House Of The Golden State Warriors' Lee

I suppose it's appropriate that when faced with a gaping hole of three book club choices to deliver I reached out to Goober to see if there was anything he'd been wanting to read. He mentioned Pale Fire, so that went into the mix. (Interestingly, I just searched my email for this email and found another email from me in 2009 asking these guys what they thought was the most chest-thumping book and Pale Fire was one of five I posited [albeit in the American canon, which in retrospect does seem a little strange — and which was pointed out at the time by Goober]; point being, always note the things you didn't pick.)

It's ridiculous: a commentary on a poem that's just bad enough, and a setting with two intertwining worlds in a book that's only just under 300 pages which somehow transforms into a wonderful murder mystery — this genre-busting feat. On top of all that, the thing is funny and entertaining. As rich and juicy as Lolita. I haven't read any other Nabakov. Sorry.

It was funny to return to the put-upon European theme, by which I mean the vision of the cultured European in the absurd milieu of middle America in the 1950s. It's a funny concept in part because it seems strange to conceive of Europeans that way today. The internet has made us all so unremarkably knowledgeable that there's not much to hoard over each other. OK, I just Googled him; that was interesting. I was going to comment on the time elapsed between the fall of Hitler and the publication of Lolita and how it's crazily short because this year is 2015 and it's just 13 years beyond 9/11, which seems like it was just yesterday. On second thought, it's not really important, except to say that 1) life immediately goes on and 2) national or continental tragedies are in the eye of the beholder, and are no more or less impactful than other major historical incidents. [This was about a half hour of randomness while not really watching the Golden State Warriors-Los Angeles Lakers game — wow, am I really watching a turd like this? — and hearing the current season of House of Cards playing on Jen's iPad about five — OK, maybe eight — feet away.]

Another random time-sensitive thought: What about the voice of Harper Lee? It seems germane this month at least.

Posted: March 16th, 2015 | Author: | Filed under: Books Are The SUVs Of Writing | Tags: ,

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