Word: lolitas
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...Zazie a device of savage social satire. Says New Wave Movie Director Louis (Les Amants) Malle: "She's actually the angel come to announce the destruction of Babylon." Still others have compared her to everyone from Joan of Arc (defending popular virtues against monarchists with Napoleonic delusions) to Lolita. In fact, Zazie is less of a Lolita than a Parisian Pollyanna, for she is a warmhearted fille, completely uninvolved in the sordid sex life that she is always talking about...
This book, first published in 1938, is one of Vladimir Nabokov's prehumous works. Like The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Invitation to a Beheading, it was buried under critical neglect and popular apathy when it appeared, is now gaining a second life through the continuing Lolita boom. But Laughter in the Dark only superficially resembles Lolita; it is closer to the Heinrich Mann novel that became The Blue Angel, the famed Marlene Dietrich film of the same general setting and period. At its loftiest, Nabokov's theme is the degradation, by lust, of dignity and intellect...
...composer's son. The company's dramatic director is Poet-Playwright Howard Sackler, who says of his bosses: "They let you do just about anything you set your heart on, even if it won't pay its way for years." One of the rare exceptions: Lolita, which Marianne vetoed...
...himself never published anything that was censorably naughty, and he apparently has no patience with those who do, or did. Said he of Lady Chatterley's Lover: "Rather boring. As for the scatological parts, they didn't tell me anything I didn't know before." Of Lolita: "I read the first 74 pages. Then I was too bored to go on. Shocked? Damn it, it takes more than that to shock me. Nothing shocks me except cruelty." And what does he think of women these days? "As far as I can judge, with women...
Inevitably, while working there, the ever-observant Nabokov kept a roving eye on Hollywood, a dreamland for which Lolita herself used to yearn. The movie colony may be hard put to know what to make of his conclusion: "It is quietest, sweetest, softest place in the world...