hsut@pur-ee.UUCP (Yuk Hsu) (09/19/85)
Stuart Cracraft made some interesting remarks about Nabokov's Lolita versus Delany's Dhalgren. I enjoyed both books, so I can be depended on to make some reasonably objective remarks, right? :-) :-) Stuart (and many other people on the net, it seems) detested Dhalgren because of its self-indulgence. While I,too, thought Dhalgren was self-indulgent (though I have a weakness for self-indulgent books), I think the richness of the language and a lot of the imagery and clever little puns and tricks make it a worthwhile reading experience. Of course, I always WARN people not to read Dhalgren if they have not read any other Delany book, since many common themes appear through Delany's works and these are more accessible in their earlier, simpler forms. Also, I don't consider Dhalgren to be Delany's masterpiece. (A friend of mine decided to ignore my suggestion and picked up Dhalgren as an introduction to Delany's works. Pity him...) Delany wrote many other more accessible books before Dhalgren. Try Babel-17, The Einstein Intersection or Nova for a good read. The "new" book Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is also very readable and interesting. Stuart's preference of Nabokov over Delany seems to be a preference for a different "type" of novel. Lolita and Dhalgren are very different books that try to do very different things. (cliche about comparing apples and oranges here... :-) ) Please don't say Delany and Joyce write garbage because you don't like their type of experimentations. I must say the later works of Edward Albee and LeGuin's The Dispossessed rather bored me (sorry, folks...), but I think they are significant pieces of literature. A point of taste here: while I enjoyed Lolita too, I must dispute Stuart's claim that Nabokov did not write any other novel that compared favorably with Lolita. I thought Pale Fire was a much richer and interesting work; I definitely enjoyed it more. It's one of the funniest books I've ever read (but then I've been accused of having a perverse sense of humor :-) ...) Bill Hsu pur-ee!hsut Department of Eccentric Esoterica, Purdue University