Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov
List Price:
Our Price: $6.83
You Save: $7.12 (51%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $1.97 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions
Book Summary Information
Author: Vladimir NabokovEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1989-03-13
ISBN: 0679723161
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of Lolita
Book Review: Terribly Misunderstood
Summary: 5 Stars
Historically, we find authors who try to mask their empty prose with the temptation of cryptic, but typically nonexistent, metaphors. Here we have a gorgeous novel whose author explicitly refutes the sorts of literary rubbish that are so liberally lavished upon it, yet the public's interpretation remains overwhelmingly fraudulent. It's strange how art culture loves to manufacture credibility by picking out "unlikely" sources of beauty and "defying" expectations. Readers follow suit. The reviews on here are, much to my distress, generally along the lines of "this was hard to read at times, but, in the end, worth it." How insincere! The most convincing "love" story of our century? What a joke! This is quite possibly the most beautiful work I've ever read, and it saddens me to perceive it so commonly misread. Nabokov's prose is uncommonly soulful, honest, and warm. Please read it in the same way--ignore what you've heard. And, please, don't feel "guilty" for loving it. People have no idea what they're saying anymore.
Summary of Lolita
The hilarious and tragic story of Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged Russian man who feels passion only for young the "nymphet" Dolores Haze, whom he renames Lolita.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
Nabokov, Vladimir Books
Book Subjects
- Arts & Photography
- Audiobooks on Cassette
- Audiobooks on CD
- Biographies & Memoirs
- Business & Investing
- Children's Books
- Comics & Graphic Novels
- Computers & Internet
- Cooking, Food & Wine
- e-Books
- Engineering
- Entertainment
- Gay & Lesbian
- Health, Mind & Body
- History
- Home & Garden
- Horror
- Law
- Literature & Fiction
- Medicine
- Mystery & Thrillers
- Nonfiction
- Outdoors & Nature
- Parenting & Families
- Professional & Technical
- Reference
- Religion & Spirituality
- Romance
- Science
- Science Fiction & Fantasy
- Sports
- Teens
- Travel
Most talked about in Thomas Pynchon & Influences
Playboy (1-year)Playboy; Playboy; Magazine; Magazine
Best price: $15.96
Price in other shops:
The Wizard of Oz (70th Anniversary Ultimate Collector's Edition)DVD
Best price: $44.99
Price in other shops:
You're Gonna Miss Me : A Film About Roky EricksonUNIVERSAL MUSIC GROUP DISTRIBUTION; Release date: 2007-07-10; DVD
Best price: $17.25
Price in other shops:
Roky Erickson - You're Gonna Miss Me: The Best of Roky EricksonRelease date: 1993-07-01; Music CD
Best price: $49.29
Country Joe & the Fish - I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-DieRelease date: 1990-10-25; Music CD
Best price: $7.48
Price in other shops:
Spike Jones - Spiked!: The Music of Spike JonesRelease date: 1994-04-12; Music CD
Best price: $7.75
Price in other shops:
Thelonious Monk Quartet - Monk's DreamRelease date: 1990-10-25; Music CD
Best price: $4.14
Price in other shops:
A Farewell To Armsby Ernest Hemingway
Scribner; Published: 1995-06-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $2.25
Price in other shops:
The Adventures of Augie March (Penguin Classics)by Saul Bellow
Penguin Classics; Published: 2006-10-03; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.98
Price in other shops:
The Waste Land and Other Writings (Modern Library Classics)by T.S. Eliot
Modern Library; Published: 2002-01-08; Paperback; Book
Best price: $3.87
Price in other shops:
Similar Books and other products
Anna Karenina (Oprah's Book Club)by Leo Tolstoy
Penguin Classics; Published: 2004-05; Paperback; Book
Best price: $3.24
Price in other shops:
The Strangerby Albert Camus
Vintage; Published: 1989-03-13; Paperback; Book
Best price: $4.72
Price in other shops:
Ulyssesby James Joyce
Vintage; Published: 1990-06-16; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.80
Price in other shops:
Pale Fireby Vladimir Nabokov
Vintage; Published: 1989-04-23; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.99
Price in other shops:
The Catcher in the Ryeby J.D. Salinger
Back Bay Books; Published: 2001-01-30; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.99
Price in other shops:
Slaughterhouse-Five: A Novelby Kurt Vonnegut
Dial Press Trade Paperback; Published: 1999-01-12; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.72
Price in other shops:
A Clockwork Orangeby Anthony Burgess
W.W. Norton & Co.; Published: 1986-11; Paperback; Book
Best price: $7.39
Price in other shops:
The Great Gatsbyby F. Scott Fitzgerald
Scribner; Published: 1999-09-30; Paperback; Book
Best price: $4.97
Price in other shops:
Catch-22by Joseph Heller
Simon & Schuster; Published: 1996-09-04; Paperback; Book
Best price: $5.40
Price in other shops:
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Booksby Azar Nafisi
Random House Trade Paperbacks; Published: 2008-11-04; Paperback; Book
Best price: $2.75
Price in other shops: