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Whomever ZHPL is, his writing reads like a crazy political grifter. There was a lot of text, but what was all that text even trying to say? I feel like he barely even tried to tie thought threads together. For example, he went from "in 1968, leftism was taking over the world", then in the next sentence said that almost a full decade later, French intellectuals baned age of consent. Am I supposed to think something about this? Am I supposed to think that one event led to the other? Can he even try to convince me of this instead of just assuming I already agree? 9 years later, people in France did something. Okay. Maybe there's a connection I'm not seeing. If so, prove it.
I won't defend this writer, but I think sometimes you leave steps out because they're fairly obvious and well connected.
It's pretty well known that the sexual revolution of the 1960s led to a lot of pedo stuff. Alan Ginsburg was a member of NAMBLA. Lolita was considered a classic. Roman Polanski was Humbert Humbert in real life and the French celebrated and protected him.
At some point we had a rollback on underage sex towards a new Schelling point focused on consent but it took a couple decades to get there.
Today, of course, we see a strange bifurcation where 23 year old women are incapable of consenting to sex with a 40 year old man, but its okay to subject young children to intense discussions and demonstrations of sexuality. Perhaps he's trying to invoke all of that. I don't know. His writing is vile.
Lolita was not in any sense a pro-pedo book. The entire point is unreliable narrators can obscure something horrific with a fancy prose style. Nabokov hits people over the head with this in the least subtle way possible, but somehow people still don't get it.
This was my takeaway as well, from listening to the audiobook (narrated by the fantastic Jeremy Irons, whose voice is now forever the canonical one of Humbert Humbert in my mind) a few years back. I could see how someone could construe it as pro-pedophilia, since people could construe any piece of text as being supportive of anything, but that's not the obvious interpretation. It also happens to be a masterpiece, merely on the quality of prose alone, IMHO, to the extent that I freely recommend it to people despite knowing the negative connotations associated with it.
A funny little anecdote: I was shopping for housing this past summer in the Boston area, and one of the places I was looking at in Cambridge was apparently in the building where Nabokov was residing when he wrote Lolita. The building has a little plaque in the lobby commemorating this, and the realtors pointed it out as well, presumably as one of those little intangible bonuses of a home. I have to wonder if this plaque and the information it concerns actually has a net negative effect on how attractive that building is for people to visit or live in. I ended up not moving there, but not for reasons relating to that plaque.
I'd also highly recommend Pale Fire: another masterpiece of his with top-tier prose, and it leans even more heavily into the unreliable narrator side of things and is more deeply textured. And you can recommend it to people without them thinking you're a pedophile.
Plus one for Pale Fire, such a creative and interesting book. I need to read the rest of his works at some point.
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