- ISBN13: 9780679410430
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Lolita
Introduction by Martin Amis
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
Holly said
I thought I would like this book after reading the reviews, but I tried to start it and it went NOWHERE! Plus, it was really hard to read. And boring. Ugh. I don’t recommend this book.
Rating: 1 / 5
Rebekah Crabtree said
I bought this book with a great excitement for reading it. Once I got passed the first chapter, which took a fairly long time, I guessed that the rest of the book would be better considering it gets such great reviews. I was desperately wrong. The book is disgusting and never kept me interested. I watched the old movie as well to try to get into the book and that was very uninteresting as well. Overall, I don’t recommend this one.
Rating: 1 / 5
selffate said
you know, I’ve heard a lot of Nabokov, and consider reading Russian writers a bit of a hobby for me. So when I heard about him I was eager to give this book a try. Considering all the Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Gogol, and Chekov I read, I thought I’d be in for a treat.
Boy was I wrong.
Nabokov’s novel ‘Lolita’ about an old man who lusts (that’s right not loves LUSTS) after a pre-pubescent girl, is the most banal boring prose I’ve ever come across. Nabokov’s narration while sometimes creative just goes on… and on… and on.. plus he gives no insight into his characters at all most simply because they have no dialogue what so ever. Perhaps the only dialogue I seem to remember from this book, was the words “you rapped me”. So how can I feel for any of the characters in this book after that? huh? Would I want to identify with the main protoganist who just can’t stop thinking of his sick ways? I don’t think so.
I suppose many decades ago you could write a book like this and get noticed with the shock value, but if this book was released now, no-one would even pay attention to it, it would be passed off for what it is, toilet literature, and then be relegated to the garbage can.
I also realised Nabokov’s insights are completley uncomprensible in his literary approach. In some of his out of print lectures that I’ve read, he thinks Dostoevesky as a weak writer with the exception of perhaps “The Double”. As someone has already mentioned, there is more development and briliance in ONE PAGE of Crime and Punishment compared to this trash.
So instead of me wasting time on this book here are some real Russian authors and stories that you should read over this junk.
Dostoevesky -
Notes from Underground, The Idiot, Crime And Punishment, Demons, The Brothers Karamazov (these are masterpieces!)
Mikhail Bulgakov – The Master and Margarita
Turgenev -
First Love, Spring Torrents
Gogol – Dead Souls
Solyzheneitsen – One Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich
etc…
One star for some interesting wordplay, but otherwise don’t bother.
Rating: 1 / 5
muzakmaven said
I give a star for that mostly intelligent and somewhat humorous writing, because with this story line the author could’ve made the writing really ridiculous and/or over the top and sickeningly sweet.
Nonetheless, the story borderlines on sickeningly sweet, which makes this book all the more revolting. There is absolutely nothing beautiful, nothing loving, nothing caring and nothing sweet about a man who’s main attraction to this child is only her age. If it wasn’t for her age, he could care less about her, he wouldn’t have at the slightest an interest in her or trying to kill her mother to get close to her. Imagine that: a man so sick-minded that he wants to kill the child’s own mother so he can get close to her before she turns into an adult, so he can rape her all the time while she is still of a certain age to fill his criminal urges. It’s hard to have respect for this book or the author of it when all this book is trying to do is convince you that Humbert is genuine and this is true love and somehow this relationship should be seen as acceptable. That’s why we have laws on child rape: because there is no excuse good enough to justify it being good, and even if there was such an excuse, it doesn’t make the act itself good for the child. Any portrayal of child rape is inexcusable, just like any act of child rape gets is inexcusable in real life. Why else would so much time be spent on showing us how Humbert, the man with the weirdest name i’ve ever heard by the way, loves Lolita, if not to try to win people over so they’ll throw their morals and respect for the law out the window? If people can feel sympathetic for a child rapist and murderer in a book, who is to say they couldn’t for one in real life? When you put the book down, it’s not like you are returning from another planet where such crazy acts of “love” don’t occur and you can rest easily after reading such a tale. Keep in mind that you are reading a celebrated book on a rapist where on any given day, real rapes are occuring right next door to you among the family with young children next door. I really hope that all who finish reading this will follow-up on some books about how child abuse and sexual assault of women have perpetually been the most underreported crimes in the world. It will really help put LOLITA in perspective. The only reason so many people approve of this book is because it goes to such great lengths to make artistically written excuses that can appear impressive and clever on how this behavior should be acceptable. After all, what languages do psychopaths know besides the manipulative kind?
