Product Description

This is the novel that first established Nabokov's reputation with a large audience tour-de-force of comic satire on sex and the American ways of life.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #509934 in Books
• Published on: 1998-04-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

About the Author
Vladimir Nabokov was born in St Petersburg in 1899, but he left Russia when the Bolsheviks seized power. His family moved to England for a brief spell and finally settled in Berlin. His first novel in English was The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, published in 1941. His other books include Ada, Laughter in the Dark, Details of a Sunset and Lolita, his best-known novel. Nabokov died in Montreux, Switzerland in 1977.

Customer Reviews

If Satan took up literature, he'd write like Nabokov...
As I grow old and older, I ask myself all too often why I bother? Haven't I eaten enough toast? Haven't I bent over to tie enough shoes? Then I come across an author like Vladimir Nabokov and a book like *Lolita,* an author and a book that, although Ive read thousands and thousands of books in my time, I somehow never read before. Maybe it was his name, or fame, or the fact that a movie was made of his most famous novel. There are books that you feel you've already read, even though you havent, just because they are so famous, or infamous. This is one of those books. But if you havent read it and think you know what its all about, youre wrong, utterly and 100% wrong, and youre missing one of the great joys of a reader's life: the prose of Vladimir Nabokov.

This book is fiendishly good. It undermines everything we "ought" to feel, then it makes us feel it; finally it pulls the rug out from under us altogether. Nabokov's narrator, Humbert Humbert, is a child molestor, that's what we'd call him in the bald and unfancy terminology of today. He's a sick, abusive, predatory[...]. Yet it's his voice that entertains us throughout *Lolita,* and entertains us it does. Humbert is urbane, intelligent, self-deprecating, cynical, and laugh-out-loud funny. He's a poet and a romantic. He's the English professor we all wish we had. He knows that what he's doing is wrong. He's the first to admit it. He's the first to admit everything, including that he can't help himself. He is, you see, in love, hopelessly and authentically and obsessively in love. The problem is that she's [....]
Now the truly devilish thing about *Lolita* is that of all the characters in the novel, including even Lolita herself, its Humbert that draws our "sympathy," so to speak. Sympathy for the devil, it is, in spite of ourselves, in the sense that we see the world most vividly from his point-of-view, in the sense that he seems more alive than anyone else in the novel, more perceptive, more uncompromisingly self-honest, more human and, in the end, the most tragic of all the characters. He's a man with an indelible flaw, he's a man in love, no matter how misguided, no matter how criminal, and its Nabokov's "evil" genius to get us to accept Humbert Humbert as our sick hero, man who we might send to prison for fifty years, but who we couldn't help feeling more than a twinge of regret having to do so.

One would be hard-pressed to come up with a prose-stylist whose voice is smoother, more casually erudite, and more post-contemporary than Nabokov...and this in a novel that is already half-a-century old! An amazing text from an author who has after 300 pages of pure reading bliss, shot instantaneously to the top of my favorite author's list, *Lolita* is a book I should have read a hundred years ago, but instead sat wasting my time in graduate literature courses! What are they teaching in schools anyway? I'm ordering up some more Nabokov novels immediately, if not sooner. You should too.

Selfishness and stupidity cause more pain than evil can
In the field of erotic literature, this novel has probably touched the awareness of the public more than any other, to such an extent that the once innocuous name of Lolita has become another name for youthful feminine charm and sexuality, to put it mildly.

Those are the historical facts, but what of the novel's merits? What is most definitely is not is pornographic: it doesn't contain a word of even mildly bad language, nor is it a trashy series of sex scenes featuring a girl of that name. In fact - surprise, surprise if you've never read it - Lolita doesn't even contain a girl called Lolita.

Writing in the first person, Nabakov does not directly tell the story of his famous heroine, but that of Humbert Humbert, a man obsessed with the memory of his dead childhood girlfriend, Annabel, to such an extent that his life is dominated by her loss. As his teens pass, and then his twenties, he fails to mature beyond his loss. When he meets a girl of twelve, Dolores Haze, who resembles his lost love, he attempts to posses her, body and soul, and in his obsessed mind he re-names her "Lolita." The final result is that both he and Dolores are destroyed, along with several other characters.

Is it a sad story of an unfortunately obsessed man, who should perhaps be pitied as much as condemned? No, for there is more to it than that. Is it a simple story? No, for Nabakov is not a simple writer, telling a plain story of black versus white. If he were, then Dolores would be a naïve and innocent girl, and Humbert an absolute villain.

