PS
to posting about a
misplaced archive, related to a review sent to the Nab-List by someone
named Farmer:
The Great American Novel by Michial
Farmer - http://www.christianhumanist.org/chb/2010/04/the-great-american-novel/
first lines: "I first read Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita during
my second semester of college, reading it furtively and fifty minutes at a time
during an Old Testament class. (I would take another course from the same
professor a few years later and note, to my shame and guilt, that he’d added to
his syllabus a new commandment: “No reading during class.”) I was, to understate
the case drastically, not ready for Lolita. If I’d started, as I’d been
instructed to, with some of Nabokov’s more obviously experimental fiction (Pale
Fire, say, or Ada), I’d have been more inclined to read closely, skeptically.
But Lolita, though miles of dark rivers flow beneath its surface, is built on
such a straightforward narrative—boy meets girl; boy gets girl; boy loses
girl—that it’s easy to lose track of what Nabokov is really up
to.Lolita,
we must note, is quite possibly the most revolting novel of the twentieth
century. It is also among the most beautiful..."
JM