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Lolita Paperback – March 13, 1989
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“The conjunction of a sense of humor with a sense of horror [results in] satire of a very special kind.”—The New Yorker
One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
Awe and exhilaration—along with heartbreak and mordant wit—abound in Lolita, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsession for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America.
Most of all, it is a meditation on love—love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.
- Print length317 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateMarch 13, 1989
- Dimensions5.19 x 0.76 x 8 inches
- ISBN-109780679723165
- ISBN-13978-0679723165
"Layla" by Colleen Hoover for $7.19
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Colleen Hoover comes a novel that explores life after tragedy and the enduring spirit of love. | Learn more
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Get to know this book
What's it about?
A controversial novel about an aging man's obsession with a young girl, exploring themes of love, horror, and satire.Popular highlight
We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.2,388 Kindle readers highlighted thisPopular highlight
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.2,270 Kindle readers highlighted thisPopular highlight
A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.2,152 Kindle readers highlighted this
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
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
Review
"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." —The Atlantic Monthly
"Intensely lyrical and wildly funny." —Time
"The only convincing love story of our century." —Vanity Fair
"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
"A revealing and indispensable comedy of horrors." —San Francisco Chronicle
From the Inside Flap
From the Back Cover
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.
2
I was born in 1910, in Paris. My father was a gentle, easy-going person, a salad of racial genes: a Swiss citizen, of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube in his veins. I am going to pass around in a minute some lovely, glossy-blue picture-postcards. He owned a luxurious hotel on the Riviera. His father and two grandfathers had sold wine, jewels and silk, respectively. At thirty he married an English girl, daughter of Jerome Dunn, the alpinist, and granddaughter of two Dorset parsons, experts in obscure subjects-paleopedology and Aeolian harps, respectively. My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.
My mother's elder sister, Sybil, whom a cousin of my father's had married and then neglected, served in my immediate family as a kind of unpaid governess and housekeeper. Somebody told me later that she had been in love with my father, and that he had lightheartedly taken advantage of it one rainy day and forgotten it by the time the weather cleared. I was extremely fond of her, despite the rigidity-the fatal rigidity-of some of her rules. Perhaps she wanted to make of me, in the fullness of time, a better widower than my father. Aunt Sybil had pink-rimmed azure eyes and a waxen complexion. She wrote poetry. She was poetically superstitious. She said she knew she would die soon after my sixteenth birthday, and did. Her husband, a great traveler in perfumes, spent most of his time in America, where eventually he founded a firm and acquired a bit of real estate.
I grew, a happy, healthy child in a bright world of illustrated books, clean sand, orange trees, friendly dogs, sea vistas and smiling faces. Around me the splendid Hotel Mirana revolved as a kind of private universe, a whitewashed cosmos within the blue greater one that blazed outside. From the aproned pot-scrubber to the flanneled potentate, everybody liked me, everybody petted me. Elderly American ladies leaning on their canes listed toward me like towers of Pisa. Ruined Russian princesses who could not pay my father, bought me expensive bonbons. He, mon cher petit papa, took me out boating and biking, taught me to swim and dive and water-ski, read to me Don Quixote and Les Mis?rables, and I adored and respected him and felt glad for him whenever I overheard the servants discuss his various lady-friends, beautiful and kind beings who made much of me and cooed and shed precious tears over my cheerful motherlessness.
I attended an English day school a few miles from home, and there I played rackets and fives, and got excellent marks, and was on perfect terms with schoolmates and teachers alike. The only definite sexual events that I can remember as having occurred before my thirteenth birthday (that is, before I first saw my little Annabel) were: a solemn, decorous and purely theoretical talk about pubertal surprises in the rose garden of the school with an American kid, the son of a then celebrated motion-picture actress whom he seldom saw in the three-dimensional world; and some interesting reactions on the part of my organism to certain photographs, pearl and umbra, with infinitely soft partings, in Pichon's sumptuous La Beaut? Humaine that I had filched from under a mountain of marble-bound Graphics in the hotel library. Later, in his delightful debonair manner, my father gave me all the information he thought I needed about sex; this was just before sending me, in the autumn of 1923, to a lyc?e in Lyon (where we were to spend three winters); but alas, in the summer of that year, he was touring Italy with Mme de R. and her daughter, and I had nobody to complain to, nobody to consult.
3
Annabel was, like the writer, of mixed parentage: half-English, half-Dutch, in her case. I remember her features far less distinctly today than I did a few years ago, before I knew Lolita. There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, with your eyes open (and then I see Annabel in such general terms as: "honey-colored skin," "thin arms," "brown bobbed hair," "long lashes," "big bright mouth"); and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes, on the dark innerside of your eyelids, the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors (and this is how I see Lolita).
Let me therefore primly limit myself, in describing Annabel, to saying she was a lovely child a few months my junior. Her parents were old friends of my aunt's, and as stuffy as she. They had rented a villa not far from Hotel Mirana. Bald brown Mr. Leigh and fat, powdered Mrs. Leigh (born Vanessa van Ness). How I loathed them! At first, Annabel and I talked of peripheral affairs. She kept lifting handfuls of fine sand and letting it pour through her fingers. Our brains were turned the way those of intelligent European preadolescents were in our day and set, and I doubt if much individual genius should be assigned to our interest in the plurality of inhabited worlds, competitive tennis, infinity, solipsism and so on. The softness and fragility of baby animals caused us the same intense pain. She wanted to be a nurse in some famished Asiatic country; I wanted to be a famous spy.
All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other's soul and flesh; but there we were, unable even to mate as slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do. After one wild attempt we made to meet at night in her garden (of which more later), the only privacy we were allowed was to be out of earshot but not out of sight on the populous part of the plage. There, on the soft sand, a few feet away from our elders, we would sprawl all morning, in a petrified paroxysm of desire, and take advantage of every blessed quirk in space and time to touch each other: her hand, half-hidden in the sand, would creep toward me, its slender brown fingers sleepwalking nearer and nearer; then, her opalescent knee would start on a long cautious journey; sometimes a chance rampart built by younger children granted us sufficient concealment to graze each other's salty lips; these incomplete contacts drove our healthy and inexperienced young bodies to such a state of exasperation that not even the cold blue water, under which we still clawed at each other, could bring relief.
Among some treasures I lost during the wanderings of my adult years, there was a snapshot taken by my aunt which showed Annabel, her parents and the staid, elderly, lame gentleman, a Dr. Cooper, who that same summer courted my aunt, grouped around a table in a sidewalk caf?. Annabel did not come out well, caught as she was in the act of bending over her chocolat glac?, and her thin bare shoulders and the parting in her hair were about all that could be identified (as I remember that picture) amid the sunny blur into which her lost loveliness graded; but I, sitting somewhat apart from the rest, came out with a kind of dramatic conspicuousness: a moody, beetle-browed boy in a dark sport shirt and well-tailored white shorts, his legs crossed, sitting in profile, looking away. That photograph was taken on the last day of our fatal summer and just a few minutes before we made our second and final attempt to thwart fate. Under the flimsiest of pretexts (this was our very last chance, and nothing really mattered) we escaped from the caf? to the beach, and found a desolate stretch of sand, and there, in the violet shadow of some red rocks forming a kind of cave, had a brief session of avid caresses, with somebody's lost pair of sunglasses for only witness. I was on my knees, and on the point of possessing my darling, when two bearded bathers, the old man of the sea and his brother, came out of the sea with exclamations of ribald encouragement, and four months later she died of typhus in Corfu.
4
I leaf again and again through these miserable memories, and keep asking myself, was it then, in the glitter of that remote summer, that the rift in my life began; or was my excessive desire for that child only the first evidence of an inherent singularity? When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past. I am convinced, however, that in a certain magic and fateful way Lolita began with Annabel.
I also know that the shock of Annabel's death consolidated the frustration of that nightmare summer, made of it a permanent obstacle to any further romance throughout the cold years of my youth. The spiritual and the physical had been blended in us with a perfection that must remain incomprehensible to the matter-of-fact, crude, standard-brained youngsters of today. Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the same dreams. We compared notes. We found strange affinities. The same June of the same year (1919) a stray canary had fluttered into her house and mine, in two widely separated countries. Oh, Lolita, had you loved me thus!
I have reserved for the conclusion of my "Annabel" phase the account of our unsuccessful first tryst. One night, she managed to deceive the vicious vigilance of her family. In a nervous and slender-leaved mimosa grove at the back of their villa we found a perch on the ruins of a low stone wall. Through the darkness and the tender trees we could see the arabesques of lighted windows which, touched up by the colored inks of sensitive memory, appear to me now like playing cards-presumably because a bridge game was keeping the enemy busy. She trembled and twitched as I kissed the corner of her parted lips and the hot lobe of her ear. A cluster of stars palely glowed above us, between the silhouettes of long thin leaves; that vibrant sky seemed as naked as she was under her light frock. I saw her face in the sky, strangely distinct, as if it emitted a faint radiance of its own. Her legs, her lovely live legs, were not too close together, and when my hand located what it sought, a dreamy and eerie expression, half-pleasure, half-pain, came over those childish features. She sat a little higher than I, and whenever in her solitary ecstasy she was led to kiss me, her head would bend with a sleepy, soft, drooping movement that was almost woeful, and her bare knees caught and compressed my wrist, and slackened again; and her quivering mouth, distorted by the acridity of some mysterious potion, with a sibilant intake of breath came near to my face. She would try to relieve the pain of love by first roughly rubbing her dry lips against mine; then my darling would draw away with a nervous toss of her hair, and then again come darkly near and let me feed on her open mouth, while with a generosity that was ready to offer her everything, my heart, my throat, my entrails, I gave her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of my passion.
I recall the scent of some kind of toilet powder-I believe she stole it from her mother's Spanish maid-a sweetish, lowly, musky perfume. It mingled with her own biscuity odor, and my senses were suddenly filled to the brim; a sudden commotion in a nearby bush prevented them from overflowing-and as we draw away from each other, and with aching veins attended to what was probably a prowling cat, there came from the house her mother's voice calling her, with a rising frantic note-and Dr. Cooper ponderously limped out into the garden. But that mimosa grove-the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honeydew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since-until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another.
5
The days of my youth, as I look back on them, seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation car. In my sanitary relations with women I was practical, ironical and brisk. While a college student, in London and Paris, paid ladies sufficed me. My studies were meticulous and intense, although not particularly fruitful. At first, I planned to take a degree in psychiatry as many manqu? talents do; but I was even more manqu? than that; a peculiar exhaustion, I am so oppressed, doctor, set in; and I switched to English literature, where so many frustrated poets end as pipe-smoking teachers in tweeds. Paris suited me. I discussed Soviet movies with expatriates. I sat with uranists in the Deux Magots. I published tortuous essays in obscure journals. I composed pastiches:
Product details
- ASIN : 0679723161
- Publisher : Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group; Edition Unstated (March 13, 1989)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 317 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780679723165
- ISBN-13 : 978-0679723165
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.19 x 0.76 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #8,876 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #21 in Censorship & Politics
- #371 in Classic Literature & Fiction
- #1,100 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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About the authors
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 23, 1899, in St. Petersburg, Russia. The Nabokov household was trilingual, and as a young man, he studied Slavic and romance languages at Trinity College, Cambridge, taking his honors degree in 1922. For the next eighteen years he lived in Berlin and Paris, writing prolifically in Russian under the pseudonym Sirin and supporting himself through translations, lessons in English and tennis, and by composing the first crossword puzzles in Russian. In 1925 he married Vera Slonim, with whom he had one child, a son, Dmitri. Having already fled Russia and Germany, Nabokov became a refugee once more in 1940, when he was forced to leave France for the United States. There he taught at Wellesley, Harvard, and Cornell. He also gave up writing in Russian and began composing ficticvbn ral books of criticism. Vladimir Nabokov died in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1977.
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Customers find the characters believable and cleverly developed. They also appreciate the writing quality and ability to make the reader suspend disbelief. However, some find the reading experience uncomfortable and the pacing slow. Opinions are mixed on the emotional tone, with some finding it deeply disturbing and honest, while others say it's dark and powerful. Readers disagree on the sexual content, with others finding it not pornographic and masterfully done. They disagree on content, describing it as clever, witty, and absurd, while other find it insincere, tough, and a chore to go on.
AI-generated from the text of customer reviews
Customers find the writing quality of the book great, descriptive, and opalescent. They also say the author does not waste a single word and the book brings them to tears.
"...Nabakov, in "Lolita," does not waste a single word. Even the title is a trick. He is not in love or even in lust with Lolita...." Read more
"...did not take away from the awe of Vladimir Nabokov's incredible mastery of the English language along with sprinklings of French and German as far..." Read more
"...Russian-born Nabokov's mastery of written English is colorful and intricate though he does make occasional errors in his attempts at American..." Read more
"...I agree with those who praise “the beauty of its language and the depth of its characterization.”..." Read more
Customers find the characters in the book believable and cleverly developed over the story. They also say the book is a brilliant portrait of an obsessed man and his psychological degeneration.
"...The important characters are memorable and the minor characters do their job well...." Read more
"...In this sense, it's perfect. The characters come alive on page, burst from it, pulling you in by the throat and making your heart beat faster...." Read more
"...Unfortunately, there is not one likeable or admirable character in the novel...." Read more
"...And no one can doubt the novel’s originality, well-drawn characters and general ability to make the reader suspend disbelief while reading its..." Read more
Customers find the subject matter intriguing, with a few twists and turns. They also mention that the ambiguity is interesting, but not cathartic enough.
