Beautiful writing confronts crude subject matter--A masterpiece

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	• Lolita Vladimir Nabokov Vintage, 1989 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 449 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Beautiful writing confronts crude subject matter--A masterpiece

Lolita is a beautifully-written book about a man and his sexual relationship with a young girl. Nabokov's beautiful writing contrasts sharply with the book's crude subject matter. This contrast is what makes this book brilliant, in my opinion.

Upends your preconceptions and prejudices

This is a book that must be read with an open mind. If you read it before judging its controversial contents, it will be sure to expand your mind and make you think about subjects in a whole new light. After I read this book, I could not stop thinking about it, and the moral questions is brought up. Most of all, it made me think: what is love? In the middle of the book, I was convinced that Humbert Humbert was a despicable monster who did not love Dolores; by the end of the book, I was less convinced.

The book was also enjoyable for the writing style; although the overuse of French annoyed me, it was fun to figure out what the literary allusions meant.

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The Most Beautiful Novel Ever Written

An account of pathological love so tender that it has no rival in literature. A dreamlike plot and dream-exquisite prose: perfection.

Which book did you read?

In writing `Lolita', Vladimir Nabokov had chosen a very difficult topic to demonstrate his writing prowess.

Why? Because many - if not most - readers have formed views about the subject matter and the characters before they have read the book. My review is not of the content but of the writing and the ambiguity of language.

Words are used to both summarise facts and to create fiction. Differentiating the two is not always easy, especially if the subject matter is distasteful. Our own views colour our relationship with the book, but should they also influence our assessment of literary worth?

Much of the journey with `Lolita' is undertaken from within the mind of Humbert Humbert, a paedophile, and his fixation on the eponymous Lolita. This is a book which, in my view, cannot be effectively translated into a movie. It is a book where the power of language and the images and reactions created at an individual level have the most impact. We are usually in Humbert's mind and, for me. that is not a comfortable space to occupy. And yet amidst Humbert's scattered, fixated thoughts and cunning but ultimately doomed plans are glimpses of beauty. The butterfly references can be read on a number of different levels: I choose to see the symbolism of transient but elusive beauty.

So what is it about `Lolita' that makes it worth reading? Simply, the power and beauty of Nabokov's writing. But that particular beauty depends upon which book you choose to read.

I have read this book twice in 40 years. Each time, I have formed different views. This book is not a paean to paedophilia: it is an illumination of the labyrinths of the human mind.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

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A road movie of the mind

Praise be to Graham Greene, who was not only an interesting novelist (e.g. The Quiet American), but he also has the merit of saving Nabokov's Lolita from obscurity. When the book found no publisher in the US, it was first brought out by a shady Parisian company that specialized in erotic books in the English language. That was a tourist attraction in Paris. For reasons unknown to me (why would Greene even know the series? he had other oddities about his character), Greene took notice of the book and named it as one of the best books of the year in a magazine article in the UK. That was the beginning of the road to fame and riches for Nabokov, including an Oscar winning, but lousy movie.
I admit I have not read Lolita recently, but I did at least twice some time ago, and I read his movie script in the LoA volume. Why do I review it now? Simply because J. talked me into it. Women can be persistent.
J did not like Lolita because she saw it as pedophile porno. I am aware that one can read the book that way. Actually most of the first buyers must have been looking for that, but most of them were badly disappointed.
Sure, the book is about a pedophile, but Nabokov never told us a straightforward story. One must be prepared to encounter mystifications and traps and double meanings.
Lolita's main text body is the alleged memoir of a man who has died in jail, where he was held for murder. We learn only late into the story who the victim was. Oddly, he was not in jail for rape and kidnapping, which he freely admits to in his text.
The hero is a decadent middle aged European of a cultured background. He has come to New England as a professor for literature. He is a pedophile, who can only 'love' pre-puberty girls. Nabokov's original title for the book was Kingdom by the Sea after E.A.Poe's poem. Humbert Humbert (the name should tell us that we can't expect clear sailing on meanings) settles down and meets a woman with the kind of daughter that he fancies. He marries her to get at the child. The woman dies (don't necessarily believe the version of her death that HH tells us), he kidnaps the girl Dolores, rapes her, and goes on the road with her, moving from place to place all over the US, settling here and there briefly, always running away before attachments can be formed. And still there comes a time when Lolita runs away from captivity.
What is the book about? It is also a little bit about pedophilia, sure, but it is mainly about an immigrant's experience of the US. Nabokov wrote about his own observations with his New England university environment, and to a large extent he wrote about his long car trips across the US on his butterfly hunts. The places where HH stays with Lolita are Nab's own stations, where he stayed with his wife, who drove the car.
HH is not a man who can be believed. He twists his tale to his liking, and even his admissions of wrongdoings with the girl have a strong smell of self-saving euphemism. The man is a self-centered egomaniac.
Lolita is not my favorite Nab-book, actually, but it is well worth reading more than once.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

Awe and exhiliration--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.

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