Fascination

When we read Lolita aloud as a class, I couldn’t believe how it sounded. Lo. Lee.Ta. really made us sound kind of like a cult... After we learned that Lolita is about incantations, I could hear it while I was reading it, instead of just looking at it on a page. Not sure if that makes any sense to you all, but it really was a strange sensation. In class, Krzys said that this novel is mean to work on our ears as well as our hearts, which is an amazing thing for a book to do. I had never thought of it that way, but it is so totally true. More than anything I’ve ever read, Lolita had soaked into my feelings instead of just my head. I felt what I read, I heard it, and this was more than just a book. Like the Nafisi said “the writer needs the precision of the poet and the passion of the scientist”, Nabokov really makes you feel the passion he wrote with and I precisely felt the things put out there for us to feel. I’m not sure what it is about his wonderful use of language that forces us to feel this book more than just read it, but it seriously amazes me.
Clint said in his last blog something about how we were disturbed about how we felt, but really, (as he pointed out) we were disturbed at how UN-disturbing this novel was. I didn’t realize it until he said that, but that is exactly how I felt, I thought I should feel sickened by this story, but because of the way Nabokov has written it, I wasn’t..
This is a short blog entry, but I just am still so fascinated by the use of language in Lolita that I don’t know what else to write about. Nabokov truly is a mastermind.