"...I don't even really know if it's a classic. Is it interesting? Is it a good book? I guess." Read more
"...The book is full of unexpected twists, but ends up feeling somewhat slow due to the deep prose and constant refrains in French, as well as the many..." Read more
"Lolita is one of the best novels I have enjoyed reading. It is an interesting, humorous story of a middle-aged man's fascination with a twelve-year..." Read more
"...The engagement of the characters was very unique, interesting, and well put together...." Read more
Customers are mixed about the content. Some find the passages clever and witty that lighten the mood of the book. They also say the writing is poetic, absurd, and distasteful. However, other customers find the book insincere, depressing, and a bit rambly. They say it's a tough read and predictable.
"...a full on cinema in your mind but there were a lot of racist suggestions throughout this book...." Read more
"...Throughout this brilliant, perfect, lyrical novel, Nabakov alternates between lies, fantasies, funny stories and fabrications...." Read more
"...It was a controversial book for its time , but full of too much fluff. I kept looking and thinking how am I only 50% through this book?..." Read more
"...I just felt that the book became predictable as you knew the motive behind every action. I am glad that I have now read the book...." Read more
Customers are mixed about the emotional tone of the book. Some find it deeply disturbing, challenging, and a controversial masterpiece that pushes the boundaries. They describe the world as obsessive, beautiful, grotesque, ironic, and tragic. However, others say the subject is disturbing, the topic and concept are utterly wretched, and the story is painful to read. They also say the book is potentially quite objectionable to those who may be bored easily.
"...ability at capturing the intensity of longing, despair, passion and rapture is enthralling. The story in many respects isn't an easy read...." Read more
"This is a dark and often powerful novel, frequently veering into ugliness and ending with a nightmarishly graphic description of a murder...." Read more
"Exactly as expected, book came in perfect condition and seems very legit. Cant wait to finish reading...." Read more
"...Humbert's rubbishy, hateful and sophomoric worldview coupled with unbearable monologues punctuated by Nabokov's playfully dull and self-centered..." Read more
Customers are mixed about the sexual content. Some mention it's not pornographic at all, and a genius blend of lust, evil, and love. Others say it verbosely romanticizes pedophilia, with no graphic sex scenes.
"...It is fair to say that, in this book, the porn is poetic. I can say the book is ultimately tragic...." Read more
"...In a way they deserved each other.The subject of pedophilia is deeply disturbing, but does that mean we should ignore it? I hope not...." Read more
"...someone could have made it approaching this subject and is not pornographic in nature, but some parts will undoubtably make people uncomfortable." Read more
"...It's not really pornographic in detail, but I guess you have to be willing to deal with the subject matter if you are buying the book to being with." Read more
Customers find the pacing of the book slow and drags at many points.
"...The book is full of unexpected twists, but ends up feeling somewhat slow due to the deep prose and constant refrains in French, as well as the many..." Read more
"...The second half of the book is not as well-paced or interesting as the first and drags the whole book down...." Read more
"...The second half was a bit slow and did not grab my attention as much as the first half. Worth reading" Read more
"...Its a little slow moving, but if you read too fast you'll miss the beauty wrapped up neatly in each sentence." Read more
Customers find the book uncomfortable, creepy, and like a bootleg.
"...No. Titallating? No. Graphic? No. Actually, today it feels a bit creepy. I don't think the years (60+) have been kind to "Lolita"...." Read more
"...The book does make you uncomfortable. This is definitely not a book for the faint hearted. It is a very dark book...." Read more
"This is a mildly uncomfortable read, yet I felt compelled to finish this beautifully written masterpiece. I'm glad I read it." Read more
"...It took me 2 days to read, it was a very uncomfortable experience the way he’d describe Dolores would make me have to stop reading...." Read more
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Nabakov, in "Lolita," does not waste a single word. Even the title is a trick. He is not in love or even in lust with Lolita. He is in love with language; with words.
John Ray, Jr. (Nabakov in disguise) lays out some important facts right in the foreward of the book, warning those that picked up the book due to its scandalous reputation that they might be disappointed. In fact, Nabakov plays a great trick on all unsuspecting readers.
"True, not a single obscene term is to be found in the whole work; indeed, the robust philistine who is conditioned by modern conventions into accepting without qualms a lavish array of four-letter words in a banal novel, will be quite shocked by their absence here."
Indeed, Nabakov loves words too much, has too many games to play with them, to waste time "dropping F-bombs" and other ineffectual lazy gimmicks.
