How refreshing it is to know someone still merits the writing for its syntax and technique. Your brief analysis of Nabokov's prose is insightful and incisive. Thank you for sharing it.
Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed my videos. It's hard to say whether or not I'll come back to Rothfuss. There's more techniques of his that I could look at, of course, but I've taken a bit of a break recently from making videos, and in my next videos, I'm thinking of taking you guys through some of my own writing, as it's hard to teach certain things while looking at published prose. But we'll see.
I think the person who described the book as a love story should be ashamed of themselves!! There is no doubt it's a horror story...but the prose is in a league of its own. If you like Nabokov's prose, but the subject matter is too heavy, then I recommend reading "speak memory" - it's written in a similar style to Lolita but without the horrific story. In fact, all Nabokov's books are good - "Pale Fire" is another good read. Thank you for the analysis - funny you should quote the "sunny cellophane" paragraph as that is my favorite in the book. There is an audiobook version read by Jeremy Irons and his voice adds so much to Nabokov's words. This is by far the best and most informative channel on RUclips. You need to add a "tip" button so your viewers can send you a bit of "thank you" cash. My writing has noticeably improved since watching your videos - you really are an amazing teacher!
Before putting the book down for good, take a look at page 190 - the paragraph begins with ""by putting the geography of the United States into motion". The following couple of pages is simply the greatest writing I have ever read. The way he describes the countryside is staggering! He is a virtuoso at the peak of his power, and those few pages are him flexing his muscles and showing off. I've spent years trying to emulate the writing on those few pages.
"Beyond the tilled plain, beyond the toy roofs, there would be a slow suffusion of inutile loveliness, a low sun in a platinum haze with a warm, peeled-peach tinge pervading the upper edge of a two-dimensional, dove-gray cloud fusing with the distant amorous mist. There might be a line of spaced trees silhouetted against the horizon, and hot still noons above a wilderness of clover, and Claude Lorrain clouds inscribed remotely into misty azure with only their cumulus part conspicuous against the neutral swoon of the background. Or again, it might be a stern El Greco horizon, pregnant with inky rain, and a passing glimpse of some mummy-necked farmer, and all around alternating strips of quick-silverish water and harsh green corn, the whole arrangement opening like a fan, somewhere in Kansas. Now and the then, in the vastness of those plains, huge trees would advance toward us to cluster self-consciously by the roadside and provide a bit of humanitarian shade above a picnic table, with sun flecks, flattened paper cups, samaras and discarded ice-cream sticks littering the brown ground." It doesn't get any better than that! The next couple of pages continue in that style...what I would give to be able to write like that!
Thanks for the recommendations! I got to page 90 or so in this book and just had to stop haha. I wasn't even aware there was a "tip" button (I'm actually pretty illiterate in the realms of social media), although I've been considering offering my services as a writing coach, as that might be the best way to help people directly, and also earn a bit of money to support my own writing.
@@mikesmithz Is this a different excerpt than the one you mentioned on page 190? Or the same one? I've certainly never read anything quite like Nabokov's prose. It's definitely quite impressive, although for my own personal preference, it's at times a touch wordy ; but that being said, all those words (often adjectives) do add a lot of life to his writing, so I can see how it might grow on me the more I get accustomed to his style.
@coreyhuffman7607 take a look in your RUclips settings - there should be a superchat option and a subscriber option - this way people can either make a 1 off tip to you, or a monthly subscription, this way you can offer different tiers depending on what you want to offer (the most common one is subscribers get to watch your videos first). It shouldn't take you too long to set up - I always tip the creators who make great content, and I'm a monthly subscriber to a couple of channels. You may as well set it up - it's free money lol, and you definitely deserve to make some cash. Yeah, I've spent way too many hours dissecting Nabokov's prose - if you look at his writing, he uses so much alliteration. He writes in strict meter, with certain vowels always hitting the stressed beats; he reverses the assonance so the rhyme alternates, he uses synesthesia (a "loud color" or a "melody of relief"). Since you are so interested in poetry, I imagine you must like all the tricks he uses in his writing. I just can't believe he did it - to write one line of strict meter, have every stressed beat have the same assonance sound, and use synesthesia, and play with reversing all the vowel sounds...I mean, doing one line of that is hard - to write an entire book like that!!! It's almost impossible! The more you dig, the deeper the Nabakov hole goes.