The book and movie Lolita has done a very unfortunate thing, it has done more for the personal justification and satisfaction of pedophiles that it has done for anything else. It has glamorized the obsessive mentality of the average pedophile, making their obsession appear normal and realistic, and has gone to extraordinary lengths to glamorize the isolated fantasy life the pedophile must live in order to avoid being caught penalized, making Humbert appear attractive because he lavishes Lolita with fantastical gifts in order to keep her part of that isolated detached lifestyle. Furthermore, the story has made the destruction of a wholesome and healthy parental and community unit look like a positive thing, like it’s benefting the child to live with a crazed wealthy sex offender. Humbert feels he is more sophisticated and smart than any other adult caretaker in Lolita’s life, and he tries to convince her that she should believe in him. She should listen to him over a doctor, a teacher, and so on. If some of you can read about a person like this, does that mean you would tolerate a person like this in your real life?
If some of these reviewers here are parents, or have children in their life, I would be absolutely astonished if you approved of this book. If you are a parent, I dare you to admit it if you approve of this book.
Regardless if the book itself a fiction, it was produced by a real person who had real thoughts on this matter, and people are deluded enough to believe that a book so popular as this one indicates that society must have acccepted this type of relationship between a mere neglected child and a self-centered jerk of an adult who only cares about his own interests.
This relationship, regardles of what form it is depicted in, fiction or nonfiction, is totally unacceptable and always will be. Just because it’s a fictional account should not mean that people need to change their attitudes towards this and be accepting because it’s “art.” Art is part of real life too, and should be treated the same way you’d treat any real life event.
To the people who believe we should believe that Humbert admitted he is wrong and is not a pedophile because he can profess love to Lolita as an adult –why do you expect readers to believe him? Lolita doesn’t even believe him when he comes to her! She thinks he is pathetic, which he is. There is no way we could believe him because he is such a disrespectful man and showed no respect for any woman in this book, only the desire to control them. He was merely feeling lonely, and that loneliness was being portrayed as love. He was feeling unlovable and wanted to be loved by her because no one else was going to love him, since anytime he wants to be loved by someone he has to force them into it. He killed fellow pedo-psycho Quilty out of rage, not guilt. He does not believe Quilty’s interest in raping children is wrong. He believed his interest in Lolita was wrong, and was jealous.
There is not one single positive trait about Humbert, contrary to readers thinking this one of killing Quilty was. So he killed Quilty, and now Quilty can rape no more. That doesn’t mean Humbert won’t continue raping. And more importantly, it should remind readers that if it wasn’t for him killing Quilty, Humbert would of never been caught for anything at all. No one would’ve known he had raped Lo countless times. He would’ve walked free. That is to me the most upsetting instance in this novel: the fact that Humbert has been walking free his whole entire life and never once getting caught for his crimes against children, and never being held accountable for them even after he gets caught due to Quilty. I just can’t get over some of you think Humbert being caught somehow puts a positive twist on this story, when he didn’t even get caught for the right crime! The murder of Quilty, a grown man and a serial rapist himself who had every chance to defend himself from attacks, pales in comparison to the numerous accounts of rape to a mere defenseless child. Who in their right might would disagree with me there? Remember, he said his first love was the one who died, and he was really just looking for a replacement of her –Lolita being that. And now he could be off to find a replacement for Lolita. So his pattern merely continues. Once the girl leaves him or dies, he finds a new child to replace her, convincing himself he is just doing this out of undying love for the one is no longer there, instead of realizing he is just a pedophile and this is what people with that problem do: keep finding new kids to abuse after the kids become adults.
This book had a really sick beginning and an even sicker end. No one wins, everyone comes out hurt, including the most vulnerable ones: the women and children. All because of some corrupt, manipulative men.
Rating: 1 / 5
Sean Patrick Murphy said
1.) I’m bored 2.) He uses too many allusions to other novels, so that if you’re not well read, this book makes no sense. 3.) Most American readers are not fluent in French, so to have conversations or interjections in French with no translation, is plain dumb. 4.) Did I mention I was bored? 5.) As with another reviewer, I agree, he uses a lot of huge words that just slow a person down. And it’s not for theatrics either, it’s just huge words mid-sentence when describing something simple. Nothing in the sense of imagery is gained. 6.) Also, to sum it up, it’s a story about a pedophile, whether you interpret it as something else or not, is up to you, but there’s the main plot for you. I would not reccomend this book to any of my friends.
Rating: 1 / 5