Word: lolita
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Taesop, the backwater math tutor at the center of Hwang Sun Won's Lolita-like tale "The Pond," heaves a deep shudder upon realizing that an ample-bosomed pupil has played him for a fool, using her coquetry to make him unwittingly party to her elopement with a much hipper philosophy student in Seoul. It's a pathetic moment, both embarrassing and revolting to witness, but not hard to imagine. It's also just the first of many convulsions that course through Lost Souls, a compilation of three early collections of stories Hwang - a highly influential Korean writer, who died...
...reaction is not an uncommon one. “Lolita,” published in 1955, provoked scandal not for any outward lewdness, but for its relentlessly dispassionate treatment of a traditionally pornographic subject. There’s something of the scalpel in those descriptions of 12-year-old Lo’s “pre-adolescently incurved back, that ivory-smooth, sliding sensation of her skin through the thin frock.” Of course, such detached precision—each word set down deliberately as a pin through the thorax of a butterfly?...
...entire thing in under an hour. The difference in quality between this and Nabokov’s other works, too, is painfully clear. However much Nabokov’s other posthumously published work “The Enchanter” existed primarily as a sketch for “Lolita,” the stave of its aesthetic virtuosity was enough to ward off doubters. “The Original of Laura” had far less time to develop in the darkroom of its brilliant author’s mind; no surprise, then, that its desk-drawer jottings come...
...Laura” thus comes as an uneasy blessing. There are characteristic moments of stylistic brilliance, but admiring them is a bit like calling attention to the gilt cornices of a house left lacking a door. Roughly the first half of the book is devoted to Flora, a grown Lolita-type, bored with her marriage to a psychologist named Philip Wild and carrying out numerous affairs. Meanwhile, an obsessive former flame is writing an erotic novel about her titled “My Laura,” a crazed production, but one in which “fixed details...
...turns out, is tentatively open to relieving Nick of his virginity. She does have a boyfriend - an athlete, poet and French speaker named Trent - but she's game for any new admirers. There's a captivating smugness to Doubleday; when she flirts, you see traces of Sue Lyon's Lolita. She and Nick court in a flurry of name-dropping, a romantic version of Amazon's "If you liked this, you'll love this" routine. For her, it's anything French, from Godard's Breathless to Serge Gainsbourg, and though Nick favors Frank Sinatra, he adapts. When Sheeni encourages...