“There are two books whose final lines make me cry without fail, irrespective of how many times I read them,” Rowling told BBC Radio 4. “One is ‘Lolita.’”
(The other one, based on the context of the interview, seems to be “Emma.”)
Like many other admirer’s of Nabokov’s novel of a pedophile who pursues a 12-year-old girl, Rowling loves it for the writing style.
“There just isn’t enough time to discuss how a plot that could have been the most worthless pornography becomes, in Nabakov’s hands, a great and tragic love story, and I could exhaust my reservoir of superlatives trying to describe the quality of the writing,” she said.
Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/jk-rowling-favorite-books-2016-7?op=1#lolitaby-vladimir-nabokov-19
Like many other admirer’s of Nabokov’s novel of a pedophile who pursues a 12-year-old girl, Rowling loves it for the writing style.
Oh ok, fair enough. Not an especially controversial take.
"There just isn’t enough time to discuss how a plot…becomes…a great and tragic love story
Oh…oh no…
She missed the whole point. The great writing is what is supposed to make you realize that you can be manipulative by narrative to condone evils. Stupid.
I feel like George R.R. Martin was doing that with incest. Starts out with shocking incest between twins, and then spend a bunch of books getting you used to the idea until you find yourself reluctantly cheering for a dude hooking up with his aunt.
cheering for a dude hooking up with his aunt.
Which dude, exactly?
Only one example immediately springs to mind, but that hasn’t happened yet in the books. And the way it happened in the show, I’m not sure was executed very well, but I don’t think it was really portrayed as a case where we “cheer for a dude”. He barely seemed into it, definitely not as much as she was.
I’ve given up on anything happening in the books ever again.
It’s a great novel, but not a love story.
Although I haven’t read Lolita myself I recently came across a great video explaining how many people misunderstand the book as being some sort of tragic romance. LOLITA: The Worst Masterpiece
It’s ironic that one of the most famous and successful writers in the world made this same mistake of trusting and sympathizing with the pedophilic murderer protagonist while claiming that she wants to protect women and children from the evil trans agenda or whatever.
I haven’t read the book either but I heard this Lolita podcast series and it was a great breakdown about how it was misinterpreted. I couldn’t believe everything I knew about it from mainstream media was off.
Will definitely be checking out your video!
Jamie Loftus’ Lolita podcast? She’s AMAZING. I love when she* is a guest on Behind the Bastards too!
Jamie being a unisex name, I dunno if “she’s amazing” is the typo or “he is a guest” is.
Rushed typing, nervous at animal hospital D:
Hope your critter gets better!
Bahahaha she’s a grill.
I haven’t read the book. I’ve only read about it… but from what I know, I don’t think I’d go with “love story” either. Ick.
JFC if good prose is enough to make you okay with pesophilia maybe you weren’t that far away from it in the first place
pesophilia
love of the Mexican currency.
I just think it’s neat.
Me encanta tambien.
Lmao I’m leaving it in
Crime novels about murders are a very popular type of book. Do you think that people read them because they’d enjoy watching murder in real life?
Also, the writing seriously is that good. I’d have completed the book if it was about watching paint dry.
Depends on the person, but in general no. Enjoying the book is fine, but it shouldn’t make you okay with the morally wrong concepts it presents. I don’t read a murder mystery and come out of it thinking that murder is good, just like you shouldn’t come out of fight club thinking fight clubs are good.
I interpreted your first comment as meaning that you are supposed to hate the book because of its topic as many people seem to think whenever it is brought up.
Rowling has said a lot more questionable things, though. And even written books about her insane opinions. Calling Lolita a love story makes sense, as that is the protagonist’s point of view, even though the story is also many other things.
“There just isn’t enough time to discuss how a plot that could have been the most worthless pornography becomes, in Nabakov’s hands, a great and tragic love story”
But there’s plenty of time to discuss the opposite when it comes to trans people, apparently.