Since Nabokov is one of my favourite writers I may add "Lolita" has never been intended as a love story. Also it's pretty superficial to call it disgusting for four main reasons you might not be aware of: One, Nabokov told the publisher that he doesn't want parts of girls on the cover or any part of them at all (precisely that which is the case in your edition published after his death going against his wishes), he feared it makes it seem like a story of seduction, which he never intended it to be. Two, the novel is voyeuristic only in the first half when Humbert is not sexually engaged with Lolita (the only sexually charged scene is between Humbert as a boy and his initial love of the same age) and then vague but brutal as to Lolita's state of body and mind once Humbert starts the sexual abuse though it's subtle so the casual reader might miss it or the malevolent reader might wilfully misinterpret it. Three, there are many books that deal with pedophilia and even more books that talk sexually about young girls most of which are downright creepy probably written by those who have these tendencies themselves and in my opinion not one is as "morally revealing" as "Lolita" because subtly but skilfully Nabokov (who is devoid of such tendencies as far as I can tell) lets Humbert voice common excuses for pedophilia and then reveals them to be perverse, such as that religious people have been practising marrying girls to older men for centuries, Humbert says, so they're pure unlike how they perceive women to be, how Humbert perceives them to be, and then shows the impure one in the novel is Humbert, who behaves like a "brute", furthermore he isn't a danger to the innocent public, Humbert says, he doesn't hurt adults or most children, he tells us that girls such as Lolita aren't normal girls, they're nymphets, tells us he would never hurt normal girls, and would never murder (but he does cause death and destruction such as Lolita's mother), so it's their fault not his. Four, relating to the former point Nabokov said in an interview that there are no nymphets outside of Humbert's mind. So "Lolita" may be many things, among them a masterpiece of English prose, but a disgusting portrayal of pedophilia it seems in my observation only to be for those who come out reading the book thinking that it was a love story and Lolita was a spoiled girl and seductress, that is, for those who think they're seducing nymphets out there, which isn't the case.
I appreciate your insights, @loveofdanteandbice2697. Personally, I was surprised by the content of the story having gone into it blindly, so my use of the word "disgusting" was directed more toward my own experience of reading the book than the book itself (although I can't recall exactly how I phrased it). That edition I grabbed was also pretty weird, and had the quote at the back from Vanity Fair calling Lolita "The only convincing love story of our generation." I do intend to read some of Nabokov's other novels, though. His writing is certainly wonderful, which is why I still made a video about it, even though I found the content of the story so disturbing.
@@coreyhuffman7607 For me it was that I went in with a preconceived notion, and found myself surprised. I found the story disturbing as well, I hope that's clear, however having read many a classical novel the public perceives as disturbing but morally upright such as Dostoyevsky's works and those of others, some of them even dealing with this subject matter, and found them rather less insightful than I had hoped, and sometimes even deeply troubling in that they lacked self-awareness and self-reflection that now in retrospect vastly failed to anticipate our present. Be that as it may, I was actually surprised to find "Lolita" nothing as I was told it to be, namely not a "disgusting" novel, but a mirror to the public, because it's those who come out of it perceiving it not a story about abused Dolores but a story about a prepubescent seductress and those who complain about the second half of the novel being not as exciting as the first half (where the story gets vague instead of continuing to be voyeuristic) that one has to worry about. That's extremely clever on the part of Nabokov. There are so many layers that one has to look out for. What I was disgusted by is with publishers, who went against Nabokov's wishes and literary critics to perceive it as a "love story". It would be helpful if a proper publisher published according to Nabokov's wishes and ended it with the quote of Nabokov saying that there are no nymphets outside of Humbert's mind. Nabokov was such a huge figure in literary circles of his time that his comments provided valuable context to his works, which is nowadays sadly missing for the most part only found by those who look for it, and the work of a proper publisher would be to rectify that with a foreword or an afterword or quotes written by normal people, who don't see nymphets. Anyway thank you for reading my comment, I should have said earlier that I liked your video and your channel in general. I love Nabokov's prose, and appreciate great prose in general. I just wished to provide context for the novel. His other works are fabulous as well by the way. His biography is also written with more enchanting prose than almost all novels ever published. I also read "Strong Opinions" by Nabokov, where he expresses strong opinions on the merit of writers rather hilariously and savagely, which may be interesting.
I'm certainly considering doing so in the future. I love his prose, but I couldn't finish Lolita because of the subject matter, so I'll have to pick a different novel. My upcoming videos are going to be a bit different (analyzing some of my own writing instead of published work, because there are certain things I can only teach by taking people through the process itself), but when I come back to analyzing the writing of famous authors I'll be sure to give Nabokov another go.
