Before it all fades...
Currently I'm reading Richard Kadrey's SANDMAN SLIM books. That is, I'm on Book 2, Kill the Dead.
It's superfun splatterpunk hardboiled Hollywood fantasy-noir, come to me recommended by our own pattytempleton, and I was precisely in the mood for it.
Words Kadrey likes: Rhino, Martha Stewart, Jack Daniels.
But before I started in on the Sandman Slim stuff, I read Nabokov's Lolita. After which, I sought recovery in non-fiction. I chose to read a chunk of Joanna Russ's How To Suppress Women's Writing. This made me angry. But it was a clean-burning anger, anyway.
The thing about Nabokov is... Everyone has already written about Nabokov.
I knew such... joy... such a dreadful, fierce joy in the writing itself. Leaping flames of the forehead, Batman! The wordplay, the giddiness, the melancholy, the operatic absurdity, the terrifically in-love-with-itself LANGUAGE got me. Got me good. Gut, thigh, mind.
Content? Well, content.
Mostly what Lolita did was make me want to read Reading Lolita in Tehran. I want someone to sit me down and teach me HOW to think about this book. Why not Azar Nafisi? She'll teach me so many other things too, while she's at it.
I thought so many things about this book, but cloudily, ambiguously, guiltily. Some of it exulted, some titillated, some bored me. And at one point at least I wanted to put the protagonist down with a no-fuss bullet to the brain, and would have done it had fiction turned to fact and stood before me, and that was disturbing.
Here were some opinions from Facebook:
I think I was about 15 when I read Lolita in secret. I remember it making me feel naughty and being appalled and loving the language. I also remember being flirted with at 16 by an older man and being disappointed. - Jeanine Vaughn
It is really fascinating to me how so many people react so differently to Nabokov (and Lolita) than I did. I read the book, I dunno, twenty years ago, and it really seemed dry and cynical and basically wise-ass, the style intentionally ludicrous and overwrought just to make the point of how delusional love is and how the narrator was hiding from himself how exploitative he was. The whole thing was just coated in such thick sludgy irony I found myself rolling my eyes. - Matthew Surridge
The trouble with Lolita is that it's about 4 books at once. Three are appalling and one is exquisite. - Patrick O'Leary (I love this one.)
But what I DID notice while I was reading - and this is a firm opinion, and boy, I get those so rarely that it always surprises me when I bump into one by accident ("Oh, is THAT what I think? How wonderful to THINK something for SURE!") - is that there were strong similarities between Humbert Humbert in Lolita and Lars Tobiaason-Svartman in Menkell's Depths, which I read last month.
The same thing that fascinated me about both protagonists at the beginning of their respective narratives made me less interested when they hit the midpoint of their journey arc.
Both Lars and Humbert are both moving through society, their quotidian occupations, and their family structures (these are not the sort of men who can have actual friends), disconnected from humanity, but passionately observant of it, and by contrast, of themselves.
The friction of the outer world with their inner landscape, the profundity of their self-analysis, their barely contained panic at being discovered, makes for an alien and highly poetic architecture of prose.
And the tension - the tension! - of watching our protagonists ill-at-ease in their own atmospheres, wondering voyeuristically when the other shoe would fall for them, what false move will shake their world to pieces - that's what kept me breathless, pressed between the pages, completely submerged. I was intently tethered to these lonely creatures as they bobbed in a sea of perceived "normal" people.
But.
Both of these protagonists, by the midpoint of the novel, get what they want. The veneer cracks. The facade crumbles. They both end up in an isolated situation with a single person (both women - or, in the case of Lolita, a girl) who is completely in their power. And the monstrous thing these men had to keep chained in darkness when they had to move about in society is let loose.
And I just didn't really find the rampaging monster all that interesting. It began a downward spiral of a. murder, or b. rape, or c. both, that could only end one way. It was like watching a striptease. The fun of burlesque is the accoutrements, the costumes, the music, the choreography. But the structure is formulaic. I suppose it is the formula of a downward spiral that inevitably ends in DOOM AND DEATH that makes me feel The Literary Ennui.
If either character had shown any signs of clawing his way back up to surface, reconstructing the veneer, struggling to get it back together, or showing brief weird moments of humanity or hope, and then, THEN was dragged BACK into the undertow of their addictions and obsessions - THAT would be more interesting to me.
It's the steady decline that makes me start to flip pages fast. To scan instead of read. I don't mind if their stories destroy them. I just don't really want to be ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN of their destruction halfway through the book. Or if I begin a book knowing that they will be destroyed? I want to be forgetting that CONSTANTLY and then being reminded by sly little darts and then FORGETTING AGAIN. That's what I want.
Besides, two people in any isolated situation, especially where one has ALL the power and neither has a LOT of conversation? Dull.
