MOLESKINE ® LITERARIO

Seguro muchos de uds. conocen los geniales, y perversos, Digested read de John Crace en "The Guardian". Se trata de críticas literarias basadas en la imitación de estilo, una caricatura de las obras comentadas, que se rematan siempre con una frase lapidaria (The digested read, digested). Esta semana, la víctima de John Crace ha sido Joan Rivers y Men Are Stupid ... and They Like Big Boobs (la frase final: Men are stupid ... and so are women). Pero a John Crace no le basta con burlarse de los contemporáneos, también arremete contra los clásicos en Digested classics . Esta semana le tocó a uno de mis libros favoritos: Lolita, de Vladímir Nabokov. Me he reído, me he reído mucho, con mala conciencia pero me he reído. Algunos párrafos brillantes:

Lolita. Light of my life. Lo. Li. Ta Very Much. Weep at this tangle of thorns. I was born in 1910 in Paris. My mother died when I was very jeune and if you wonder where my peculiar interests came from, I should have to say it started when I was 13 with Annabel Leigh, who died of typhus just as we were sur le point de la jouissance.
On the issue of my pedanterosis, I should stress it is not just any old 12-year-old girl that attracts me, but only "nymphets" with a sexual awareness. And how Humbert Humbert tried to be bien. In Paris, I sought palliatives with prostitutes and even, naive as only a pervert can be, married Valeria who betrayed me with a Slav.
I arrived alone in New York and joined an expedition to the Arctic. It was not easy to satisfy my tastes as Eskimo women were too fishy, so in 1947 I moved to New England to do what every literary hero is asked to do by a creator who cannot imagine a world sullied by the banalities of earning a living; I started work on a book that would never be written.
Oh, the conceit, reader! But forgive the chuckles of Humbug Humbug. My landlady was Charlotte Haze, a woman of unbearable drabness, with whom I would not have stayed had it not been for her 12-year-old daughter, Dolores. Dolly. Lo. L. My downy darling, nymphet whom j'aime for toujours et toujours amen.
(...)

I collected L from school in my Humber Humber and took her to a hotel where Lo, aux yeux battus, seduced me. "I'm a derlickwent, Dad," she replied. I was soon bored with her tales of Sapphism and her first sexual conquest, but was magnetised by her nymphaea. When I knew she had nowhere else to go, I told her about her mother.
Thus began our Baedeker travels through the States. Lo. Li. Ta Ti Tum. You may sense the book entering Flaubertian longueurs as I recount how I swore my pubescent concubine to secrecy while taking her to natatoria in between some sessions of gentle sodomy for which I bribed her with a nickel. But we were walking in a winter Humbertland, where critics would conflate the belles lettres of my transgression with artistic genius. Some would even go so far as to maintain my pederasty was a metaphor for Soviet totalitarianism.
(...)

For three years I suffered a Proustian and Procrustean fate as I sought my Lolita in a boyish woman. I even wrote poems. Oh my Lolita / I long to meet yer. And then I got a letter from a Mrs Schiller. "Dear Dad, I am married and having a baby. Please send money."
Humpty Dumpty took his gun, ready to kill the man who had taken his darling. But Schiller was innocent; Lolo had conspired in her own kidnapping with Clare Quilty and had left him when he asked her to star in a pornographic movie.
In Quilty, I recognised a pentapod monster like myself and Chum the Gun and Engelbert Humperdinck staked out his house. "She was really just a bit too repressed," Quilty drawled. I wrestled with him, shooting him 52 times before he uttered his last words. "Ooh that hurts a bit."
So now I sit here, wondering if I will be given the death sentence. And whether, for all its show-bateauing, this livre isn't really a load of aurochs.

Etiquetas: inglaterra, john crace, nabokov, NOTICIA, rusia

This entry was posted on 3.03.2009 at 1:59 p. m.. You can skip to the end and leave a response.