Critics keep talking about its style, but to me it sounds no different from a verbose variety of decadence. Nabokov's voice isn't present like it is in Ada.
>>25219315>Nabokov's voice isn't present like it is in Ada.Consider that Lolita is written in character, in the first person
>>25219315>Nabokov's voice isn't present like it is in Ada.Thank fuck for that.
>>25219318So is Ada. Unless Van Veen is supposed to be Nabokov
>>25219315Grab the scepter of my passion
>>25219315>it sounds no different from a verbose variety of decadence.if you take out the very frequent very economical passages ("picnic, lightning") that balances out the explosions, the irreverence even in those moments, the constant play, the oddball details, the clear dissonance between passionate narrator and cold author (which imo you're overlooking)... or not even then. even if you've only read Hemingway and one decadent author/poet, you should have trouble situating Lolita closer to the latter. here's a good representative passage:>Fussily, busybodily, cunningly, he had risen again while he talked. I groped under the chest trying at the same time to keep an eye on him. All of a sudden I noticed that he had noticed that I did not seem to have noticed Chum protruding from beneath the other corner of the chest. We fell to wrestling again. We rolled all over the floor, in each other's arms, like two huge helpless children. He was naked and goatish under his robe, and I felt suffocated as he rolled over me. I rolled over him. We rolled over me. They rolled over him. We rolled over us.in Ada, although he is actively trying to emulate different styles, sometimes it feels like he is using Van to rant, and Van isn't as strong a character as HH anyways.
>>25220597lmao this whole scene is like a cartoon
>>25220652exactly. much more on point than OP. not only slapstick humor but employment of cinematic language and distortions in perspective treated as real (like when the cayote paints a tunnel on a wall and the roadrunner somehow enters it) is more nabokovian than "verbose decadence". he is kinda cartoony. he liked the marx brothers and chaplin too.
>>25220726tbf to OP, he seems to be reading it for the first time and the first few chapters ARE just really long descriptions of how sexy little girls are. I made a similar observation here on my first read too lol.
