Lolita (Crest Giant, d338) Mass Market Paperback – January 1, 1959

As I grow old and older, I ask myself all too often why I bother? Haven't I eaten enough toast? Haven't I bent over to tie enough shoes? Then I come across an author like Vladimir Nabokov and a book like *Lolita,* an author and a book that, although Ive read thousands and thousands of books in my time, I somehow never read before. Maybe it was his name, or fame, or the fact that a movie was made of his most famous novel. There are books that you feel you've already read, even though you havent, just because they are so famous, or infamous. This is one of those books. But if you havent read it and think you know what its all about, youre wrong, utterly and 100% wrong, and youre missing one of the great joys of a reader's life: the prose of Vladimir Nabokov.This book is fiendishly good. It undermines everything we "ought" to feel, then it makes us feel it; finally it pulls the rug out from under us altogether. Nabokov's narrator, Humbert Humbert, is a child molestor, that's what we'd call him in the bald and unfancy terminology of today. He's a sick, abusive, predatory[...]. Yet it's his voice that entertains us throughout *Lolita,* and entertains us it does. Humbert is urbane, intelligent, self-deprecating, cynical, and laugh-out-loud funny. He's a poet and a romantic. He's the English professor we all wish we had. He knows that what he's doing is wrong. He's the first to admit it. He's the first to admit everything, including that he can't help himself. He is, you see, in love, hopelessly and authentically and obsessively in love. The problem is that she's [....]Now the truly devilish thing about *Lolita* is that of all the characters in the novel, including even Lolita herself, its Humbert that draws our "sympathy," so to speak. Sympathy for the devil, it is, in spite of ourselves, in the sense that we see the world most vividly from his point-of-view, in the sense that he seems more alive than anyone else in the novel, more perceptive, more uncompromisingly self-honest, more human and, in the end, the most tragic of all the characters. He's a man with an indelible flaw, he's a man in love, no matter how misguided, no matter how criminal, and its Nabokov's "evil" genius to get us to accept Humbert Humbert as our sick hero, man who we might send to prison for fifty years, but who we couldn't help feeling more than a twinge of regret having to do so.One would be hard-pressed to come up with a prose-stylist whose voice is smoother, more casually erudite, and more post-contemporary than Nabokov...and this in a novel that is already half-a-century old! An amazing text from an author who has after 300 pages of pure reading bliss, shot instantaneously to the top of my favorite author's list, *Lolita* is a book I should have read a hundred years ago, but instead sat wasting my time in graduate literature courses! What are they teaching in schools anyway? I'm ordering up some more Nabokov novels immediately, if not sooner. You should too.

I'm straight, but oh Lord, but if Nabokov were to pen a seduction for Irons to read to me, I don't know what I'd do.Imagine the rich, honey-sweet tones of Jeremy Irons and the incredible prose of Vladimir Nabokov, together in a deliciously creamy mix. Irons is the perfect Hum - sad, manic, arrogant, and humorous. He handles the multiple voices and language shifts without a whimper or a pause.This is awesome stuff. This is the art of acting. This is perfect prose.Mouth-watering.

There were many incorrect preconceived notions I had about this novel, that were dispelled once I read it. The book is centered around a startling contradiction: A monster that worships purity. The book unfolds around this theme with some of the most beautiful prose you will ever read.

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta . . . standing four feet ten in one sock."From the very first sentence in the book, Nabokov showed amazing perception of the mind of the child erotist. Nabokov wrote these words in 1947, but it was not until 1990 that Segal & Stermac announced that pedophiles tend to idealize children.Nabokov's hero sought a "princedom by the sea," an "enchanted island," or an "enchanted island of time." It was not until 1976 that R. Gordon, in "The normal and abnormal love of children," recognized the pedophile search for an earthly paradise.Nabokov also beat the beat the professional writers when it came to the pedophile's most common rationalizations. Humbert checked into the hotel room and told the reader, "And she was mine, she was mine, the key was in my fist, my fist was in my pocket, she was mine." Decades later, in 1982, de Young commented on what we might call the "possession rationalization."Humbert then tells his youthful heroine, "Look here, Lo. Lets settle this once for all. For all practical purposes I am your father . . . Two people sharing one room, inevitably enter into a kind, how shall I say, a kind . . ."Lolita interrupts, "The word is incest."Humbert thereby committed the "love rationalization," which received its first professional comment from MacFarlane in 1978.Humbert reads these words aloud from a book:"The normal girl is usually extremely anxious to please her father. She feels in him the forerunner of the desired elusive male . . . The wise mother (and your poor mother would have been wise, had she lived) will encourage a companionship between father and daughter, realizing . . . that the girl forms her ideals of romance and of men from her association with her father."In 1947, the same year that Nabokov wrote the novel, Hirning wrote on what can be called the "sex education rationalization."Lastly, Humbert tells the reader:"I am going to tell you something strange: it was she who seduced me . . . Suffice it to say that not a trace of modesty did I perceive in this beautiful hardly formed young girl whom modern co-education, juvenile mores, the campfire racket and so forth had utterly and hopelessly depraved."This "seduction rationalization" received its first professional mention from Gebhard et al. in 1968.Did Nabokov himself suffer from this mental discomfort? Or was Nabokov insightful into the minds of others? In 1992, Centerwall published an article arguing that Nabokov himself suffered from the malady. But we may never know for sure.