But no, it is more delicious than even that. Nabakov is behind the joke; he is the true writer of the foreward, disguised as "real." It is enchanting the way he is able to pull off this hoax with such elan:
"...had out demented diarist gone, in the fatal summer of 1947, to a competent pyschopathologist (what is this?), there would have been no disaster; but then, neither would there have been this book. This commentator may be excused for repeating what he has stressed in his own books and lectures, namely that "offensive" is frequently but a synonym for "unusual" and a great work of art is of course always original, and thus by its very nature should come as more or less shocking surprise."
"I have no intention to glorify "H.H." No doubt, he is horrible, he is abject, he is a shining example of moral leprosy, a mixture of ferocity and jocularity that betrays supreme misery perhaps, but is not conducive to attractiveness."
"A desperate honesty that throbs through his confession does not absolve him from sins of diabolical cunning. He is abnormal. He is not a gentleman."
This is typical of the style; dry, comical, self-deprecating, hilarious, pretending to be serious.
Nabakov wastes no time, and hits us with this zinger in the first page:
"You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style."
He describes his early love, Annabel, in the most beautiful of passionate terms:
"All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other's soul and flesh..."
And then later...
"I am convinced, however, that in a certain magic and fateful way Lolita began with Annabel."
One of the central themes of the book is his yearning not only for the young love he never consummated, but with the youth, and very life he had before. Who has not felt this way at some time in their life? But he personifies with Lolita. And Lolita becomes dirty and soiled, and imperfect and rotten, just like real life can be, making it clear that we just can never go back.
Nabakov's prose is lyrical. It is thrilling and mouthwatering and a delight to readers. The beauty interspersed with the taboo topic only adds to its ferocious perfection. For example:
"...that vibrant sky seemed as naked as she was under her light frock. I saw her face in the sky, strangely distinct, as if it emitted a faint radiance of its own. Her legs, her lovely live legs, were not too close together, and when my hand located what it sought, a dreamy and eerie expression, half-pleasure, half-pain, came over those childish features."
Stunning.
And then...
"But that mimosa grove- the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honeydew, and the ache remained with me, and that girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since- until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another."
To dance with words with such beauty into such a twisted sick act is thrilling.
He describes "nymphets:"
"...the elusive, shifty, soul-shattering, insidious charm..."
And the way he describes "himself" is just so vivid and lyrical:
"You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine..."
And this:
"The dimmest of my pollutive dreams was a thousand times more dazzling than all the adultery the most virile writer of genius or the most talented impotent might imagine."
But he is so self-deprecating and playful with words that he can downplay the depravity with this pretty sentence:
"I daresay you see me already frothing at the mouth in a fit; but no, I am not; I am just winking happy thoughts into a little tiddle cup."
Beyond the lust for Lo is something deeper, a lust for life, especially his youth:
"Ah, leave me alone in my pubescent park, in my mossy garden." This sentence with "mossy garden" is so delicious with double entendre, yet not dirty or direct enough to for him to be caught.
Even when he is self-deprecating, he does it out of extreme ego. But when he is egotistical, his writing is absolutely perfect:
"Well did I know, alas, that I could obtain at the snap of my fingers any adult female I chose; in fact, it had become quite a habit with me of not being too attentive to women lest they come toppling, bloodripe, into my cold lap." Who writes like this? "bloodripe?" What a perfect, made up word, full of meaning.
He makes the most pathetic or banal events hilarious, such as this incident in which he catches his first wife in the act with a Russian man:
"I noticed with a spasm of fierce disgust that the former Counselor of the Tsar, after thoroughly easing his bladder, had not flushed the toilet. That solemn pool of alien urine with a soggy, tawny cigarette butt disintegrating in it struck me as a crowning insult, and I wildly looked around for a weapon."
I love these flashes of brilliance that also expose his madness.
He manages to describe the absurdity of life, such as this description of an experiment conducted by a distinguished scientist:
"The experiment dealt with human and racial reactions to a diet of bananas and dates in a constant position on all fours. My informant, a doctor, swore he had seen with his own eyes obese Valechka and her colonel, by then gray-haired and also quite corpulent, diligently crawling about the well-swept floors of a brightly lit set of rooms, in the company of several other hired quadrupeds, selected from indigent and helpless groups. I tried to find the results of these tests in the Review of Anthropology; but they appear not to have been published yet."
This is the real title to the book. This entire novel could be the fantasies of a madman, a sequence of dreams, a dance with words. Would it matter if it was? Not in the least.
In the afterward, he says indirectly that Lolita was "his love affair with the English language." And amusingly, he implies that his books in Russian are much better, and says "I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses - the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions- which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way."