In the fantasy genre (which makes up the majority of what I've been reading over the last few years, given that I've been writing an epic fantasy of my own), my favourites (unsurprisingly) are probably the authors/books I've made videos about, such as George R R Martin (A Song of Ice and Fire, even though the story is incomplete), Patrick Rothfuss (The Name of the Wind, series also incomplete lol), and Terry Pratchett (Disc World series); but I'm also finally getting around to reading Tolkien (Lord of the Rings), and have an appreciation for series like The Wheel of Time and Malazan (though I haven't finished them yet). I'm not likely to offer any suggestions for niche or lesser-known novels, unfortunately, because I've been making my way through all the most well known first, and I'm a rather slow, methodical reader. In the realm of literary fiction, the authors that stand out to me (given my limited sampling) are Ernest Hemingway (Old Man and the Sea), Herman Wouk (whose prose I've made videos on, in his novel The Winds of War), and Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov).
@@coreyhuffman7607 thank you, i'm getting back into books again and also want to write, feel i need more depth for it; there's a lack of words for the images in my mind. all are on my list now. i'm finishing Count Zero and will read ASOIAF next :) do you read in parallel or one at a time? waiting for your release!
@@haxmonk Six years ago when I started writing seriously, it had also been many years for me since I'd read any books (being too busy with school), so I too felt like I had some catching up to do. If you're lacking visualization when writing, I find the best thing you can do is practice visualizing while reading: read every single word (don't skim), and as you do so, use those words to paint a picture in your head. I almost always read one book at a time, but I will alternate reading books in different series. In fact, I've read just the first book in several series because I've also been writing the first book in my own series, and I wanted to sample many different writing styles (instead of, say, reading all 15 books in the Wheel of Time and nothing else lol). I'm glad you're excited for my release! This book has been a long time in the making, with countless rewrites and revisions, and I'm hoping to have it 95% done by the end of this year.
Really? That's surprising to hear. I picked up on some comedic undertones, but attributed it more to the character's personality, as opposed to the story as a whole. If it were any other subject matter, I could see how it could be a tragic comedy of sorts, but it's hard to look past his perverse obsession.
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How refreshing it is to know someone still merits the writing for its syntax and technique. Your brief analysis of Nabokov's prose is insightful and incisive. Thank you for sharing it.
Will you do more of patrick rothfuss? 🥺😢 You are the only channel out here analysing his prosile so well!!
Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed my videos. It's hard to say whether or not I'll come back to Rothfuss. There's more techniques of his that I could look at, of course, but I've taken a bit of a break recently from making videos, and in my next videos, I'm thinking of taking you guys through some of my own writing, as it's hard to teach certain things while looking at published prose. But we'll see.
I think the person who described the book as a love story should be ashamed of themselves!! There is no doubt it's a horror story...but the prose is in a league of its own. If you like Nabokov's prose, but the subject matter is too heavy, then I recommend reading "speak memory" - it's written in a similar style to Lolita but without the horrific story. In fact, all Nabokov's books are good - "Pale Fire" is another good read.
Thank you for the analysis - funny you should quote the "sunny cellophane" paragraph as that is my favorite in the book. There is an audiobook version read by Jeremy Irons and his voice adds so much to Nabokov's words.
This is by far the best and most informative channel on RUclips. You need to add a "tip" button so your viewers can send you a bit of "thank you" cash. My writing has noticeably improved since watching your videos - you really are an amazing teacher!
Before putting the book down for good, take a look at page 190 - the paragraph begins with ""by putting the geography of the United States into motion". The following couple of pages is simply the greatest writing I have ever read. The way he describes the countryside is staggering! He is a virtuoso at the peak of his power, and those few pages are him flexing his muscles and showing off. I've spent years trying to emulate the writing on those few pages.
"Beyond the tilled plain, beyond the toy roofs, there would be a slow suffusion of inutile loveliness, a low sun in a platinum haze with a warm, peeled-peach tinge pervading the upper edge of a two-dimensional, dove-gray cloud fusing with the distant amorous mist. There might be a line of spaced trees silhouetted against the horizon, and hot still noons above a wilderness of clover, and Claude Lorrain clouds inscribed remotely into misty azure with only their cumulus part conspicuous against the neutral swoon of the background. Or again, it might be a stern El Greco horizon, pregnant with inky rain, and a passing glimpse of some mummy-necked farmer, and all around alternating strips of quick-silverish water and harsh green corn, the whole arrangement opening like a fan, somewhere in Kansas.
Now and the then, in the vastness of those plains, huge trees would advance toward us to cluster self-consciously by the roadside and provide a bit of humanitarian shade above a picnic table, with sun flecks, flattened paper cups, samaras and discarded ice-cream sticks littering the brown ground."
