Book crisis of sorts

Shortly before the holidays I finished Lolita by Nabakov. Lolita was for me just as reviewers had promised: Beautiful prose skillfully written to render a shocking and vile character so sympathetic that one cannot help but question her own morality for merely reading it. Anyway, if you've read Lolita, you might understand what I mean when I say that finishing it was a downer and for some reason that I cannot put my finger on, it reminded me of the feeling I had after finishing The Moor's Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie.

It was thus perhaps with poor judgment that the next book I picked up was Memories of My Melancholy Whores by García Márquez. Poor judgment? you might ask. Please understand that I adored the notion of waiting so many years to finally hook up with true love as García Márquez tells in Love in the Time of Cholera. And I will agreee with the scholars who argue that One Hundred Years of Solitude is absolutely worth your time in the end to sort through the endless parade of Arcadios and Aurelianos.

But when I opened up the Memories of My Melancholy Whores, I confronted the first sentence:

"The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin."

The appeal of reading this one suddenly eluded me. Why is it that old men, especially men of high academic achievement, revel in the power of molesting girls and young women? It seems plain and simple that art which glorifies sexual harassment and abuse is, from my point-of-view,

Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!

Any woman who has these kinds of memories would understand.

It reminds me of the English professor, who pulled me aside as I turned in a final essay my sophomore year at a prestigious state university. He put his hand on my arm, looked me in the eye and pleaded "Come with me to Germany this summer!"

While that fellow was probably only about ten years my senior, there was also the decaying, decrepit botany professor who, while the class was meeting in the gardens, beckoned me by calling out, "Donna, look here at these harlequin beetles copulating!"

Finally, there was the rotund, not-far-from retirement history teacher at the first high school I taught at who would hand deliver erotic novellas to me and suggest that I ought to come to his home to view his Remington collection.

Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!

In each of these very real memories, a much older man of considerable power, who with the mere offhandedness of a few words, left me feeling vulnerable, weak and dirty. Yet in each of these cases, I felt that a polite decline was all I could muster, because I was afraid that to speak up and report this would render nothing more than disbelief. After all, it would have only been my lowly word against that of an academic with established accolades.

Each of these very real experiences occurred 20-25 years ago. I don’t know why, but I thought that things were different today, thanks to the brave women who have spoken out and suffered the scrutiny I was too afraid to bear. However, understanding that Lolita has been re-glorified and that an influential Nobel Prize winning author can publish a story based on the delusional premise that a young girl could be sympathetic to the lechery of an ancient schmuck, it appears that perhaps things might not be as different as I hoped. Despite the great advancements in opportunities women have made, I suspect that beneath the surface, there are many girls and young women today for whom sexual harassment is still a dark reality.

Needless to say, I am working on being more selective about what I read. Currently, I am revisiting Orwell's 1984. On deck is Caramelo by Sandra Cisneros.