Oh my God she said this on BBC Radio 4, which is basically the main, national Radio station in the UK. To put this in context, this is like if Orson Scott Card said he agreed with the Main Character in Points of Origin.
…in Points of Origin
Okay, I think you need to be more specific? I really don’t know what story you’re referring to.
Points of Origin was a book written by John Leonard Orr, an arson investigator who, between 1984 and 1991, repeatedly set fire to several shops and woodlands. He was later caught because he wrote a novel wherein a fictionalized version of himself described how he did it, including a part where he set fire to a hardware store in which four people, including a two year old died, describing how he died in lurid detail, right down to the fact the child liked Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream, saying that “it was their fault they didn’t get out in time, they were too stupid”.
He was suspected of being, almost proven to be the serial arsonist, but he couldn’t be brought in because they needed to catch him in the act. His superiors were informed he was a suspect, and one of said superiors called the police when Orr showed him a publisher’s letter for this book which basically admitted he did it and how he did it.
Well. I did find that book, but not the story about it. Also, TIL Orson Scott Card is rather a bit of a homophobe.
Hence why I chose him as the example.
It’s a shame that Rowling picked up absolutely zero from Nabakov’s writing style.
Welp
Never ask her anything at all. I mean… who cares? Why do people constantly try to squeeze infotainment from the emotionally ill? It ain’t healthy, all around. For anyone.
I mean I’m somewhat interested in how the Wizarding world manages to keep hidden despite all the kids from the muggleworld supposedly having friends and connections and things before Hogwarts.
I mean, which 11-year old wouldn’t want to tell their friends they’re special? Hmm… perhaps ones which fear some sort of “witch-hunt” if they out themselves as being different?
How about why don’t muggles just address the weird looking wizards who they see on the streets (at least in book 1 chapter 1) and on King’s Cross station. I mean, I can always spot a wizard.
i’d be concerned that she’d just fucking retconn everything and make it a nightmare or ruin it.
So yeah no, i’m good.
Oh, you got so angry you started stalking me? Aww, how cute. :)
gotta know how shitty your opinions are outside of one thread, how am i suppose to deliver personal attacks if i don’t have a properly documented structure of your behaviors?
Not that i would, because i’m too fucking lazy.
Ooh, I’m so flattered. You took it so personally, I became your life’s focus.
Thank you. <3
Doesn’t still excuse you denying Israeli war crimes though. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I became your life’s focus.
nah, about 30 minutes a day. I spend the rest of the day building a 500 SPM factorio megabase because it’s more productive :)
“I devote half an hour of my life to you every day”
What can I say, I make people who defend child slaughter really into following me. :) Thank you for your time, fan!
I mean I’m somewhat interested in how the Wizarding world manages to keep hidden despite all the kids from the muggleworld supposedly having friends and connections and things before Hogwarts.
I imagine the kindest answer to that involves magical law enforcement obliviating and confounding any witnesses, akin to how Gilderoy Lockhart had a career but perpetrated at scale on a large populous of second-class citizens (aka Muggles). Which is horrifying, but any other answer I can think of is somehow worse than wizard cops mind raping anyone who saw anything.
Transphobes be like “think of the children”, then recommend you a book about a pedophile
Tbf, they clearly are thinking about children.
Wait, all this time we thought “think of the children” because of security.
But they’ve been saying like “we wanna bang them”.
Which wouldn’t be a problem if she didn’t call it a tragic love story…
The more you read into the themes of Rowling’s work, the more you realize she just has very poor media literacy in general.
This is the problem.
When the author of the most widely read children’s books is media illiterate, how are we surprised that critical thinking skills are down?
That was pretty apparent to me from the first chapter of the first book. I never got the hype and thought her writing was pretty bad, even by the YA standards of the time. Like, Piers Anthony farts out better YA fantasy on the toilet every morning, but Rowling writes some toddler-speak and everyone loses their fucking mind?
Voldemort could have easily been killed with a gun.
Could he? Wizards are apparently able to handle significantly more physical trauma than Muggles and have access to considerably more advanced medicine.
