Just When I Thought No One Was Listening...

I wrote an article on Vladimir Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark and originally received one lone comment. Didn't think much about it but assumed it wasn't well received. Well the good folks at Criminal Element posted it on reddit where it snared 20,000 page views and, so far, garnered 155 comments. What else can I say but... Wow!

Laughter in the Dark

“Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster.”

That succinct paragraph opens Laughter in the Dark before Vladimir Nabokov dutifully unfolds the spiraling downward fall of middle-aged art critic Albert Albinus and his gripping obsession with the 16-year-old Margot Peters. The novel was first published in Russian in 1932 under the far more captivating title Camera Obscura, and twenty-three years later Nabokov would tackle a similar theme of an older man with a young girl in the groundbreaking Lolita. But, whereas the famed nymphet of the 1950s gains a certain amount of pity for her situation, Margot comes across for what she is: a spoiled, conniving, and ultimately quite cruel femme fatale.

Read the rest of my article at Criminal Element.