Product Description

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: #2984 in Books
• Published on: 1998-04-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
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 post-war 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

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

love, yes, but self love
This is one of the finest novels, and undoubtedly the best joke, in the English language. Humbert inspires respect, and even awe, in the societies in which he's lived. The type of reader who can pick his way through the labyrinthine prose automatically identifies with Humbert's literary accomplishment. Yet the book is about banal and sordid self-obsession. Humbert analyzes and reanalyzes his life and lusts. He laughs at his therapists yet 'blames' his childhood misfortune for his predilection for nymphets. His failure to escape from the monster he's made himself has disastrous consequences for a young girl, struggling to come to terms with her own sexuality under difficult circumstances. This book tells us a lot about love, but only because one can't help catching distorted glimpses of oneself in the mind of the monster. The combination of darkly humorous perception and profound sincerity is terrifying.

Darkly sensuous and disturbingly beautiful
Lolita is in many ways an extraordinary book. Not only in its choice of subject matter which is perhaps more controversial today then it was in the 1950s but also in the style of writing. It is perhaps the best written book that I have ever read. Nabokov's writing style has a richness that is even more remarkable given that it is not his native tongue. The expert use of allusion, extended metaphor and generously evocative imagery makes this a book to savour slowly and one that is closer at times to poetry than prose.

But what a poem. Humbert Humbert is perhaps the very model of the antihero but as he is also the narrator everything is seen through the prism of his own monstrous and predatory lusts. Lolita herself, as Humbert admits, remains something of an enigma throughout. The narrator is unable to see her as an individual and she is portrayed as the archetypal 'nymphet,' who serves merely to serve his own needs. Any deviation from this role is regarded as betrayal. But then the book is entitled Lolita not Delores Hayes and 'Lolita' is no more than the perfect nymphet lurking inside Humbert's diseased brain never a girl of blood and flesh.

Humbert does not in fact offer much in the way of self justification beyond the occasional admission of insanity and his sickening claims to truly love the girl. He also seems to grow in awareness of his perversion as the novel goes on but never seems to regret it. He starts by offering various justifications of child brides from history but his final allusion is to Sade's Justine which is surely an admission of guilt. But the prose is so tender and so darkly comic that all this is repeatedly obscured and Nabokov manages to win you a twisted sympathy for his protagonist even, almost, for his predicament. So much of it seems so reasonable the way Humbert tells it.

This is largely because the way the feelings and desires of little Delores herself are so obscured by Humbert's dark longings. This of course serves to make it all the more poignant on the odd occasion that they do surface. When Humbert is in his first rapture of paradise after possessing young Lolita he describes his joy to search an extent and with such tenderness that the reader could be forgiving for believing Lolita welcomed his advances. Until he lets drop in a single sentence that she cries herself to sleep every single night.

A rich though black humour also punctuates the novel for all that it goes on to breed horror. The earlier sections especially those concerning his first wife, her Tsarist lover and Humbert's Arctic expeditions are quite hilarious. The book also deals with a definite sense of place and of being out of place. Humbert,, like Nabokov,, is a European new to the New World and though his depiction of America is not always flattering it is often insightful. No nostalgia is ever shown for 'rotting Europe' however even if he feels it gives him a superiority over the banal pretensions of his new countrymen. Despite his other predilections Humbert is a huge intellectual snob and his writing will probably appeal most to those who feel themselves akin to him in this respect, if no other.

Lolita is a dark and engrossing masterpiece and is in many ways more beautiful then it has any right to be. There is nothing pornographic or prurient about it but it does raise some quite complicated emotions in the reader. It should rightly be considered a classic but is rightly controversial and is quite simply one of the most astonishing things I have ever read. Much as I deplore censorship there is certainly something playfully dangerous about Lolita and it should only be recommended to the more sophisticated reader.

Phenomenal
The sinister, sensuous, enigmatic, magical, disturbing, breathtaking ‘Lolita’… my all-time favourite book. How many times have I re-read it? Don’t ask. I’ve lost count.

‘Lolita’ has to be one of the very few books that I have come across in my life that has a truly haunting quality. It grips you from the very first words and will not let go until long after you've finished reading it… That is, if you ever dare put it away (‘Lolita’ is a permanent resident of my bedside cabinet). There are so many levels to this novel and so many reasons why it will put you under its spell. Nabokov’s virtuoso command of English language is probably what did it for me when I read it for the first time (am I the only one who finds it hard to believe the author is not a native English speaker?!). I’ve given up trying to analyse this book; instead, I just let my mind drift along the mesmerizing flow of words…

I implore you to cast aside your prejudice and keep an open mind about ‘Lolita’. Forget all you might have heard about it and find out for yourself! This is definitely not a book about paedophilia and sexual perversion; nor does it justify it or make it look attractive. The main character’s obsession is just a backdrop for exploring the darker areas of human nature where no one had dared go before, in a way that no one had done before. You will savour it like a glass of exquisite red wine and will be desperate to make the last drops last when nearing the end. So make yourself comfortable, leave your phone off the hook and let its dark magic do its work…