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Loading... Lolita (original 1955; edition 1989)by Vladimir Nabokov (Author)
Work InformationLolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
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Most good reviews for this novel tend to say that it manages to make you like and support the pedophile protagonist. And indeed, it is a most well made trap, from beginning to end, one which I really wanted to fall into for the sake of drama, but I really didn't. It becomes really sad in the end, and I do feel pity for him, and I times I did find Lolita(the girl, not the book) really annoying, but the best parts of the book, for me at least, are those in which our pedophile suffers in one way or another, mostly in the two opposites parts of the narrative. That's my big grudge, that the point seems for me to like a character but instead I really like watching him suffer. In general, pretty good but not the high-caliber classic many say it is. ( ) I think what the scariest thing about this book is not what actually happens in it (which is thankfully fictional), but what it reveals about ourselves. We, the readers, are the real jury here, with the power of either condemning or acquitting Humbert ditto. But Humbty-Dumbty is so suave and such a smooth operator that he spellbinds us into his little game of sensational excuses and slippery lies. I'm ashamed to admit at times I actually found myself sympathizing with old wily Humblepie. Like a demon he tempts us with poisoned candy apples and Turkish delights and we gormandize them ravenously, and we only realize what we've done once it's too late. What a exceptional, ghastly book. Too creepy to be one of the top 100 books of the twentieth century. I view it as smut masquerading as literature. It was hard to keep reading a book entirely devoted to justifying pederasty. (regardless of the "beautiful" writing ) July 2020 I gained more insight to the novel's use of language and manipulation by listening to a lecture by Professor Amy Hungerford, through Open Yale (https://oyc.yale.edu/english/engl-291/lecture-5). It is still creepy and spine tingling. I think that was Nabokov's aim. March 2021 Another resource that explores the novel and its misrepresentation popular culture, listen to Lolita podcast on iHeart radio. Yeah, I think you've likely heard of Lolita. It's astonishing however how this novel seems to get characterized, in blurbs such as the one here on Goodreads. The "freedom and sophistication" in the telling of "a love story almost shocking in its beauty and tenderness", and "most of all, it is a meditation on love". How different and much less appealing the novel would seem I guess if advertised as a story told from inside the head of a child rapist. That would be irresponsible commercial blurbing. It's an excellent novel, but a love story it is not. The protagonist is written in a way that certainly causes Nabokov controversy, because the character is writing this story to the reader from his prison cell and wants the reader to, yes, view it as a doomed love story. But that's what the character is doing, not what Nabokov is doing. Nabokov is tricky, I mean this is the 13th novel of his that I've read now, I know he's tricky and an extremely erudite writer, but still, this should be apparent. Humbert tells us from the start of his journey with Lolita that he won her compliance by threatening her with what would become of her as an orphan child if she tries to escape him. He writes of withholding breakfast from her until she "performs her morning duties". He writes of "her sobs in the night - every night, every night - the moment I feigned sleep." Humbert himself, despite his other self-delusions, seems pretty clear that the "love" in this situation is entirely one-sided, it's just that though he makes performative nods in his telling of the story to feeling guilt on occasion, he's entirely self-centered. He feels love, therefore this is a love story. The reader should obviously know better. It's not a love story, it's a story from the point of view of a child rapist.
Haven’t we been conditioned to feel that Lolita is sui generis, a black sheep, a bit of tasteful, indeed ‘beautiful’ erotica, and that Nabokov himself, with this particular novel, somehow got ‘carried away’? Great writers, however, never get carried away. Even pretty average writers never get carried away. People who write one novel and then go back to journalism or accountancy (‘Louder, bitch!’) – they get carried away. Lolita is more austere than rapturous, as all writing is; and I have come to see it, with increasing awe, as exactly the kind of novel that its predecessors are pointing towards... At one point, comparing himself to Joyce, Nabokov said: ‘my English is patball to [his] champion game’. At another, he tabulated the rambling rumbles of Don Quixote as a tennis match (the Don taking it in four hard sets). And we all remember Lolita on the court, her form ‘excellent to superb’, according to her schoolmistress, but her grace ‘so sterile’, according to Humbert, ‘that she could not even win from panting me and my old fashioned lifting drive’. Now, although of course Joyce and Nabokov never met in competition, it seems to me that Nabokov was the more ‘complete’ player. Joyce appeared to be cruising about on all surfaces at once, and maddeningly indulged his trick shots on high-pressure points – his drop smash, his sidespun half-volley lob. Nabokov just went out there and did the business, all litheness, power and touch. Losing early in the French (say), Joyce would be off playing exhibitions in Casablanca with various arthritic legends, and working on his inside-out between-the-legs forehand dink; whereas Nabokov and his entourage would quit the rusty dust of Roland Garros for somewhere like Hull or Nailsea, to prepare for Wimbledon on our spurned and sodden grass. Massive, unflagging, moral, exqusitely shaped, enormously vital, enormously funny - Lolita iscertain of a permanent place on the very highest shelf of the world's didactic literature. Above all Lolita seems to me 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. A masterpiece of narrative, an incredibly penetrating psychoanalytical study and brilliantly descriptive. It has been called the most depressing and most entertaining book ever written. Vladimir Nabokov is obviously influenced by James Joyce and T.S. Eliot - he can write a pastiche of T.S. Eliot as easily as scratching his back. . . . The novel is also a nightmare of cunning and persecution mania and strikes the strangest three-fold chord of passion, desperate humour and dramatic irony. Belongs to Publisher SeriesIs contained inHas the adaptationHas as a studyHas as a commentary on the textHas as a student's study guideAwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)When it was published in 1955, "Lolita" immediately became a cause célèbre because of the freedom and sophistication with which it handled the unusual erotic predilections of its protagonist. But Vladimir Nabokov's wise, ironic, elegant masterpiece owes its stature as one of the twentieth century's novels of record not to the controversy its material aroused but to its author's use of that material to tell a love story almost shocking in its beauty and tenderness. Awe and exhilaration-along with heartbreak and mordant wit-abound in this account 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, but most of all, it is a meditation on love-love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.With an Introduction by Martin Amis "From the Hardcover edition." No library descriptions found.
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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