Like, they teach 11 year olds to play sports on flying brooms several stories in the air in which they hit heavy balls at each other very fast. They teach 16 year olds to teleport with the explicit risk that they might mess up and leave part of themself behind (and we don’t even ask the question of what happens if there’s something physically blocking their target location, such as another person). Somehow, the school doing these things doesn’t have multiple fatalities every year which means that getting hit then falling 60 feet to the ground is generally not a death sentence, or even a particularly serious injury.
You shoot Voldemort pre-horcruxes and he’s likely going to apparate away, drink a healing concoction of some variety, and try again in a few hours or days unless it’s a headshot. You shoot him post-horcrux, and even if it is a headshot that’s just a somewhat longer delay. And that presumes a lack of some kind of magical defense that would block a small projectile coming at you very fast.
So part of the significance of Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov is how our society has responded to it, and for a truly deep dive (that I’m in the process of going through, myself), check out the Lolita Podcast by Jamie Loftus which begins with the story of how Daniel Handler (that is Lemony Snicket) suggested Lolita to Jamie when she was still a kid looking for book recommendations.
Also as noted by Jamie, both the 1967 Stanley Kubrick film adaptation and the 1997 Adrian Lyne adaptation portray the story with Humbert Humbert as a sympathetic character (with James Mason and Jeremy Irons playing Humbert, respectively.)
So yeah, the story simultaneously invites the reader to walk a razor’s edge between sympathizing with a child predator and watching the story unfold the way one looks at an automotive collision, watching a monster deeply past the moral event horizon justifying his behavior.
Lolita doesn’t play out as a love story. Delores isn’t precocious or mature nor is she mentally equipped for an adult relationship, and yet Humbert insists his pursuit of Delores is proper and justified, despite not only Delores’ age and minor status, but also the power relationship, with Humbert the legal guardian of Delores. The story is psychological horror.
And the story plays out showing in older Delores the psychological consequences of child sexual abuse. This is not a story of a May / December couple in love living happily ever after. Despite Lolita being described as an Erotic Novel by critics and literary indexes.
But then, in the 1980s, one in three American women surveyed were victims of child sexual abuse. Also in 1987 Suzanne Vega put out the song Luka highlighting a long standing culture that whatever happens in your house is none of my business (🐸☕), and before the Satanic Panic and the SRA scares, CSA was not an oft-prosecuted crime (it was assumed incest laws covered them) and the believe was kids who were victimized not by drunken daddy were instead victimized by strangers in white vans offering candy (rather than say, John Wayne Gacy, who held frequent neighborhood barbecues, or the coach of girls’ physical education). Only in the 1990s and the new century have we taken CSA and human trafficking of children seriously, and then, not very, considering how some US states are letting kids work in hazardous conditions and letting children marry. So it doesn’t really surprise me that Lolita is thought of as romantic or erotic even when it is the testimony of an abuser.
It’s even more insidious than this. In many conservative value sets, children are viewed as property, and domestic issues are viewed as household business. Many many cases of obvious CSA (and physical abuse in general) over the decades have been dismissed as “I’m sure the parents know best,” or “it’s not our business,” or “I’m sure we don’t know the whole story.” It was only very recently that this veil was pierced even a little bit, but it was not without significant struggle. And even now there is a growing backlash to the idea that children are to be allowed any autonomy or agency beyond their parents. Many people still believe it is is ok to hit children, or that children should not be allowed to use a nickname in school. These are all vestiges or even new iterations of this exact same attitude which has enabled all manner of child abuse over the years.
Make no mistake, in the conservative worldview, child abuse is still, to this day, only bad if the parents say it is bad.
and letting children marry.
Most still do so long as the line being drawn is “is there any hypothetical situation in which a 17 year old can legally marry?” Most of those specifically allow older teens (16 or 17 depending on the state) to marry under narrow circumstances, usually requiring any minor have parental consent and/or court approval before allowing it. All states allowed under-18 marriage in some conditions until 2018, and only about a dozen have set a hard 18 limit with no exceptions since then.