Imagine the joy in reading Nabakov, in Russian, as an educated native speaker!
And much later he writes:
"But really these are irrelevant matters; I am not concerned with so-called "sex" at all."
One of my favorite passages in the book is how he describes how much he enjoyed fooling around while he was in the sanatorium. He makes Randle Patrick McMurphy of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" seem like a rank amateur:
"I discovered there was an endless source of robust enjoyment in trifling with psychiatrists: cunningly leading them on; never letting them see that you know all the tricks of the trade; inventing for them elaborate dreams, pure classics in style (which make them, the dream-extortionists, dream and wake up shrieking); teasing them with fake "primal scenes"; and never allowing them the slightest glimpse of one's real sexual predicament. By bribing a nurse I won access to some files and discovered, with glee, cards calling me "potentially homosexual" and "totally impotent." The sport was so excellent, its results - in my case - so ruddy that I stayed on for a whole month after I was quite well (sleeping admirably and eating like a schoolgirl). And then I added another week just for the pleasure of taking on a powerful newcomer, a displaced (and, surely, deranged) celebrity, known for his knack of making patients believe they had witnessed their own conception."
More funny ways to say the serious:
"I exchanged letters with these people, satisfying them I was housebroken, and spent a fantastic night on the train, imagining in all possible detail the enigmatic nymphet I would coach in French and fondle in Humbertish."
Nabakov as more verbal weapons at his disposal than an army, but when he wants a better one, he just makes it up! And then:
"...his house had just burned down - possibly, owing to the synchronous conflagration that had been raging all night in my veins."
It's very clear, that at least in Humbert's mind, no nymphet is a pure, innocent child. That is not what he is attracted to. His desires are more subtle, more nuanced:
"What drives me insane is the twofold nature of this nymphet - of every nymphet, perhaps; this mixture in my Lolita of tender dreamy childishness and a kind of eerie vulgarity, stemming from the snub-nosed cuteness of ads and magazine pictures, (...) and from very young harlots disguised as children in provincial brothels;"
Even a list of students at Lo's school is fair game for Nabakov's word play. Almost every one has a subtle or not so subtle double entendre for a name:
"Angel, Grace
Buck, Daniel
Fantasia, Stella
Flashman, Irving
Fox, George
Falter, Ted"
And on and on. (In the afterward, Nabakov claims this is one of his favorite parts of the book that he "pick(s) out for special delectation.")
Not every sentence is half a paragraph long. Some of his best are short:
"We hasten to alienate the very fates we intended to woo."
Again, one of the fun things is the way Nabakov makes up words:
"The stars that sparkled, and the cars that parkled..."
"...how I might eventually blackmail - no that is too strong a word - mauvemail big Haze into letting me..."
The way he describes the lack of a penetrative sex act is poetic:
"The conjurer had poured milk, molasses, foaming champagne into a young lady's new white purse; and lo, the purse was intact."
And describing his own drunkenness in the perfect lyrical sentence:
"The gin and Lolita were dancing in me, and I almost fell over the folding chairs that I attempted to dislodge."
His foreshadowing is blunt, which only adds to the humor, since it's already obvious this is not going to end well:
"A few more words about Mrs. Humbert while the going is good (a bad accident is to happen quite soon)."
"No man can bring about the perfect murder; chance, however, can do it."
He respects no one:
"...with Lady Bumble - or Sam Bumble, the Frozen Meat King, or a Hollywood harlot."
And more double entendre snuck in among his snobbishness:
"Palace Sentries, or Scarlet Guards, or Beaver Eaters, or whatever they are called."
In his madness, he does describe the pathetic lot of many men:
"When you decorate your home, I do not interfere with your schemes. When you decide - when you decide all kinds of matters, I may be in complete, or in partial, let us say, disagreement - but I say nothing. I ignore the particular. I cannot ignore the general. I love being bossed by you, but every game has its rules."
He readily admits his depraved behavior, in a deadpan, but hilarious way, by dropping in quick vignettes like this one:
"Finally, I did achieve an hour's slumber - from which I was aroused by gratuitous and horribly exhausting congress with a small hairy hermaphrodite, a total stranger."
His descriptions of the vast country of the United States, with its motor inns and barely-under-the-surface depravity are colorful:
"...all along our rout countless motor courts proclaimed their vacancy in neon lights, ready to accommodate salesmen, escaped convicts, impotents, family groups, as well as the most corrupt and vigorous couples."
His snobbish attitude:
"I needed a drink; but there was no barroom in that venerable place full of perspiring philistines and period objects."
