Sunday Book Review: Lolita

lizshine74by lizshine74

In Book Reviews!.

I finished reading Lolita last week. It took me a while because originally I started reading it for my writer’s book group and didn’t finish it on time. After our meeting, other obligations rolled in and it wasn’t until summer that I found time to pick it up again. Once I began again, I couldn’t put it down.

The fact that you spend the entire story in the warped point of view of a narcissistic, delusional pedophile holds a valuable lesson regarding writing. I’m not going to review Lolita here. That has been done and the status of the novel as a classic and the fact that the writing is fantastic isn’t arguable. What I want to talk about is the lesson the book offered me as a writer.

We are all of us thoroughly socialized. Our individual sense of right and wrong in any given social or moral dilemma has been years in the making. We judge without thinking about it. We act to the best of our ability in accordance with the rules we have internalized. This reality is the primary cause of boundaries between people of different socioeconomic statuses.

Our desire to be good people can be a crutch in our writing.

It is extremely hard to create characters outside of our own boundaries of morality and propriety convincingly. It requires objectivity and a commitment to character and story and a faith that the characters we write are not projections of ourselves. They are fiction.  Writing fiction requires stepping outside the self and into other.

Is it just me that finds that task to be the greatest challenge of the work we do?

Humbert Humbert is the perfect villain. He thinks he is really quite good: good intentions, good looking, highly intelligent, and charming. It is entirely up to the reader to read between the lines and see Humbert as he truly is: predatory and gross.

This extreme example of flawless characterization serves a model for all character-building. The consistency and depth of detail Nabokov employs in rendering his villain really shouldn’t be missed. lolita

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Some past posts to keep you making time: 
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone

lizshine74

lizshine74

Liz Shine teaches high school English, writes, edits, and coaches other writers from her home in Olympia, WA. When she begins to feel overwhelmed by it all, she simply looks up at Mount Rainier in the distance and gets back to work. If that fails, she heads to the ocean. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press. Her Substack Make Time is her gift to writers, like her, trying to magic time in this crazy, busy world. All of those posts are cross-posted on the blog here. You can see more of her writing at lizshine.com and find her on Instagram {@lizshine.writer} cooking, traveling, and in other ways seeking moments of awe. She has been an active participant in communities of writers since the early 1990s. She’s learned that two things feel truly purpose-driven in life: writing and coaching other writers. In the in between (because one cannot be driving for a purpose every moment), she enjoys looking for wonder and connection. She is a lifelong yoga student, an enthusiastic walker along streets and trails, and an amateur gardener and vegetarian cook. She lives in Olympia, WA. She believes in the power of practice and has been practicing writing since some time in the early 90s when she became an adult in the rain-soaked city of Aberdeen. Writing began with journaling, as a way to understand a confusing, sometimes violent coming-of-age. She writes mostly fiction, some nonfiction, and poetry, and holds an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writers Workshop. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press.