I‘ve just started Orhan Pamuk‘s The Museum of Innocence and so far it’s a golden and warm, romantic and melancholic story about love and desire (and culture of course).
On the back Financial Times calls it „(…) a work concerning romantic love worthy to stand in the company of Lolita, Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina.“
Of those three I‘ve only read Lolita and… what the hell? Did they read the book?
SPOILERS FOR LOLITA:
It‘s a hallucinatory stream-of-consciousness trip into the psyche of a very deranged man. It‘s beautiful at times but mostly it’s grotesque and full of pitch black humor. There’s no love there, it’s consumption, it’s narcissism, it’s mental illness, it’s obsession.
Contrary to that I have the feeling that pop culture regards it as a powerful and interestingly twisted taboo love story. I expected it to be beautiful and romantic in a weird way, kind of like „León The Professional“, but hell no. I also vaguely remember that critiques back in the day praised for it being beautifully romantic (after it being shunned for being pornographic, right?).
Could this be connected to cultural differences between the US and Russia? Did the dead pan humor and exaggerated flamboyance of the narrator go over their heads? Or were upperclass men back in the day such sexual perverts that they understood this as actually praising the narrator’s mindset? Or did some critics just not read books and go with the flow?
Thanks for any type of input!
by AlfonsoRibeiro666
7 Comments
I actually feel like most people understood that the pedophile was bad.
I took it to mean worthy of standing with the other literary giants, not necessarily as a work about love.
Never read Lolita, but the Russian literary “voice” is a *thing*. It’s an acquired taste.
You may be interested in Jamie Lotus’s incredibly well-done Lolita Podcast, which, among other things, examines the book’s pop + cultural legacy.
Nobody who has actually read or understood Lolita thinks it’s a romance. I mean sure, smoothbrained Lana Del Rey is aping an aesthetic she has failed to understand or contextualise, and that’s embarrassing for her, but neither here nor there.
Madame Bovary isn’t a romance either. My grandmother told me, bluntly, “it’s the story of a small town, and you’ll understand if you ever live in one”. She wasn’t wrong 😆
You should look into “Lolita in the Afterlife”, a collection of essays on the book & it’s pop culture impact. It’s edited by Nabokov’s daughter
There’s this weird thing with *Lolita* where the blurbs call it romantic or a love story, but everyone who has actually read the book knows it for what it is. But the prevalence of these blurbs lead some people who read the book to imagine that they’re among the very few who actually “got it”, while the rest of us wallow in perverted darkness