I'm trying to address the holes in my reading history. Like, I'm reasonably well read as it is, but there are a few gaping chasms For example, I've never read Middlemarch, nor got through to the end of Tess of the D'Urbervilles. I've read DH Lawrence and Oscar Wilde, but I'm missed out on Henry James. I'm great with Shakespeare, but Marlowe not so much. I've managed to dodge Proust, Houellebecq and Jonathan Franzen until now.
I've not attempted reading Moby Dick in years (An American right of passage, I'm told). I've had Ulysses sitting next to my bed for a decade. But Ulysses is something you can dip in and out of, like the I Ching, or the Bible.
I only read Slaughterhouse 5 a few years ago. It lived up to the hype. But I've never got through Catch-22.
I've got form on reading around books as well . I read David Copperfield after loving every page of Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead. If an author leans on a classic, I will go hunt out that classic, to get more context. I've got a degree in English and a Masters in Writing. It's in my blood.
And I've never read Lolita, that pariah of a novel by Vladimir Nabokov that everybody knows about, but nobody's really read (or read at university, hated it, and has put it out of their minds). It's always been a Port Augusta of a novel, in that everybody knows where it is, but nobody wants to go there.
Late last week I picked up a book from my very large TBR pile, Gail Jones' A Guide to Berlin. We voted on it at book group, and it just missed out being on the list, but curious, I bought a copy. 20 pages in, I very quickly learned that there was a lot in the book about Nabokov, his time in Berlin, references to Lolita and Nabokov himself, and rather than going in blind, I've finally got down to reading Lolita.
I told Jay about this at breakfast, and she thought I was a bit bonkers.
"That's an awful book."
"That's part of the point of it."
"I don't know why you'd want to read it."
"It's a classic. Call it research."
She wasn't impressed.
I'll admit to listening to this rather than reading. Jeremy Irons is narrating the book. He can make anything sound wonderful, and I'm 34% in and enjoying it.
Yes, some of content is abhorrent. It's a book about a paedophile, of course it's unnerving. But just as I love Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, Geoff Nicholson's Footsucker Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, I get the unsettling, at times profane, at times, pornographic, then marvel that writers can go there. Now about a third the way through, it's reminding me of the book Perfume by Patrick Suskind.
And the writing is incredible. Absolutely cracking, complete with an unreliable narrator and a turn of phrase that's second to none.
Lastly, in filling this literary hole, I ask myself have I missed out by leaving it so long? I think not. This is a book where a bit of maturity can assist you in appreciating it. You're not supposed to like Humbert Humbert. You're not supposed to understand him. But you can appreciate this incredible text, even if you're being lulled into a false sense of security by Jeremy Irons.
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