe.

But this got me thinking about that blurb calling it a "the only convincing love story of our century” on the cover of my edition, and where that quote originated: mikeashapiro.wordpress.com/2009/02/25/s...

Sourcing a blurbmikeashapiro.wordpress.com In a conversation with a friend about Lolita, an interesting problem arose. This is the cover of the second Vintage International edition of the book: In the upper left corner is the blurb "The only c...

Jesus Christ, somehow it's even worse in context

Yikes with spikes

The essential irony at the heart of Lolita is that Humbert as written is charismatic, cultured, good with words, and, even though he outright confesses to horrible crimes and acknowledges he is trying to justify his own monstrosity, readers believe he can’t be that bad because of his sophistication.

Nothing but sharing Humbert's sociopathic personality.

I watched “an education” with a group of women who *gushed* “I wish a man would treat me like that” through the most groomiest of scenes, and I was like are we watching the same movie??

I never heard anyone call it that, really (which doesn't mean no one has, of course). But it is an amazing character study of a fatally flawed man and the havoc his immoral obsession causes.

this is in reference to the Alice Munro story, where the guy earnestly said "this is a clear case of Humbert and Lolita" in his own defense

Yeah, but I could talk for hours about Nabokov

I just read the plot summary on Wikipedia and I did know it was about a pedophile but I didn't know how bonkers it was. I also didn't know he was framed as a protagonist. I assumed he was at best the despicable main character

He is! But since he is the one telling the story, he frames himself as the protagonist. Because he's despicable.

But it's not actually the writings of a now dead pedophile framing himself as sympathetic. It's the writings of an author who frames the narrative as such.

Why yes, that is in fact how fiction works. The author is not the person in the story because the person is not real and the story did not happen. It is just pretend. Glad we could have this chat

You don't see how the author choosing to frame the pedophilia as sympathetic protagonist is that point of this whole conversation?

We're talking about J.K. Rowling, right?

bsky.app/profile/sara...

I was angry and wrote about it.

Andrea Robin Skinner reminds us that monsters lurk within classic Canadian literaturewww.theglobeandmail.com Skinner is reshaping a narrative that turned a woman’s terrible decisions into near-literary sainthood, reminding us that character isn’t correlated with great art

pretty neat trick to leverage your once-in-a-lifetime facility for incredibly beautiful sentences and use it to describe the inner lives of pathetic little freaks, but not even that prose style can hide the events that plainly occur in the narrative!

Ironically this article, while not strictly speaking literary criticism, is making it unlikely that I will read any Alice Munro novels.

Another Trilling reference!

Yeah, I actually forgot that was in the scene when I posted the picture!

That's a conspiracy theory?! It's self evident on its face, these illiterate fucks have never so much as cracked a book

The darkest version of the scene in born yesterday (the remake, i don’t remember the original all that well) where the lead goes on a radio show after working hard to understand THE talked about book on politics, and it turns out no one else has read it

Sarah's book is really good, if you haven't read it.

Holy bat balls, I learned that from that article there people out there that view Lolita as a love story

I think it's incorrect to assume that because someone else's opinion on a novel appears to be wrong that they haven't read it. A novel is really a collaboration between the author and the reader, each bringing their own knowledge and experiences to it, and the reader has the final cut.

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