How can someone be this amusing (and amused) and articulate? I’m in love and fascinated and repulsed all at the same time, just as I was reading Lolita
While we’re here:
Martin Amis on Nabokov.
Shelley Winters breaks my heart in Kubrick’s film version (for which Nabokov wrote the screenplay):
What say you?
LiteraryMinded 
well, as you may well know lolita is my favourite book. i’m not sure how many times i’ve read it anymore, more than 10 now in any case.
i love it because the language is incredible, and every time you read it you notice more puns and more little jokes. i also love the way it combines the terrible and the beautiful so it hits you right smack bang in the stomach and by the time you get to part two you can hardly breathe and want to stop reading but you keep going because you can’t stop. there is a moment, just where part two begins, when you feel like you’re in a go kart right at the top of a very steep and very rocky hill and you think you might be able to jump out, but then the wheels slip, the cart races off, and you plunge down with the characters as they plummet to their devasting end. gah, it gets me every time.
zadie smith (yes, i know, everyone is sick of hearing about the essays) writes a lovely piece about nabakov, and her favourite, pnin. for me, nabakov is so important because he’s one of the few authors who changes with me. in different moods and at different times of my life i relate to different characters, but there is always someone and something – a phrase, a situation, an insight – that opens me up and shows me things in myself and in other people that makes the world richer.
Will be interested to read your thoughts on The Original of Laura. Should unpublished dogs be left to lie or do readers own posthumous works?
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