But the work itself, the WORDS, these were not dull.
I could sip of Menkell's (or his translator, Laurie Thompson's) and Nabokov's prose as of nectar and icicles, lava and diamonds, ALL THE DAMNED DAY. I'd be a mighty hummingbird of words.
Secondly, re: Nabokov...
Even if the protagonist is an anti-hero, a serial killer, a pedophile, and/or a total douchebag (I don't think I've ever typed out that word before), when you're sitting on their shoulder, wallowing in their febrile brains, seeing through their eyes, you can't help but feel points of connection to the character. That's the POINT of fiction, isn't it? To make you complicit in their crimes and passions, a passenger on their sprees, their victim and accomplice.
But, sheesh. I've never had a character make me feel so physically UGLY as Humbert Humbert. Not morally ugly - that's a different discussion. But me, personally, the reader. Physically ugly.
I felt like a cow when I read Lolita. I felt hairy, fat, sorry, awkward, old, worthless, and stupid besides. I felt personally insulted - and isn't that strange? - because I was not, and never have been, even at 12, a nymphet. All beauty was a single and singular beauty to Humbert Humbert, all beauty was certifiably nymphetted, and I could in no way participate in it. And, because Nabokov's language is so gorgeous, because his Humbert Humbert is so terrifyingly CONVINCING in the expression of his own madness, I wanted that beauty too. I wanted in. I wanted to embody it. Just a slice. Just a little.
I find my own reaction repulsive, actually, but I'm just putting that out there. Because it's SO FASCINATING.
I wouldn't have wanted to have coffee with Humbert Humbert. On a purely imaginative harmless having coffee mind date. Nope. I would RATHER have coffee with Hannibal Lector. Because at least he'd be interested in eating ME!!! Even find me beautiful in his way. More so if I had keen psychological empathy for sociopaths and was always polite.
But not Humbert Humbert. I don't have coffee with people who make me feel bloated, bovine, and absolutely worthless.
I would, however, have coffee with Nabokov. I would be a butterfly on his tombstone. I want to read more of him. And more than that, I want to stalk him on YouTube and hear him talk. Talk to me, Nabokov. Speak to me of writing and of words.
For now, however, it's Richard Kadrey. It's the fearless cheekiness of Sandman Slim. And soon it will be Azar Nafisi, and Francesca Forrest's Pen Pal, and maybe even my first Thomas Pynchon. Karen Meisner recommended The Crying of Lot 49 as a chaser to Lolita.
What do you think?
***
It's superfun splatterpunk hardboiled Hollywood fantasy-noir, come to me recommended by our own pattytempleton, and I was precisely in the mood for it.
Words Kadrey likes: Rhino, Martha Stewart, Jack Daniels.
But before I started in on the Sandman Slim stuff, I read Nabokov's Lolita. After which, I sought recovery in non-fiction. I chose to read a chunk of Joanna Russ's How To Suppress Women's Writing. This made me angry. But it was a clean-burning anger, anyway.
The thing about Nabokov is... Everyone has already written about Nabokov.
I knew such... joy... such a dreadful, fierce joy in the writing itself. Leaping flames of the forehead, Batman! The wordplay, the giddiness, the melancholy, the operatic absurdity, the terrifically in-love-with-itself LANGUAGE got me. Got me good. Gut, thigh, mind.
Content? Well, content.
Mostly what Lolita did was make me want to read Reading Lolita in Tehran. I want someone to sit me down and teach me HOW to think about this book. Why not Azar Nafisi? She'll teach me so many other things too, while she's at it.
I thought so many things about this book, but cloudily, ambiguously, guiltily. Some of it exulted, some titillated, some bored me. And at one point at least I wanted to put the protagonist down with a no-fuss bullet to the brain, and would have done it had fiction turned to fact and stood before me, and that was disturbing.
Here were some opinions from Facebook:
I think I was about 15 when I read Lolita in secret. I remember it making me feel naughty and being appalled and loving the language. I also remember being flirted with at 16 by an older man and being disappointed. - Jeanine Vaughn
It is really fascinating to me how so many people react so differently to Nabokov (and Lolita) than I did. I read the book, I dunno, twenty years ago, and it really seemed dry and cynical and basically wise-ass, the style intentionally ludicrous and overwrought just to make the point of how delusional love is and how the narrator was hiding from himself how exploitative he was. The whole thing was just coated in such thick sludgy irony I found myself rolling my eyes. - Matthew Surridge
The trouble with Lolita is that it's about 4 books at once. Three are appalling and one is exquisite. - Patrick O'Leary (I love this one.)
But what I DID notice while I was reading - and this is a firm opinion, and boy, I get those so rarely that it always surprises me when I bump into one by accident ("Oh, is THAT what I think? How wonderful to THINK something for SURE!") - is that there were strong similarities between Humbert Humbert in Lolita and Lars Tobiaason-Svartman in Menkell's Depths, which I read last month.
