Product Description

The hilarious and tragic story of Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged Russian man who feels passion only for young the "nymphet" Dolores Haze, whom he renames Lolita.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7019 in Books
• Published on: 1989-03-13
• Released on: 1989-03-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Amazon.com Review
Despite its lascivious reputation, the pleasures of Lolita are as much intellectual as erogenous. It is a love story with the power to raise both chuckles and eyebrows. Humbert Humbert is a European intellectual adrift in America, haunted by memories of a lost adolescent love. When he meets his ideal nymphet in the shape of 12-year-old Dolores Haze, he constructs an elaborate plot to seduce her, but first he must get rid of her mother. In spite of his diabolical wit, reality proves to be more slippery than Humbert's feverish fantasies, and Lolita refuses to conform to his image of the perfect lover.

Playfully perverse in form as well as content, riddled with puns and literary allusions, Nabokov's 1955 novel is a hymn to the Russian-born author's delight in his adopted language. Indeed, readers who want to probe all of its allusive nooks and crannies will need to consult the annotated edition. Lolita is undoubtedly, brazenly erotic, but the eroticism springs less from the "frail honey-hued shoulders ... the silky supple bare back" of little Lo than it does from the wantonly gorgeous prose that Humbert uses to recount his forbidden passion:

She was musical and apple-sweet ... Lola the bobby-soxer, devouring her immemorial fruit, singing through its juice ... and every movement she made, every shuffle and ripple, helped me to conceal and to improve the secret system of tactile correspondence between beast and beauty--between my gagged, bursting beast and the beauty of her dimpled body in its innocent cotton frock.

Much has been made of Lolita as metaphor, perhaps because the love affair at its heart is so troubling. Humbert represents the formal, educated Old World of Europe, while Lolita is America: ripening, beautiful, but not too bright and a little vulgar. Nabokov delights in exploring the intercourse between these cultures, and the passages where Humbert describes the suburbs and strip malls and motels of postwar America are filled with both attraction and repulsion, "those restaurants where the holy spirit of Huncan Dines had descended upon the cute paper napkins and cottage-cheese-crested salads." Yet however tempting the novel's symbolism may be, its chief delight--and power--lies in the character of Humbert Humbert. He, at least as he tells it, is no seedy skulker, no twisted destroyer of innocence. Instead, Nabokov's celebrated mouthpiece is erudite and witty, even at his most depraved. Humbert can't help it--linguistic jouissance is as important to him as the satisfaction of his arrested libido. --Simon Leake

From Library Journal
This unabridged edition of Nabokov's classic story about a middle-aged, expatriate European man's obsessive love for a 12-year-old girl?which is being released to coincide with director Adrian Lyne's new film version?is a beautifully produced recording that pushes the boundaries of the audio medium. While Lolita continues to raise the hackles of would-be censors even today, most listeners will marvel at the restraint and playful humor with which Nabokov limns his tale. Narrator Jeremy Irons, who plays Humbert Humbert in Lyne's film, is an uncompromising audiobook reader whose performances on cassette are as laudatory as his Academy AwardR-winning work on the silver screen. This landmark release is highly recommended for all library collections.?Mark Annichiarico, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"The only convincing love story of our century." --Vanity Fair

"Lolita blazes with a perversity of a most original kind. For Mr. Nabokov has distilled from his shocking material hundred-proof intellectual farce . . . Lolita seems an assertion of the power of the comic spirit to wrest delight and truth from the most outlandish materials. It is one of the funniest serious novels I have ever read; and the vision of its abominable hero, who never deludes or excuses himself, brings into grotesque relief the cant, the vulgarity, and the hypocritical conventions that pervade the human comedy." --Atlantic Monthly

"Intensely lyrical and wildly funny." --Time

"The conjunction of a sense of humor with a sense of horror [results in] satire of a very special kind, in which vice or folly is regarded not so much with scorn as with profound dismay and a measure of tragic sympathy . . . The reciprocal flow of irony gives to both the characters and their surroundings the peculiar intensity of significance that attends the highest art." --The New Yorker

"Lolita is an authentic work of art which compels our immediate response and serious reflection--a revealing and indispensable comedy of horrors." --San Francisco Chronicle


From the Hardcover edition. -- Review

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Customer Reviews

Beautiful writing confronts crude subject matter--A masterpiece
Lolita is a beautifully-written book about a man and his sexual relationship with a young girl. Nabokov's beautiful writing contrasts sharply with the book's crude subject matter. This contrast is what makes this book brilliant, in my opinion.

Upends your preconceptions and prejudices
This is a book that must be read with an open mind. If you read it before judging its controversial contents, it will be sure to expand your mind and make you think about subjects in a whole new light. After I read this book, I could not stop thinking about it, and the moral questions is brought up. Most of all, it made me think: what is love? In the middle of the book, I was convinced that Humbert Humbert was a despicable monster who did not love Dolores; by the end of the book, I was less convinced.

The book was also enjoyable for the writing style; although the overuse of French annoyed me, it was fun to figure out what the literary allusions meant.

Which book did you read?
In writing `Lolita', Vladimir Nabokov had chosen a very difficult topic to demonstrate his writing prowess.

Why? Because many - if not most - readers have formed views about the subject matter and the characters before they have read the book. My review is not of the content but of the writing and the ambiguity of language.

Words are used to both summarise facts and to create fiction. Differentiating the two is not always easy, especially if the subject matter is distasteful. Our own views colour our relationship with the book, but should they also influence our assessment of literary worth?

Much of the journey with `Lolita' is undertaken from within the mind of Humbert Humbert, a paedophile, and his fixation on the eponymous Lolita. This is a book which, in my view, cannot be effectively translated into a movie. It is a book where the power of language and the images and reactions created at an individual level have the most impact. We are usually in Humbert's mind and, for me. that is not a comfortable space to occupy. And yet amidst Humbert's scattered, fixated thoughts and cunning but ultimately doomed plans are glimpses of beauty. The butterfly references can be read on a number of different levels: I choose to see the symbolism of transient but elusive beauty.

So what is it about `Lolita' that makes it worth reading? Simply, the power and beauty of Nabokov's writing. But that particular beauty depends upon which book you choose to read.

I have read this book twice in 40 years. Each time, I have formed different views. This book is not a paean to paedophilia: it is an illumination of the labyrinths of the human mind.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith