Caustic Cover Critic - Interview

The CCC has a very interesting interview, with a remarkable array of images, with editor John Betram.  Bertram discusses Lolita - the Story of a Cover Girl, which takes a look at the remarkable breadth of cover designs for this novel.

One of the remarkable things about the covers is the division between those which avoid exploitation and those which go for it with, quite literally, cartoonish gusto.  The interview discusses the character of Lolita, too, versus the popular image of "a Lolita" (not a Goth Lolita, but the more generalized cultural assumptions) - and thank goodness.  It's been so long since I read the novel that even I have forgotten what the girl herself was like.  The false image, instead, of the willing and precocious coquette has thoroughly papered over Nabakov's original writing, the character; it is an injustice almost as cruel as that described by the novel itself.

Much could be said about the culture which so reveres and obsesses over child rape.  I'll leave it to the interview, and the images, and for you to consider.