He skewers religion and marriage in one fell swoop:
"There is nothing wrong, say both hemispheres, when a brute of forty, blessed by the local priest and bloated with drink, sheds his sweat-drenched finery and thrusts himself up to the hilt into his youthful bride."
He laughs at the ludicrous nature of the world:
"I derived a not exclusively economic kick from such roadside signs as TIMBER HOTEL, Children under 14 Free."
This sentence is an entire paragraph, and for readers, Mobius Loop of great writing:
"Now in perusing what follows, the reader should bear in mind not only the general circuit as adumbrated above, with its many sidetrips and tourist traps, secondary circles and skittish deviations, but also the fact that far from being an indolent partie de plaisir, our tour was a hard, twisted, teleological growth, whose sole raison d'etre (these French clichés are symptomatic) was to keep my companion in passable humor from kiss to kiss."
Nabakov is never blunt or crude when describing the sex act. Here is an elegant, pithy way he writes it:
"Venus came and went."
One of the best plays with words is when he is discussing Lo with the headmistress Pratt, and she keeps on using the wrong name for Mr. Humbert, and his Lolita:
"Mr. Humbird...Dolly...Dorothy Humbird...Dr. Humburg...Mr. Humberson...Dr. Hummer...Dorothy Hummerson"
His descriptions of others, stream of consciousness, with the ultimate insult being how terrible a man's language was:
"He always wore black, even his tie was black; he seldom bathed; his English was a burlesque. And, nonetheless, everybody considered him to be a supremely lovable, lovably freakish fellow!"
But he saves his best insults for Gaston, his real or imagined rival for Lo's attention:
"There he was, devoid of any talent whatsoever, a mediocre teacher, a worthless scholar, a glum repulsive fat old invert, highly contemptuous of the American way of life, triumphantly ignorant of the English language - there he was in priggish New England, crooned over by the old and caressed by the young- oh, having a grand time and fooling everybody; and here was I."
How do you read things like this without laughing out loud?
"Dolly has written a most obscene four-letter word which our Dr. Cutler tells me is low-Mexican for urinal..."
And:
"Should I marry Pratt and strangle her?"
And this crazy sentence, which shows his madness and depravity and brilliance at once:
"It may interest physiologists to learn, at this point, that I have the ability - a most singular case, I presume - of shedding torrents of tears throughout the other tempest."
Great descriptions, this of the American countryside:
"... the enchanted interspace slid on intact, mathematical, mirage-like, the viatic counterpart of a magic carpet."
And just plain silliness:
"We had breakfast in the township of Soda, pop. 1001."
The way he describes his terror at being caught, after it has faded:
"... there was a day or two of lovely release (I had been a fool, all was well, that discomfort was merely a trapped flatus)"
Who hasn't felt that way before- something that bothers you viscerally, fades in importance?
And finally he drops the inevitable punch line, as if he was waiting the entire novel to say it, when Lolita has escaped him:
"There was no Lo to behold."
Nabakov at one point finally breaks out in poetic verse, which is effortless for him, because all of his writing is so lyrical. And in his usual style, he uses a sentence to develop the Humbert character further:
"By psychoanalyzing this poem, I notice it is really a maniac's masterpiece."
He describes later Rita, his companion that he picked up "some depraved May evening between Montreal and New York" and says of her "She was so kind, was Rita, such a good sport, that I daresay she would have given herself to any pathetic creature or fallacy, an old broken tree or a bereaved porcupine, out of sheer chumminess and compassion."
And soon thereafter, one of my favorite sentences in the entire novel of great sentences:
"It is no the artistic aptitudes that are secondary sexual characters as some shams and shamans have said; it is the other way around: sex is but the ancilla of art."
His description here is perfect:
"...in a hideous hotel, the kind where they hold conventions and where labeled, fat pink men stagger around, all first names and business and booze..."
He sneaks some truths in:
"I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art."
He makes us laugh even with the silly, childish acts like this passage, in which he asks a dentist for a price quote:
"'No,' I said. `On second thoughts, I shall have it all done by Dr. Molnar. His price is higher, but he is of course a much better dentist than you.' I don't know if any of my readers will ever have a chance to say that. It is a delicious dream feeling."
Such silliness and even the "Dr. Molnar."
Only Nabakov can describe masturbation in such elegant terms:
"The house, being an old one, had more planned privacy than have modern glamour-boxes, where the bathroom, the only lockable locus, has to be used for the furtive needs of planned parenthood."
In his post-novel comments, Nabakov gives more clues on the novel, admitting that the forward by the fictional John Ray steals some of his credibility when discussing the novel from a distance. But he does tell us:
"I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction, and despite John Ray's assertion, Lolita has no moral in tow."
