Literary Fiction Mini-Reviews #1

Title: Lolita
Author: Vladimir Nabokov
First Publication: 1955

From the first sentence, I loved the writing of Nabokov. His prose meanders and substitutes, deceives and describes, tempts and rejects. Purely on the word-level, I think this might be one of the best books I have ever read. Rarely am I this impressed by writing itself.

The story of Humbert Humbert the paedophile falling in love with Lolita is cloaked in this prose. If the reader isn’t instantly repelled by the theme itself, the reader will get swept up in the strange and demented world of H.H. He is proud, selfish, clumsy and manipulative and an all-round terrible person. Lolita proves again that the main character of a book doesn’t have to be likeable to be engaging.

Rating: 4 Stars

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Title: Slaughterhouse-Five
Author: Kurt Vonnegut
First Publication: 1969

I slightly detest World War Two books. The war is turned into something fictional to be looked at, and then forgotten. It’s glorified or turned into swaying love stories, or easily compressed into a two-hour documentary. No matter how you treat it, the war that cost the lives of millions is turned into something rational, something understandable, while by pure definition WWII cannot to be understood. Sure, we can know all the facts, apply some cause and effect, but to truly understand what went down back then cannot be grasped.

So Mr Vonnegut doesn’t try to. The beauty of Slaughterhouse-Five is that it hardly deals with the war at all. Billy Pilgrim, the main character, jumps through time, being at his wedding one moment and in a German prison camp the next. Instead of diving right into the main theme, it skirts it, just barely edges it most of the time. Yet this book manages to be sad, funny, and poignant.

Billy Pilgrim thinks he’s been kidnapped by aliens. If you’ve seen the bombing of Dresden, I’m sure an alien planet seems downright cozy after that.

Rating: 4 Stars

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Title: The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Author: Milan Kundera
First Publication: 1884

The Unbearable Lightness of Being would have been one of those books that I hated. Filled with nudity and sex and pooing and farting, it’s not exactly the kind of book I would have called “fun”. In the case of The Unbearable Lightness of Being though, I feel like I understand what Kundera was trying to say. The constant cheating of the main character is there to make a point, not necessarily just for shock value. The book also includes some pretty advanced meta-fiction, which isn’t something I enjoy, but it does interest me academically.

Don’t read this novel for the story, because the story isn’t realistic in the sense that it usually is in fiction. It’s basically Kundera’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy, and he does make some interesting points.

Rating: 3 Stars

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