Ode to Nabokov
Tickets to my “Lolita” online salon and live reading night in Toronto
Reading Nabokov is like a cool, multilingual, well-travelled uncle asking you if you wanna join him on his after-dinner walk and on the walk he smokes a cigarette, offers you some molasses candy, and tells you stories like how he inherited an old villa with 18th-century pornographic etchings on the guest bathroom walls or about how he caught this very rare butterfly while vacationing in Antibes one summer in his teens.
He trusts you to keep up. You’re invited into the game, the puzzle, the story, and beneath the smart talk, there’s real feeling: grief, obsession, memory, exile. Nabokov is my favorite writer, truly. It’s satirical (dark humor), highly detailed—even when he’s being pretentious, he owns it and dares to indulge. Most importantly, he doesn’t just write about beauty, he shows you how to see it.
I don’t think Nabokov likes being worshipped so I’m paying homage with two events:
Online salon: Lolita and the unreliable reader (this Thursday)
Get ticket here. Paid subscribers: scroll to the bottom to reserve a free seat.
When Nabokov first tried publishing Lolita, Viking Press said, “We would all go to jail if the thing were published.” It’s rightfully controversial. But it’s also terribly misunderstood what Nabokov was really trying to do with this novel:
This talk isn’t about whether Humbert Humbert is a monster. (He is, duh.) It’s about how Nabokov uses this manipulative narrator to play a far more interesting literary game—one where the real test isn’t Humbert’s reliability, but yours as a reader.
Because the brilliance of Lolita is that it never tells you what to think. There’s no safe way to read this book and that’s the point. It flatters you, seduces you, implicates you—and then it holds up the mirror to show you how easily evil hides in plain sight and how easily you miss it. This is a story about how language can lie, about how easily we can be gaslit (and get angry about it).
If you enjoy virtual salons, consider becoming an Interintellect member—20% discount if you use this code at checkout: sherryfriends!
Live reading: Insomniac Dreams (next Thursday)
Come in your comfiest clothes and stay up late with us—Insomniac Dreams is a live reading where me and my friends answer, “What keeps you up at night?” Vibes: slumber party, candles, kind of confessional…
The lovely readers:
, , , , , , meHope to see you at either/both!