With CA being one of the worst offenders in that it has no hard legal minimum age of marriage at all and relies on parents and courts to prevent serious abuse (no minimum but requires approval from one parent or guardian and the court). MA was very similar with no hard minimum at all until recently passing a hard 18 minimum.
Which means if you have the right people in your pocket (a parent or guardian and a judge) you could hypothetically marry someone very underage in CA then cart them off to a state where marriage is an explicit exception to age of consent (such as NM) and engage in legal CSA.
Lolita is a masterpiece in the true sense of the word. I just do not understand how J.K. see Lolita as a love story.
Yes, the ending of Lolita is amazing but even in it I could feel the “wrongness” of the narrator. Maybe it’s me but you guys tell me if this doesn’t read more like horror than romance.
The following decision I make with all the legal impact and support of a signed testament: I wish this memoir to be published only when Lolita is no longer alive.
Thus, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book. But while the blood still throbs through my writing hand, you are still as much part of blessed matter as I am, and I can still talk to you from here to Alaska. Be true to your Dick. Do not let other fellows touch you. Do not talk to strangers. I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come at him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. And do not pity C. Q. One had to choose between him and H.H., and one wanted H.H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.
Wow. My skin was crawling the entire time.
I have always taken that to be the author’s intent. J.K., on the other hand, read a love story. I do agree with everything else she said about Nabakov though.
For what it’s worth, I think it’s an excellent horror novel told from the perspective of an unreliable narrator.
I would not describe it as a great romance novel.
Funny enough, a friend of mine got into literature recently and he recently read it. He said it was fucking heavy but probably the best thing he’s read so far in his life. I’ve been meaning to get around to reading it myself, but I am also WELL aware that it is not a, uh, ‘great and tragic love story’.
Yeah, this. It’s an amazingly well-written novel… seriously, one of the greats. But I would absolutely never describe it as a love story. That definitely requires some amount of reciprocation and not just grooming and rape.
Whaaaaat!? Grooming? But Humbert isn’t trans? This is just normal behavior, it only becomes wrong when you are already a persecuted minority.
/s obvs
I’m a huge fan of Nabokov’s and have read Lolita several times… But I’ve never heard it described as horror before and you are so right! I guess before I’d have classified it as tragedy but horror fits so much better.
It’s basically a horror story told from the point of view of the monster.
The only “tragic love story” is maybe Dolores’ mother trying to warn the world about Humbert being a pedophile only to be hit by a car and killed, unable to save her daughter. Or maybe Dolores’ tragic battle to love herself and escape from all the men who want to take advantage of her.
Rowling with another steaming hot garbage pile of an opinion on sexual abuse, no surprise there. What an awful person.
Ok so we can add pedophile sympathiser to transphobe, racist and anti Semite.
J.K. Rowling to give her opinion on
the novel “Lolita”anythingJoanne is incapable of summoning a good take about anything. No surprise I suppose since she also cannot write a good book.
It may be understandable to view the novel as high art using pedophilic themes to craft an intriguing story, with no intention to titillate.
Then you check out the author’s other work…
Oh fuck no…
Y I K E S
Oof
I always considered it a great tragedy and a warning about how everything is connected and one person’s lack of self control destroys another person’s life. I never got a tragic love story out of it. She hates him.
Man if I had a billion dollars me an bill Waterston would be living it up.
If I had a billion dollars, no-one would hear from me again.
Lolita is shit Nabokov can’t write for shit the whole thing is terrible and I don’t understand why it’s considered such a good book.
There’s a lot of books out there that I think are famous because they’re exceptionally shitty just in a different way than is typical. Same way I personally feel about Ulysses, It’s not a literary puzzle, it’s just a shitty book where the author tried something stupid and then just kinda kept going. I think Nabokov is a bit more effective, but it’s along the same vein.
What a complete piece of human garbage.
My opinion on said novel: youtu.be/skz9odeewpc