He tells us the "secret points, the subliminal coordinates by which the book is plotted- although I realize very clearly that these and other scenes will be skimmed over or not noticed..."
He finishes the novel on a high note, expressing the truth, only art endures, if it isn't written down it didn't happen:
"I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita."
Throughout this brilliant, perfect, lyrical novel, Nabakov alternates between lies, fantasies, funny stories and fabrications. But he does sometimes admit the truth, such as when he bluntly says:
"Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with."
Story-wise, the cold and calculated way Humbert Humbert goes about seducing 12-year-old Dolores is difficult to endure especially as the reader is privy to every manner of plan and execution. Of course as this is almost entirely from Humbert's perspective, the reader is only able to glean Lolita, his private name for her, and other characters from that perspective notwithstanding his own scrupulous attempt at objectivity. From this perspective we discover a Lolita in many ways a typical 12- year-old of the times yet with a beguiling precociousness. She's brash and bratty and not shy about her sexuality, burgeoning though it may be. There is Dolores' mother Charlotte, needy and in a hateful rivalry with her daughter for Humbert's affections. Humbert himself is erudite, superior and routinely disdainful of all who pass his way. Yet under the spell of his own longing and desire for Lolita, becomes the very entity he scorns.
What stands out and continues to draw me to this work is the depths of emotion Humbert subjects himself to albeit much of it through his obsession for Lolita. It made me question the idea of love and what it is supposed to mean. It's clear that Humbert's feelings for Lolita are profound but one could not but question whether this love is centered more on an ideal Lolita rather than the real life Dolores. His ongoing obsession with "nymphs" and "girl children" finally finds release in the ideal form, in many ways, of Dolores Haze. Ideal because she was a willing participant at least initially and fit the criteria of being a young girl, an ideal nymphet in that regard. Yet this nymphet turns out to also be impudent, petulant with banal tastes, not exactly a fantasy combination for the highbrow Humbert. Yet his declarations of love and devotion is always steadfast and much to his surprise goes on to extend past her "nymphage" years. At the end, I was left with the unsettling thought that perverted and unseemly though it may be perhaps it could be qualified as love. Not the not-so-common pure and selfless kind but the sullied and soiled kind where self-interest, manipulation and in Humbert's case ultimately murder is par for the course.
What is even more fascinating about this book is the twist taken by Nabalov with the character of Lolita. By taking the child abuse scenario in a different direction and not making her the frightened, quivering Little Red Riding Hood to Humbert's Big Bad Wolf. Nabokov still does a remarkable job of keeping her as a believable young girl, not totally innocent but clearly not grown-up either. He is skillful at interweaving her precociousness with an obvious emotional immaturity. At age 12 in the early 1950s, she is knowledgeable and experienced in the ways of sex but in a childishly oblivious way. She is aware of the concept of incest, breezily admits to having sex at camp with her and another girl taking turns with a teen-aged boy and is the one to initiate the first sexual contact with Humbert whom she assumes is clueless about this activity which she summarizes as being "rather fun" and "good for the complexion." She then has no compunction about needling him, calling him a "dirty old man" and slyly telling him that she's going to call the cops. During their travels, she has a lot of say in where they will eat, what they will do, where they will stay. Granted this more than likely stems from Humbert's desire to appease Lolita in Humbert's words "from kiss to kiss." But through out it can be sometimes difficult to discern where the balance of power really does fall. It is interesting though the fact that despite Dolores' growing ambivalence if not outright distaste for Humbert and his foppish ways she continues the sexual relationship without much fuss considering she has no problem heartily refusing other demands made by Humbert such as reading more books, despite his pleas and threats. Perhaps sex does not have significance for Dolores one way or the other. Perhaps she knows it's a powerful leverage with Humbert although it wasn't until later on that she appears to actually start using it as such and even then still in a limited manner. The fact that everything is pretty much related from Humbert's perspective had me at times, longing for a bit more insight into Dolores' own inner thoughts.
There really is a lot to this book and it would take another entire book to analyze it all. The subject of the story may be taboo but it is done in what I think is a very tasteful and non-offensive manner. It delves into so much more than a pedophile's lust for a young girl that it's hard to even know where to start. But it definitely got me thinking not just about the complexity of the human experience but the skill that it takes as a writer to express it in such an eloquent and exceptional way. As I got this as an audio-cassette, hearing Jeremy Iron and his way of bringing to life Nabokov's words allowed me a means of appreciating it all the more so. His ability to infuse the book with the sarcasm, humour, despair and vulnerability so prevalent in the book makes the writing that much more memorable.
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