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Loading... Lolita (1955)by Vladimir Nabokov
I read this book the first time in my late teens and was absolutely horrified. Since then I have reread the story several times and every time I am astonished anew, also this time I listened to the unabridged audiobook version narrated by Jeremy Irons who did a marvelous job at reading this story. French academic and literary scholar Humbert Humbert comes to America to renew his life after his divorce in France and a prolonged stay in a psychiatric hospital. Soon he meets Dolores Haze the 11 year old daughter of his new landlady and widow Mrs. Haze. Dolores his LOLITA – LO-LEE-TA. “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.” So what is it what makes a book about a pedophile so fascinating? In an almost perfect way, Nabokov describes the pedophile Humbert Humbert, without judgment, without representing the sex offender as a bad person, and alone for this reason the story is so impressive. Here, it is the style which is so clearly manipulative and ironic. The plot is predictable, and Nabokov succeeds again and again to outline detailed possible actions and then allow them to collapse into themselves. We feel the love of Humbert towards his Lolita – without him never acknowledging the GIRL Dolores – and we quickly recognize the depths such illness brings with it. One is constantly torn between disgust and comprehension, between pity and hatred. On top of that Humbert is a smart storyteller, who often tries to manipulate the reader with incredible questionable arguments; trying to justify his acts and desires. The further the story moves along, the more he loses the outlook on reality and becomes more and more victim to paranoia. We do not just see Humbert’s obsessive and insatiable lust for the young Lolita, but we also see what life with him does to her, how she cries at night, how she learns to manipulate him to achieve her own ends, how she grows to hate him more and more. “She considered me as if grasping all at once the incredible -- and somehow tedious, confusing and unnecessary -- fact that the distant, elegant, slender, forty-year-old valetudinarian in velvet coat sitting beside her had known and adored every pore and follicle of her pubescent body. In her washed-out gray eyes, strangely spectacled, our poor romance was for a moment reflected, pondered upon, and dismissed like a dull party, like a rainy picnic to which only the dullest bores had come, like a humdrum exercise, like a bit of dry mud caking her childhood.” We are shown a story of decadence and decline, the beautiful ugliness of corruption presented with a narrator who manages to persuade us to sympathize with him from time to time, even so that he is a ruthless and despicable villain. Nabokov’s use of language and translation of a difficult topic into literature – well, absolutely amazing! Beautiful, dark, twisted, funny, haunting, lovely, relentlessly engaging, and thoroughly uncomfortable. Lolita, the modern classic, is infamous enough to avert any stereotype and was definitely a wrong choice for me at this early stage of my “journey to classics”. The content is pathetic, obscene enough to be digested by anyone. Though, as I read a few more of these lately, it doesn’t took much time to conclude that “No modern fiction is complete without these explicit scenes described in lengths greater than actually required”. Anyhow,the scintillating flow of the language by Nabokov is awe-striking. Such a good control over English, despite Russian being his vernacular definitely demands respect.Strength of the eloquence and the lively use of imagery at times become subtle enough to comprehend. The plot is a chase of the main character “Lolita” and his step father all across the east just for the sake of their survival. Analyzing it holistically, the only statement that strikes me is that it is a “funny serious thriller” to be read once, criticized twice and never in one’s lifetime recommended to anyone. Commendation for the elusive piece of literature is also enough to compete with the renunciation it has faced lately I won't rate this book. It is brilliantly written, but I hated it. I had totally wrong ideas about this book when I started reading - some vague notion, that it is a story about a forbidden love, piquant because of the girl's age, but an amour fou, not quite right, but love nonetheless. I only saw some short scenes of the movie with Jeremy Irons. Boy, was I wrong. In reality this is the memoirs of a pedophiliac who rapes/abuses his 12 year old step daughter. She is not the first child he molests and there is no love involved as I understand it. I understand also that it was the author's intent to show the vileness of the protagonist's thoughts, feelings and behaviours, but the facts that it was 1st person POV made it so very hard to bear. Pages after pages of justification of his behaviour, recrimination towards the victim, disgusting thoughts about sexual acts with children and so on. No easy or recreational read, that's for sure. A brilliant book, also for sure.
Following Nabokov's earlier excellent, offbeat novels, Lolita should give his name its true dimensions and expose a wider U.S. public to his special gift—which is to deal with life as if it were a thing created by a mad poet on a spring night. "Lolita" is a small masterpiece, an almost perfect comic novel, a rare thing in these days when we have lost sight of the purgative and pleasurable effects of comedy and when tragedy has become the small and poverty-stricken province of southern effetes and New England housewives... Far from celebrating perversion, this novel somehow communicates the utter hopelessness and bitterness of it. And not the least through the irony of Humbert Humbert's mixture of blindness and lucid vision about his obsession. He is an intelligent and gifted man but he is also a disabled man and his cleverness, his puns, his play on words, his ability to fly in the depths does not in the end save him. "Lolita," then, is undeniably news in the world of books. Unfortunately, it is bad news. There are two equally serious reasons why it isn't worth any adult reader's attention. The first is that it is dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion. The second is that it is repulsive. This is still one of the funniest and one of the saddest books that will be published this year. As for its pornographic content, I can think of few volumes more likely to quench the flames of lust than this exact and immediate description of its consequences. That a book like this could be written- published here sold, presumably over the counters, leaves one questioning the ethical and moral standards. I don't agree that it has a titillating fascination that will lead any reader entry- as some feel. I do think there is a place for the exploration of abnormalities, that does not lie in the public domain. Any librarian surely will question this for anything but the closed shelves. Any bookseller should be very sure that he knows in advance that he is selling very literate pornography. Is contained inNabokov: Novels 1955-1962: Lolita / Pnin / Pale Fire (Library of America) by Vladimir Nabokov Five novels (Collins collector's choice) by Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov Has the adaptation
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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
(retrieved from Amazon Wed, 02 Jan 2013 09:29:17 -0500)
The most controversial classic novel of the 20th century, Lolita tells the story of Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged man who is aroused to erotic desire only by a young girl. Awe and exhilaration--along with heartbreak and mordant wit--abound in Lolita, Nabokov's most famous and controversial novel, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion 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.… (more)
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Three editions of this book were published by Audible.com.
Penguin AustraliaSix editions of this book were published by Penguin Australia.
Editions: 014102349X, 014118504X, 0141037431, 024195164X, 0241953243, 0141197013
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Lolita is likely one of the most controversial stories in 20th century literature to date. Lolita has been coined as a 'love story' and even 'erotic'. In all honesty, this was simply Humbert attempting to convince himself (and others) that his actions were normal and completely justified. By the end pages, I could honestly say that Humbert believed wholeheartedly he truly loved Lolita, that he always had the best of intentions for her and that he was a good father to her. His version of love was of course far from normal and was quite sick and twisted indeed but because we're only seeing this story from his point of view it's obviously a biased and glamorized interpretation.
'We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.'
But to me that was the most amazing part of this story. When you really think about this story as a whole, you know what he did was wrong, you know that he changed that 12 year-old girl irrevocably and you can almost despise him for the fact that he blamed her for seducing him initially. However, despite all that, I know I'm not the only reader that struggled to not feel at least a slight bit of sympathy for him. And that's the true brilliance of it.
'And the rest is rust and stardust.'
Lolita is a truly remarkably written story that was undoubtedly shocking after its initial publication in 1955. I can't help but find it severely unlikely though that it would have ever been published during this day and age. (