Sometimes you just have to let it be

The Annotated Lolita

Ok, people, it’s time to talk about Lolita. Never in my life have I been so wrong about a book. The first time I read Lolita, I didn’t think very much of it, it was nothing to write home about. It was only because of the intense, incessant urging of a highly esteemed friend - and lifetime Nabokov devotee - that I was talked into trying again. It was a pinnacle reading experience. And I read a lot. I expected to slog through, to be let down. On the contrary, I was struck dumb by the writing; moved by the complex, precise, and accurate emotional depictions; bowled over by the brilliant humor, biting irony, and dry descriptions. Lolita is, indeed, a masterpiece.

It’s a storyline known round the world: older man (Humbert Humbert) falls in love and has an affair, of sorts, with a young girl (Lolita). What is lost, or at the very least, obscured by, the morally challenging plot summary, is how absolutely incredible and multi-layered the book is. Nabokov was a genius and his books are laced with references to pretty much everything that came before him, in any genre.

The complexity of Nabokov’s writing is not academic pretension. He’s creating a universe out of the layers he builds; nothing is done thoughtlessly. The design of the book is seamless, but the local complexities can be staggering. Get the annotated version; you’re going to want it.

Lolita is brilliant - but it’s also beautiful and deeply touching. Bottom line: no book has ever made my blood run cold like this one. It’s a love story, in the truest sense of the word. The raw emotion portrayed is heartbreakingly true to life. And it’s unbearably funny.

This is not a story about an old guy trying to shtup a young girl; if that’s all you can see, look harder. Lolita is unequaled. It’s an allegory for our time. It is the ultimate example of language as art, and has rightly become a cultural landmark.

The Book of Embraces

If you take the molds for a historian, a poet, a critic, a grand storyteller, a journalist, a novelist and an artist and blend them all together, you’d have Eduardo Galeano. He’s an author who defies categorization, and his books are written across the boundaries of genre. Born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1940, Galeano’s work chronicles the history, or more aptly, the experience, of Latin America. “I’m a writer obsessed with remembering,” says Galeano, “With remembering the past of America above all, and above all that of Latin America, intimate land condemned to amnesia.”

The Book of Embraces is a mosaic of nearly 200 named vignettes, paired with woodcuts and laid out meticulously to create a stunning, full-bodied picture of the spectrum of humanity. Galeano is a wondrous and radical storyteller, whose veritable book of wonders is an articulation of just where the limits of language, and of storytelling, lie. He has a vast and visionary scope but also, an intensely intimate one, and his musings are as much about love and losses as they are about justice and the chasm of history.

In his writing, he creates worlds nestled within worlds, and with a flourish of his pen, invites us in. He bids us “turn loose the voices, undream the dreams,” and caught up in his writing, you do - he leaves you no other choice.

Rachel Meier is a used and new book buyer at Bookshop Santa Cruz and the proprietor of the website www.readafuckingbook.com, where she is obnoxious online.