It doesn't get any better than that! The next couple of pages continue in that style...what I would give to be able to write like that!
Thanks for the recommendations! I got to page 90 or so in this book and just had to stop haha. I wasn't even aware there was a "tip" button (I'm actually pretty illiterate in the realms of social media), although I've been considering offering my services as a writing coach, as that might be the best way to help people directly, and also earn a bit of money to support my own writing.
@@mikesmithz Is this a different excerpt than the one you mentioned on page 190? Or the same one? I've certainly never read anything quite like Nabokov's prose. It's definitely quite impressive, although for my own personal preference, it's at times a touch wordy ; but that being said, all those words (often adjectives) do add a lot of life to his writing, so I can see how it might grow on me the more I get accustomed to his style.
@coreyhuffman7607 take a look in your RUclips settings - there should be a superchat option and a subscriber option - this way people can either make a 1 off tip to you, or a monthly subscription, this way you can offer different tiers depending on what you want to offer (the most common one is subscribers get to watch your videos first). It shouldn't take you too long to set up - I always tip the creators who make great content, and I'm a monthly subscriber to a couple of channels. You may as well set it up - it's free money lol, and you definitely deserve to make some cash.
Yeah, I've spent way too many hours dissecting Nabokov's prose - if you look at his writing, he uses so much alliteration. He writes in strict meter, with certain vowels always hitting the stressed beats; he reverses the assonance so the rhyme alternates, he uses synesthesia (a "loud color" or a "melody of relief"). Since you are so interested in poetry, I imagine you must like all the tricks he uses in his writing. I just can't believe he did it - to write one line of strict meter, have every stressed beat have the same assonance sound, and use synesthesia, and play with reversing all the vowel sounds...I mean, doing one line of that is hard - to write an entire book like that!!! It's almost impossible! The more you dig, the deeper the Nabakov hole goes.
Should I mention you in the acknowledgement page of my book when I get published?
Since Nabokov is one of my favourite writers I may add "Lolita" has never been intended as a love story.
Also it's pretty superficial to call it disgusting for four main reasons you might not be aware of:
One, Nabokov told the publisher that he doesn't want parts of girls on the cover or any part of them at all (precisely that which is the case in your edition published after his death going against his wishes), he feared it makes it seem like a story of seduction, which he never intended it to be.
Two, the novel is voyeuristic only in the first half when Humbert is not sexually engaged with Lolita (the only sexually charged scene is between Humbert as a boy and his initial love of the same age) and then vague but brutal as to Lolita's state of body and mind once Humbert starts the sexual abuse though it's subtle so the casual reader might miss it or the malevolent reader might wilfully misinterpret it.
Three, there are many books that deal with pedophilia and even more books that talk sexually about young girls most of which are downright creepy probably written by those who have these tendencies themselves and in my opinion not one is as "morally revealing" as "Lolita" because subtly but skilfully Nabokov (who is devoid of such tendencies as far as I can tell) lets Humbert voice common excuses for pedophilia and then reveals them to be perverse, such as that religious people have been practising marrying girls to older men for centuries, Humbert says, so they're pure unlike how they perceive women to be, how Humbert perceives them to be, and then shows the impure one in the novel is Humbert, who behaves like a "brute", furthermore he isn't a danger to the innocent public, Humbert says, he doesn't hurt adults or most children, he tells us that girls such as Lolita aren't normal girls, they're nymphets, tells us he would never hurt normal girls, and would never murder (but he does cause death and destruction such as Lolita's mother), so it's their fault not his.
Four, relating to the former point Nabokov said in an interview that there are no nymphets outside of Humbert's mind.
So "Lolita" may be many things, among them a masterpiece of English prose, but a disgusting portrayal of pedophilia it seems in my observation only to be for those who come out reading the book thinking that it was a love story and Lolita was a spoiled girl and seductress, that is, for those who think they're seducing nymphets out there, which isn't the case.
I appreciate your insights,
@loveofdanteandbice2697. Personally, I was surprised by the content of the story having gone into it blindly, so my use of the word "disgusting" was directed more toward my own experience of reading the book than the book itself (although I can't recall exactly how I phrased it). That edition I grabbed was also pretty weird, and had the quote at the back from Vanity Fair calling Lolita "The only convincing love story of our generation." I do intend to read some of Nabokov's other novels, though. His writing is certainly wonderful, which is why I still made a video about it, even though I found the content of the story so disturbing.
