Hurley (From TV’s Lost) reads Laughter in the Dark. He was my favourite.
The problem with being a Hopeless Romantic is that you are often guided by a romanticised and slightly unrealistic view of love. This can cause you problems as life is much more gritty these days than Austen or Disney will teach you.
Laughter in the Dark tells the story of a middle-aged man who becomes infatuated with a teenage girl. The result is a mutually destructive relationship that ends in tragedy. Not really holiday reading.
Nabokov’s writing is fantastic and vivid, even in translation. He fills your imagination with a clear picture of Europe in the first half of the twentieth-century. Whether walking down a Berlin street or winding through the mountains in a convertible you can see every colour and smell every smell, summoned so perfectly by Nabakov’s seamless flow of story.
It’s not a happy tale and it isn’t supposed to be. There are those relationships, that while they might indulge, they don’t fulfill and slowly they tear us apart. This book is about those relationships. It is a reminder that while we might want to love with our hearts, it is often more sensible to love with our heads.
Not that reading it has ever stopped me.
30 Something, Single and ... 