Lolita (Everyman's Library Classics & Contemporary Classics)
by Vladimir Nabokov
List Price:
Our Price: $13.24
You Save: $8.76 (40%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $7.00 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions
Book Summary Information
Author: Vladimir NabokovEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1993-03-09
ISBN: 0679410430
Number of pages: 376
Publisher: Everyman's Library
Summary of Lolita (Everyman's Library Classics & Contemporary Classics)
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)When it was published in 1955, Lolita immediately became a cause célèbre because of the freedom and sophistication with which it handled the unusual erotic predilections of its protagonist. But Vladimir Nabokov's wise, ironic, elegant masterpiece owes its stature as one of the twentieth century's novels of record not to the controversy its material aroused but to its author's use of that material to tell a love story almost shocking in its beauty and tenderness. Awe and exhilaration?along with heartbreak and mordant wit?abound in this account 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, but most of all, it is a meditation on love?love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.With an Introduction by Martin AmisDespite 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
Classics Books
Book Subjects
- Arts & Photography
- Biographies & Memoirs
- Business & Investing
- Children's Books
- Comics & Graphic Novels
- Computers & Internet
- Cooking, Food & Wine
- Entertainment
- Gay & Lesbian
- Health, Mind & Body
- History
- Home & Garden
- Horror
- Law
- Literature & Fiction
- Mystery & Thrillers
- Nonfiction
- Outdoors & Nature
- Parenting & Families
- Professional & Technical
- Reference
- Religion & Spirituality
- Romance
- Science
- Science Fiction & Fantasy
- Sports
- Teens
- Travel
Most talked about in Classics Books
Native sonby Richard Wright
Perennial Library; Published: 1987; Paperback; Book
Best price: $1.75
Native Son: And How Bigger Was Bornby Richard Wright
Perennial; Published: 1993-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $60.00
Raphael and the Noble Taskby Catherine Salton
Harper; Published: 2000-10-24; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $5.49
Price in other shops:
Island (Perennial Classics)by Aldous Huxley
Harper Perennial Modern Classics; Published: 2002-07-30; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.00
Price in other shops:
A Tree Grows in Brooklynby Betty Smith
Harper; Published: 2001-11-13; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $14.82
Price in other shops:
The Great Divorce CDby C. S. Lewis
HarperAudio; Published: 2003-11-25; Audio CD; Book
Best price: $12.90
Price in other shops:
Great Expectationsby Charles Dickens
Macmillan Pub Co; Published: 1979-06; Paperback; Book
Price in other shops:
This Side of Paradiseby Fitzgerald
Scribner Paper Fiction; Published: 1988-09-30; Paperback; Book
Best price: $1.95
Price in other shops:
Black Coffee (Poirot)by Agatha Christie
Harper Collins Pb; Published: 2002-12-02; Paperback; Book
Best price: $68.32
Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1960s)by Joan Didion
Flamingo; Published: 2001-04-17; Paperback; Book
Best price: $22.25
Similar Books and other products
Animal Farmby George Orwell
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Published: 1990-11-20; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $9.99
Price in other shops:
Slaughterhouse-Five: Or The Children's Crusade, A Duty Dance With Death (25th Anniversary)by Kurt Vonnegut
Delacorte Press; Published: 1994-02-01; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $12.47
Price in other shops:
Crime and Punishment (Everyman's Library)by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Everyman's Library; Published: 1993-05-25; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $11.79
Price in other shops:
Midnight's Children (Everyman's Library)by Salman Rushdie
Everyman's Library; Published: 1995-10-17; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $15.26
Price in other shops:
Pale Fire (Everyman's Library Classics & Contemporary Classics)by Vladimir Nabokov
Everyman's Library; Published: 1992-03-10; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $13.73
Price in other shops:
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A (Collector's Library)by James Joyce
Collector's Library; Published: 2009-10-01; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $4.41
Price in other shops:
Catch-22 (Everyman's Library)by Joseph Heller
Everyman's Library; Published: 1995-10-17; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $14.87
Price in other shops:
The Great Gatsby (Scribner Classics)by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Scribner; Published: 1996-06-01; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $13.39
Price in other shops:
Nineteen Eighty-Fourby George Orwell
Everyman's Library; Published: 1992-11-03; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $13.23
Price in other shops:
Ulysses (Modern Library) (Modern Library of the World's Best Books)by James Joyce
Modern Library; Published: 1992-09-05; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $12.47
Price in other shops: