Not Nabakov’s best work, IMHO. That would be “The Defense”, greatest novel ever written about chess (and it wasn’t really even about chess ;-) ) .
Absolutely a brilliant book and I agree.
Glad to see I’m in before the knee-jerk reactionaries who will post about how depraved the book is, but probably haven’t read it.
62 by my math. No?
Only PBS could generate this much gas over such a trivial matter.
I am not responding to this thread.
I've always told people this: No writer writes more beautifully about nothing of real consequence than Nabokov.
A story of pedophilia is not much to bag about.
Interesting. Having never read it, I never realized what the novel was really about. I’ll have to add it to my list.
It's a great work about an incredibly uncomfortable subject.
i think lolita is a creepy, dreadful book. i hated the writing and i still
feel nabokov wrote it because he was at least a latent pedophile.
i’m a fan of joyce, austen, proust, waugh, twain, flaubert, etc., so i am
not unlettered. but i really did not catch the beauty of the book.
i must admit, the opening sequence of the kubrick movie, with james
mason going after peter sellers is highly entertaining. but rest of
the movie misses point of the book.
WIFE-O-BUCKHEAD
It has a place on the shelf with Gravity's Rainbow, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Absalom! Absalom! and a hundred or so others.
Your namesake wasn't too shabby either. He wrote more in twenty pages than most "novelists" write in their entire body of work.
A brilliant work, but I do think that one of Nabokov's literary tenets was called into question within its pages, namely that a novel need not contain a character with whom the reader empathizes. One spends the entire time attempting to empathize with Humbert and only in that attempt experiences the full force of the dissolution of his personality. He is a classically tragic character in a very funny novel. Part of the critical ambivalence in assessing his character is, I think, a reaction on the part of the reader to this more or less hopeless attempt to empathize with a most unempathetic fellow.
Plainly Humbert is not in love with Dolly at first, but with some idealized projection - of what, purity? Innocence? - that isn't at all like the girl she turns out to be. And yet Nabokov convinces us that Humbert does, in fact, succeed in loving the real person in the end, and one of the ironies of this supremely ironic treatment is that it is the genuine love that kills him.
Dolly turns out to be, to absolutely no one's surprise except that of Humbert himself, a crass, manipulative adolescent not beneath playing Humbert like a cheap violin. It is ridiculous - without Nabokov's literary brilliance these two unlikable characters would populate a sordid little melodrama by now forgotten altogether. But it isn't forgotten at all, and despite my every intention not to I do like them, just a little. An author good enough to pull that one off has my complete admiration.