Getting it wrong?
A couple of weeks ago, when Time magazine came up with that list of the 100 greatest novels of the past 82 years, there was an added bonus: in many cases, you could get a peek at the original Time review of the book in question. Like the baffling 1925 blurb on Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (the novel was selling for $2 at the time) — the piece reads like a computer-generated plot summary that’s been given a copyedit by John Cheever. (In most cases, unfortunately, access to the full review is limited to subscribers.)
Now The Village Voice, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary, has posted its original review of Nabokov’s Lolita. Jerry Tallmer, writing back in 1958 (at which time Nabokov’s novel was selling for $5), was unimpressed. “[T]o me the most irritating aspect of this ‘sensational’ and ‘shocking’ book,” Tallmer writes, “is that nowhere in it will you be able to discover just which of its cardboard figures does what, and with what, and to whom.” And a little later, he adds: “Three hundred pages of sex in the head. A good number of them funny pages, I admit. Even delicately Joycean. But too many, and too much.”
Related links:
Click here for the original Village Voice review of Lolita
Click here for Time’s list of top 100 novels
Click here for the original Time review of The Great Gatsby
