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Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
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Member recommendations

  1. heidijane recommends The Pornographer of Vienna by Lewis Crofts
  2. heidialice recommends Memories of my Melancholy Whores by Gabriel García Márquez, "Possibly too obvious of a recommendation? Very different takes on this central theme...."
  3. roby72 recommends The Lover by Marguerite Duras
  4. rcc recommends Belinda by Anne Rice, "IF you're "shocked" by Nabokov's Lolita, you surely should read Belinda. It takes off where Lolita ends. What I mean to say is that Anne Rice showed herself (see more) to be much more adpet - and daring - at writing about this "taboo" concerning the sexual adventures of a very young girl. Also, Belinda is so much more her "own woman" than Lolita."
  5. zembla recommends The Basic Eight by Daniel Handler, "Handler is a confessed 'Nabokov freak,' as he said when I saw him at a reading two years ago. He absorbs the influence beautifully."
  6. edwinbcn recommends The North China Lover by Marguerite Duras, "Another story of a man with a passion for a young girl."
  7. rosenrot recommends Belinda by Anne Rice
  8. Queenofcups recommends The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch, "I heard many echoes of Lolita in reading The Black Prince. Anyone else find this to be the case?"
  9. betterthanchocolate recommends Acts of Love: Ancient Greek Poetry from Aphrodite's Garden (Modern Library) by George Economou ed., "Acts of love, ecstatic, outrageous, profane."
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English (162)  Dutch (5)  French (1)  Italian (1)  Portuguese (1)  All languages (170)
Showing 1-5 of 162 (next | show all)
A book that has an absolutely amazing control of pace and character development. Very, very good. Very disturbing
  JonathanGorman | Oct 31, 2009 |
I can't believe Nabokov's mastery of the English language, but I'm grateful for it. Reminded me a bit of reading Poe's stories written by insane men. ( )
  alissamarie | Oct 25, 2009 |
I can't believe Nabokov's mastery of the English language, but I'm grateful for it. Reminded me a bit of reading Poe's stories written by insane men. ( )
  alissamarie | Oct 25, 2009 |
I can't believe Nabokov's mastery of the English language, but I'm grateful for it. Reminded me a bit of reading Poe's stories written by insane men. ( )
  alissamarie | Oct 25, 2009 |
As controversial as this book is, I instantly fell in love with it after the first couple of pages. Even though Humbert is wrong with his adoration of Lolita (according to most people), towards the end I found myself feeling intense sympathy for him. Nabokov has a way with writing with such sexual intensity that sometimes we barely notice that we are being drawn in even more. From what I have read of him, he likes to use that technique in almost all of his works. The movie was quite an interesting one to watch, especially after having read the book. ( )
  sealford | Oct 23, 2009 |
Showing 1-5 of 162 (next | show all)
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.
added by Shortride | editTime (Sep 1, 1958)
 
"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.
 
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Series (with order)
Canonical Title
Original publication date
People/Characters
Important places
Important events
Awards and honors
Epigraph
Dedication
To Véra
First words
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 palette to tap, at three, on the teeth.
Quotations
Last words
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
Disambiguation notice
Please do not combine Lolita with The Annotated Lolita.
Publisher's editors
Blurbers

References to this work on external resources.

Wikipedia in English (3)

Lolita

Lolita (term)

Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2008 January 27

Book description
Awe and exhilaration - along with heartbreak and mordant wit - abound in Lotlita, Vladimir 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 hyper civilized 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.

Amazon.com (ISBN 0679723161, Paperback)

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

(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:09 -0400)

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