EDNOTE. Abdellah Bouazza of The Nethrlands has been
a NABOKV-Lsubscriber and contributor since 1994.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, December 06, 2003 2:37 AM
Subject: Re: Fw: my first time
The year 1984, I was 18: I read The Eye,
because we used to receive unsolicited brochures from a book club
advertising besides Harold Robbins and his ilk VN's LOLITA. So I remembered
the writer's name and looked him up in the local library; but I wanted first to
read something "small"; that's why I decided upon The Eye. I was struck and
somewhat puzzled by the foreword -this was a writer claiming to have no social
interests or messages...! Later on in the same year as the summer vacation was
nearing I borrowed Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov and LOLITA (how ironic fate
can be!)from the same library. Since Dostoevsky was the more serious stuff I
started reading it. Suffice to say that I have never read anything by this
writer since that first terrible reading experience.
After Karamazov I read another writer
(Alice Hoffman) before setting my teeth into LOLITA. I read it in three
enthralled exhilarating days, interrupted by brief intermissions to play
badminton with my little sister.
I am still rereading VN.
A. Bouazza.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, December 06, 2003 2:42
AM
Subject: Fw: my first time
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, December 05, 2003 11:57 AM
Subject: my first time
Imagine -- the very middle of the '60s and I'm stuck in high
school. But once a week a radio program ('the Radio Free University of
the Air' I think it was called) used to keep me from insanity. One evening I
was introduced to Pnin -- love at first hearing. The next morning I had
to explain to my family what was so funny that I was laughing out loud at one
o'clock in the morning. I think it was Pnin driving a car, or perhaps Pnin
enjoying his laundry.
I quickly progressed to Lolita and was
lost to any other American contemporary writer.
Carolyn
-----------------------------------------------
EDNOTE. I can't recall for sure but I think my
first time was LOlita in the late fifties. I recall buying my father a
birthday _Pnin_ since Pnin reminded me of my first Russian teacher--a
volume I later inherited. My father always wrote the date at the end of any
book he read, so that was December 1957. The third was _Invitation to a
Beaheading_ which, after LOLITA, I found disappointing although, many years
later, I found it to be technically far more glittering than LO.
------------------------