Dear Patrick:
OK, you win.
Lolita = not funny
Corpse-moving = funny funny
If I understand your concluding sentences, Lolita is not
funny any more than the lives of actual child molesters are
funny, but corpse-moving is funny because the lives of actual
murdering corpse-movers can be funny.
And clearly, the discussion of humor in
www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/02/lifetimes/nab-v-obit.html is
simply deluded.
Thank you for making my day :) (No, really …quot; your email
is wonderfully Nabokovian!)
Loving rara-avis,
Bob V in NYC
P.S. Amen to the superb stewardship of Denton!
P.P.S. Do Lankford and Doherty wish to weigh in on how Altman
got the Mexican dogs to hump on cue?
The reply to Richard Moore:
Okay, but there's a lot more humor in Thompson's Recoil, when
Pat has to get that corpse out of the elevator, or in
Highsmith's Ripley Underground when Ripley is trying to get
the corpse out of his wine cellar in the wheelbarrow and it
keeps falling over, than there is anywhere in Lolita. Lolita
is a psychological study of one type of child molester...and
the child he molests, for in Lolita, the child is NOT
innocent. Nabokov makes Humbert a tragic but not detestable
figure. Clair Quilty is much easier to hate than Humbert is.
One can even relate in some ways to Humbert's problem. In the
wide world there is some crazy denial that children don't
think about sex until they're 16 or so. Anyone's who's
actually lived life knows children experiment with sex much
much younger than that. That adults have a responsibility to
control their behavior with children is the given. That some
adults cannot and why, is the subject of the novel. I'm sure
there were passages in Lolita that made me smile, but I would
not categorize Lolita as a "very funny" novel. Any more than
the life of Paul Shanley was a very funny life.
Patrick King
--- In
rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com, Patrick King
<abrasax93@...> wrote:
>
> Frankly, Bob, no, I don't find those passages
"funny"
> at all. I find them to be true and
beautiful.
>
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