But Nabokov is not a limited moraliser, wagging a solemn preacher's finger at a wrong-doer seeking his evil way in a world of innocence. Instead he examines the complexities of both love and lust, for Humbert finds that his hidden, furtive desire has met its mate, as he discovers that Dolores has an open, natural tendency to depravity to match his. Moreover, most of the characters that the two are in contact with are flawed, and some are so self-deceiving and tacky that the reader may be drawn into preferring Humbert's admitted lechery, and the reader, not allowed to deal easily with absolutes in a simple situation of right and wrong, is made to journey in an intriguing world of comparisons.

Whereas Dolores's nature is a mixture of easily given love and defensive cynicism - she rapidly falls in love with the handsome, exotic Frenchman - Humbert is cowardly, conceited and stupid, with a talent for bungling everything he attempts, from emotional relationships to violent crime, a failing that he does not notice.

Failing also to see that Dolores is attempting to seduce him, he seeks to trick here into a physical intimacy that she would have awarded him willingly. As his stupidity becomes more apparent, so does his indifference to the well being of others, as he accepts marries a woman he detests to gain control of Dolores, and later contemplates murdering her.
But all his desperate, bungling manoeuvres fail, until to his surprise - Dolores casually offers herself to him, after revealing that she has already had a lover.

Technically this is the climax of the novel, and here Nabokov ends the first of the two books into which it is divided. Some critics say that the latter half is too long, and I agree with them, remarking however that it may merely seem to long, due to being the record of a highly unpleasant relationship.

At about this time, the death of her mother gives Humbert total control of Dolores. He has achieved his great ambition, but he proves utterly incapable of living with his success. Dolores, sullen at the wandering life that they adopt, but entirely dependent on Humbert, strives not to regain her freedom, but for the two to lead some kind of stable life. But Humbert, living in a world of his own, composed of ecstasy and fear - he has gained Dolores, but is terrified of discovery - fails to listen to her, or realise that the actuality that he has gained is living Dolores, not imaginary Lolita.

Trapped in his conceited self-image - he is a pedantic scholar, who has produced no work of his own, but imagines himself a sophisticated artist - he fails to communicate with Dolores, or lower himself from his pretensions to her simpler, healthier attitude to life - "speak English!" as she says at one point - and he destroys what remains of her love for him.

As Dolores grows older she is able to gain more control over her affairs, and she tortures him as he has tortured her, and eventually escapes him. After several years of agonised search Humbert finds her again. Dolores, prematurely aged by hardship, is no longer the cute nymphet that he lusted for, but Humbert still loves her. He has finally achieved a maturity of sorts. He gives her a needed gift of cash, and the two part forever. Later both are destroyed by exterior forces.

However, Nabokov is not such a sentimentalist as to make Humbert's redemption complete, and it is by a further lunatic act that he causes his own end.

Graham Worthington, author, Wake of the Raven

psychologically insightful
"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta . . . standing four feet ten in one sock."

From the very first sentence in the book, Nabokov showed amazing perception of the mind of the child erotist. Nabokov wrote these words in 1947, but it was not until 1990 that Segal & Stermac announced that pedophiles tend to idealize children.

Nabokov's hero sought a "princedom by the sea," an "enchanted island," or an "enchanted island of time." It was not until 1976 that R. Gordon, in "The normal and abnormal love of children," recognized the pedophile search for an earthly paradise.
Nabokov also beat the beat the professional writers when it came to the pedophile's most common rationalizations. Humbert checked into the hotel room and told the reader, "And she was mine, she was mine, the key was in my fist, my fist was in my pocket, she was mine." Decades later, in 1982, de Young commented on what we might call the "possession rationalization."

Humbert then tells his youthful heroine, "Look here, Lo. Lets settle this once for all. For all practical purposes I am your father . . . Two people sharing one room, inevitably enter into a kind, how shall I say, a kind . . ."Lolita interrupts, "The word is incest."

Humbert thereby committed the "love rationalization," which received its first professional comment from MacFarlane in 1978.

Humbert reads these words aloud from a book:

"The normal girl is usually extremely anxious to please her father. She feels in him the forerunner of the desired elusive male . . . The wise mother (and your poor mother would have been wise, had she lived) will encourage a companionship between father and daughter, realizing . . . that the girl forms her ideals of romance and of men from her association with her father."

In 1947, the same year that Nabokov wrote the novel, Hirning wrote on what can be called the "sex education rationalization."

Lastly, Humbert tells the reader:

"I am going to tell you something strange: it was she who seduced me . . . Suffice it to say that not a trace of modesty did I perceive in this beautiful hardly formed young girl whom modern co-education, juvenile mores, the campfire racket and so forth had utterly and hopelessly depraved."

This "seduction rationalization" received its first professional mention from Gebhard et al. in 1968.

Did Nabokov himself suffer from this mental discomfort? Or was Nabokov insightful into the minds of others? In 1992, Centerwall published an article arguing that Nabokov himself suffered from the malady. But we may never know for sure.