Nabokov must be more widely available in the US--your average chain shop will carry Lolita, Pale Fire, Pnin, and then a mixed bag of others. All those rather uniformly horrid-looking Vintage editions however. I attribute this more to the business acumen of Vintage than any difference in popularity, Vintage books are always everywhere.
Speaking of Lolita and Polanski (who loved, loved, loved 13-16 year old girls) it's rather unacceptable in the US to discuss degrees of "pedophilia." I daresay that an attraction to 16-year-old girls is rather more common than one to 5-year-old boys, but in the rush to moral outrage both are described using the same terms. The law of necessity must draw bright-line rules (and we must accept the occasional unjust result) but we need not make personal moral judgments the same way.
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Nabokov
Date: 2009-10-26 07:31 pm (UTC)Speaking of Lolita and Polanski (who loved, loved, loved 13-16 year old girls) it's rather unacceptable in the US to discuss degrees of "pedophilia." I daresay that an attraction to 16-year-old girls is rather more common than one to 5-year-old boys, but in the rush to moral outrage both are described using the same terms. The law of necessity must draw bright-line rules (and we must accept the occasional unjust result) but we need not make personal moral judgments the same way.