@@coreyhuffman7607 For me it was that I went in with a preconceived notion, and found myself surprised. I found the story disturbing as well, I hope that's clear, however having read many a classical novel the public perceives as disturbing but morally upright such as Dostoyevsky's works and those of others, some of them even dealing with this subject matter, and found them rather less insightful than I had hoped, and sometimes even deeply troubling in that they lacked self-awareness and self-reflection that now in retrospect vastly failed to anticipate our present.
Be that as it may, I was actually surprised to find "Lolita" nothing as I was told it to be, namely not a "disgusting" novel, but a mirror to the public, because it's those who come out of it perceiving it not a story about abused Dolores but a story about a prepubescent seductress and those who complain about the second half of the novel being not as exciting as the first half (where the story gets vague instead of continuing to be voyeuristic) that one has to worry about. That's extremely clever on the part of Nabokov. There are so many layers that one has to look out for.
What I was disgusted by is with publishers, who went against Nabokov's wishes and literary critics to perceive it as a "love story". It would be helpful if a proper publisher published according to Nabokov's wishes and ended it with the quote of Nabokov saying that there are no nymphets outside of Humbert's mind.
Nabokov was such a huge figure in literary circles of his time that his comments provided valuable context to his works, which is nowadays sadly missing for the most part only found by those who look for it, and the work of a proper publisher would be to rectify that with a foreword or an afterword or quotes written by normal people, who don't see nymphets.
Anyway thank you for reading my comment, I should have said earlier that I liked your video and your channel in general. I love Nabokov's prose, and appreciate great prose in general. I just wished to provide context for the novel.
His other works are fabulous as well by the way. His biography is also written with more enchanting prose than almost all novels ever published. I also read "Strong Opinions" by Nabokov, where he expresses strong opinions on the merit of writers rather hilariously and savagely, which may be interesting.
Could you make more content on Nabokov? He writes like nobody else.
I'm certainly considering doing so in the future. I love his prose, but I couldn't finish Lolita because of the subject matter, so I'll have to pick a different novel. My upcoming videos are going to be a bit different (analyzing some of my own writing instead of published work, because there are certain things I can only teach by taking people through the process itself), but when I come back to analyzing the writing of famous authors I'll be sure to give Nabokov another go.
@@coreyhuffman7607"speak, memory" could be the next book to try - written with the same brilliance as Lolita, but it is his autobiography.
What are your favorites? Books and authors?
In the fantasy genre (which makes up the majority of what I've been reading over the last few years, given that I've been writing an epic fantasy of my own), my favourites (unsurprisingly) are probably the authors/books I've made videos about, such as George R R Martin (A Song of Ice and Fire, even though the story is incomplete), Patrick Rothfuss (The Name of the Wind, series also incomplete lol), and Terry Pratchett (Disc World series); but I'm also finally getting around to reading Tolkien (Lord of the Rings), and have an appreciation for series like The Wheel of Time and Malazan (though I haven't finished them yet). I'm not likely to offer any suggestions for niche or lesser-known novels, unfortunately, because I've been making my way through all the most well known first, and I'm a rather slow, methodical reader. In the realm of literary fiction, the authors that stand out to me (given my limited sampling) are Ernest Hemingway (Old Man and the Sea), Herman Wouk (whose prose I've made videos on, in his novel The Winds of War), and Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov).
@@coreyhuffman7607 thank you, i'm getting back into books again and also want to write, feel i need more depth for it; there's a lack of words for the images in my mind.
all are on my list now. i'm finishing Count Zero and will read ASOIAF next :)
do you read in parallel or one at a time?
waiting for your release!
@@haxmonk Six years ago when I started writing seriously, it had also been many years for me since I'd read any books (being too busy with school), so I too felt like I had some catching up to do. If you're lacking visualization when writing, I find the best thing you can do is practice visualizing while reading: read every single word (don't skim), and as you do so, use those words to paint a picture in your head. I almost always read one book at a time, but I will alternate reading books in different series. In fact, I've read just the first book in several series because I've also been writing the first book in my own series, and I wanted to sample many different writing styles (instead of, say, reading all 15 books in the Wheel of Time and nothing else lol). I'm glad you're excited for my release! This book has been a long time in the making, with countless rewrites and revisions, and I'm hoping to have it 95% done by the end of this year.
If it's any help, this book is suppose to be a comedy. I was horrified all the way through it but then somebody told me that.
Really? That's surprising to hear. I picked up on some comedic undertones, but attributed it more to the character's personality, as opposed to the story as a whole. If it were any other subject matter, I could see how it could be a tragic comedy of sorts, but it's hard to look past his perverse obsession.
@@coreyhuffman7607 I agree.