The same thing that fascinated me about both protagonists at the beginning of their respective narratives made me less interested when they hit the midpoint of their journey arc.
Both Lars and Humbert are both moving through society, their quotidian occupations, and their family structures (these are not the sort of men who can have actual friends), disconnected from humanity, but passionately observant of it, and by contrast, of themselves.
The friction of the outer world with their inner landscape, the profundity of their self-analysis, their barely contained panic at being discovered, makes for an alien and highly poetic architecture of prose.
And the tension - the tension! - of watching our protagonists ill-at-ease in their own atmospheres, wondering voyeuristically when the other shoe would fall for them, what false move will shake their world to pieces - that's what kept me breathless, pressed between the pages, completely submerged. I was intently tethered to these lonely creatures as they bobbed in a sea of perceived "normal" people.
But.
Both of these protagonists, by the midpoint of the novel, get what they want. The veneer cracks. The facade crumbles. They both end up in an isolated situation with a single person (both women - or, in the case of Lolita, a girl) who is completely in their power. And the monstrous thing these men had to keep chained in darkness when they had to move about in society is let loose.
And I just didn't really find the rampaging monster all that interesting. It began a downward spiral of a. murder, or b. rape, or c. both, that could only end one way. It was like watching a striptease. The fun of burlesque is the accoutrements, the costumes, the music, the choreography. But the structure is formulaic. I suppose it is the formula of a downward spiral that inevitably ends in DOOM AND DEATH that makes me feel The Literary Ennui.
If either character had shown any signs of clawing his way back up to surface, reconstructing the veneer, struggling to get it back together, or showing brief weird moments of humanity or hope, and then, THEN was dragged BACK into the undertow of their addictions and obsessions - THAT would be more interesting to me.
It's the steady decline that makes me start to flip pages fast. To scan instead of read. I don't mind if their stories destroy them. I just don't really want to be ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN of their destruction halfway through the book. Or if I begin a book knowing that they will be destroyed? I want to be forgetting that CONSTANTLY and then being reminded by sly little darts and then FORGETTING AGAIN. That's what I want.
Besides, two people in any isolated situation, especially where one has ALL the power and neither has a LOT of conversation? Dull.
But the work itself, the WORDS, these were not dull.
I could sip of Menkell's (or his translator, Laurie Thompson's) and Nabokov's prose as of nectar and icicles, lava and diamonds, ALL THE DAMNED DAY. I'd be a mighty hummingbird of words.
Secondly, re: Nabokov...
Even if the protagonist is an anti-hero, a serial killer, a pedophile, and/or a total douchebag (I don't think I've ever typed out that word before), when you're sitting on their shoulder, wallowing in their febrile brains, seeing through their eyes, you can't help but feel points of connection to the character. That's the POINT of fiction, isn't it? To make you complicit in their crimes and passions, a passenger on their sprees, their victim and accomplice.
But, sheesh. I've never had a character make me feel so physically UGLY as Humbert Humbert. Not morally ugly - that's a different discussion. But me, personally, the reader. Physically ugly.
I felt like a cow when I read Lolita. I felt hairy, fat, sorry, awkward, old, worthless, and stupid besides. I felt personally insulted - and isn't that strange? - because I was not, and never have been, even at 12, a nymphet. All beauty was a single and singular beauty to Humbert Humbert, all beauty was certifiably nymphetted, and I could in no way participate in it. And, because Nabokov's language is so gorgeous, because his Humbert Humbert is so terrifyingly CONVINCING in the expression of his own madness, I wanted that beauty too. I wanted in. I wanted to embody it. Just a slice. Just a little.
I find my own reaction repulsive, actually, but I'm just putting that out there. Because it's SO FASCINATING.
I wouldn't have wanted to have coffee with Humbert Humbert. On a purely imaginative harmless having coffee mind date. Nope. I would RATHER have coffee with Hannibal Lector. Because at least he'd be interested in eating ME!!! Even find me beautiful in his way. More so if I had keen psychological empathy for sociopaths and was always polite.
But not Humbert Humbert. I don't have coffee with people who make me feel bloated, bovine, and absolutely worthless.
I would, however, have coffee with Nabokov. I would be a butterfly on his tombstone. I want to read more of him. And more than that, I want to stalk him on YouTube and hear him talk. Talk to me, Nabokov. Speak to me of writing and of words.
For now, however, it's Richard Kadrey. It's the fearless cheekiness of Sandman Slim. And soon it will be Azar Nafisi, and Francesca Forrest's Pen Pal, and maybe even my first Thomas Pynchon. Karen Meisner recommended The Crying of Lot 49 as a chaser to Lolita.
What do you think?
***