BOOKS

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WHY DO WE READ LOLITA?

By: Nasser Yousaf

Our reading decisions are mostly influenced by the West. Western media, publishers and the award-giving organizations tell us what to read, and we comply with their biddings, whims and dictates.

Take for instance the case of 'Lolita' by the Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov. Lolita is an out and out paedopphilic story. But it has been showcased as a masterpiece in the West.

Had he not been a Soviet or Russian dissident, Nabokov wouldn't have been a household name in the Western literary circles. West loves dissidents if they happen to be from the countries that the West loves to hate.

Incidentally, paedophilia is a sickness that is very common in the West. Elderly people from Europe and America visit some Asian countries only to indulge their craving for children forced into prostitution due to extreme poverty.

But look at the dishonesty. In order to promote a novel by one of their favourite dissidents, and at the same time to cover up its own explicit proclivity for paedophilia, Western media tells us that Lolita is a story woven around exploitation in the former Soviet Union.

One doesn't really know when would the self-righteous organization called Transparency International wake up to rating intellectual dishonesty as a base crime. Intellectual propriety appears to have never existed on the shelf.

Undoubtedly, West has a license to do everything it wishes to do with impunity. It has perfected the art of annihilating cultures, societies and countries through its total control on media and through enslaving the rest of the world economically.

Organizations like the World Bank, IMF, UNDP, UNESCO, UNICEF, WHO etcetera are being used like guided intercontinental ballistic missiles. AI and its tools like Chatgpt have now added to the western arsenal.

Lest we forget him, the last Soviet leader Michael Gorbachev died in 2022. We remember him because his rule didn't just spell the end of his own country but it also dealt a fatal blow to a bi-polar world.

Russia defeated Napoleon in the early 19th century. War and Peace by Tolstoy tells the story of the ignominious French adventurism. Again, Russia defeated Germany in WW2. Russia didn't lose in Afghanistan but Gorbachev did when he got carried away with his glorification in the Western media.

Western media pampered and extolled Gorbachev through the excessive repetition of his so called reforms oriented slogans of 'glasnost' (openness) and 'perestroika' (reconstruction) to an extent that he was compelled into doing the bidding of the western media. Adept in flaunting its seductive charms, the western media acting like Circe, led Gorbachev to his inevitable doom.

Such is the power of the western media. But in Donald Trump, western media finally appears to have found its nemesis, and one would hope to the rescue of the rest of the world from the venomous bite of the ubiquitous chatter boxes.

Another novel that we have read despite it being outrageous and, therefore, unreadable is The Holy Sinner by a German Jewish writer Thomas Mann. Thomas was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1929. Ironically though, the world saw its worst economic meltdown or depression in the same year.

Thomas was an immensely intelligent man in addition to being a humanist. He wrote on subjects as varied as Mohandas Gandhi. It is, therefore, quite strange that he chose some most repulsive human habits to tell his stories.

The Holy Sinner novel is about incest from the beginning to the end. Throughout the torturous reading, one feels like skipping pages to find out if the subject wasn't intended to be what it has come down to. But there was no escaping the fact that the writer indeed was enraptured by the story that he had woven around incestuous relationship between a brother and sister.

The Blood of the Walsungs is another novel by the same writer on the same subject, which luckily one has not read. His infatuation with incest is beyond comprehension although the present-day Western reviewers would do their best to hide it under the veneer of most tempting explanations.

Before one is branded a moralistic prig, it would help to make mention of some of the great but nonetheless controversial works that one has read and reread. Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and Gabriel Garcia's One Hundred Years of Solitude merit mention among scores of others.

The beauty of its smooth flowery prose of one of the recent works of fiction titled 'The Crimson Petal and the White' by Michel Faber is so tempting that one had to reread it. Set in the Victorian era, the lead protagonist in the novel is a prostitute known for her killing charms, her average looks notwithstanding.

A novel, laced profusely with different figures of speech, is a beautiful narrative. The Crimson Petal and the White like Anna Karenina by Tolstoy is an ever lengthening narrative of love, betrayal and adultery. The prose in all such works makes them unceasingly readable. These superb novels are unlike Lolita, The Holy Sinner and many other similar works where the reader finds oneself in a claustrophobic cul de sac.

Apart from being a smart novelist, VS Naipaul was also known for his uncanny and belligerent arrogance, and no less for touching raw nerves in the literary circles. He had no love lost for women novelists of whom he told The Guardian that they were excessively sentimental. Having read the likes of George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), Bronte sisters, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf and Hilary Mantel, one totally disagrees with Naipaul. 

But in the midst of all his scurrilous chitchat, Naipaul would some time blurt out the truth. Of his publishers, he once said that they would sell anything, even tosh, only if the cover had his name printed on it. This is exactly how western media plays with our reading choices simply because of our blindly following them.

'Have you read Bob Wood's latest book about Trump, or have you read Charlie Wilson, Clinton, Obama, Bush, Henry Kissinger?' are some of the inquiries we keep making all the time. We all know all such villainous characters by their criminal deeds they committed when they held the highest offices. Books written by them after quitting offices are little more than piffle.

We should be discerning enough to make better reading choices. Mandela, Gandhi, Castro, Teresa are not known to have hurt a bird. Reading autobiographies and biographies of such leaders raise our spirits.

A great work of literature is like an enticing cocktail. We must choose our own cocktails and sip them leisurely instead of looking to the West to recommend their undrinkable beverages to us.