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I am not saying Lolita is a bad book, or that its fans or Nabokov are complicit in sexism; just that it’s not a story I care about delving into. I always thought this was because I wasn’t open-minded enough as a reader—until I met The Lover, by Marguerite Duras, a novel centering on an affair between a poverty-stricken white teenage girl and a very wealthy Chinese man over a decade her senior in colonial Vietnam.
In this literary chain, we have two old white men surveying Mexico, followed by me, a young, Indian woman, whom most strangers in Oaxaca assumed was Mexican.
If Paris is a moveable feast, then let’s feast on it with more recent works of fiction and nonfiction that describe Paris as it is today, without ignoring the city’s multifaceted history.
I remember the bookshelf of my childhood home as very imposing and very maroon. It had the entire leather-bound World Book Encyclopedia collection, and I spent many afternoons cross-legged with one of the heavy volumes on my lap, reading entries on “China” or “homeostasis.”
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