Add this to your list of books that will never be written: Nabokov's Lolita and The Holiness Code: An Intertextual Study of a "Parody of Incest" and Leviticus18.

I had to hole up last week in our humble flat after I contracted an acute case of something-or-another. I managed to do a little work, but eventually I gave myself permission to pick up a novel instead of John Barton. Lolita turns out to be a good book to read when afflicted.

It is my first literary read since we moved to Scotland almost two years ago. I did pick up Ulysses last summer when we went to Dublin but failed to make it any further than the last time I tried to read it. And Adriel and I read the 6th Harry Potter to each other when it came out. But apart from that, Lolita was the first. The experience makes me nostalgic for my undergraduate days as a lit major.

Martin Amis put me on to the book. See an excerpt from the review I read in his The War Against Cliché (which I also recommended). Let his insights and well-chosen quotations stand in for what could have been a long-winded, less reflective post from me. I would only add one quote from the foreward:

"No doubt, [HH] is horrible, his is abject, he is a shining example of moral leprosy, a mixture of ferocity and jocularity that betrays supreme misery perhaps, but is not conducive to attractiveness. He is ponderously capricious. Many of his casual opinions on the people and scenery of this country are ludicrous…"

Amis is the best guide, but there's a decent Wikipedia article (the Slate article it links is disappointing).

Tags: Literature