The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated

The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated
by Vladimir Nabokov, Alfred Appel Jr.

The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated
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Book Summary Information

Author: Alfred Appel Jr., Vladimir Nabokov
Edition: Paperback
Published: 1991-04-23
ISBN: 0679727299
Number of pages: 544
Publisher: Vintage

Book Reviews of The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated

Book Review: Stick with the unannotated edition
Summary: 1 Stars

Appel's annotations are simply insufferable. It's pathetic and depressing to read his sniveling Kinbote impression--is he completely unaware that he represents exactly what Nabokov was mocking in Pale Fire? Even trying to use his annotations as merely a reference to help translate the French in the book will leave you quivering with rage, as Appel submits you to his Stanford ENG 300 course, draws absurd and positively indefensible parallels (some of which that he even admits--with the appropriate quotation from a letter as evidence--Nabokov expressly disavowed), reveals the entire narrative by page 70, and, in a meta-textual burlesque (which, ever self-aware and oh-so-meta, Appel audaciously compares to the effect created by Pale Fire) completely robs your reading experience of the chance to form its own impression of the work.

Under no circumstances buy this drivel. Nasha Vladishka deserves better.

Summary of The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated

In 1954 Vladimir Nabokov asked one American publisher to consider "a firebomb that I have just finished putting together." The explosive device: Lolita, his morality play about a middle-aged European's obsession with a 12-year-old American girl. Two years later, the New York Times called it "great art." Other reviewers staked a higher moral ground (the editor of the London Sunday Express declaring it "the filthiest book I've ever read"). Since then, the sinuous novel has never ceased to astound. Even Nabokov was astonished by its place in the popular imagination. One biographer writes that "he was quite shocked when a little girl of eight or nine came to his door for candy on Halloween, dressed up by her parents as Lolita." And when it came time to casting the film, Nabokov declared, "Let them find a dwarfess!"

The character Lolita's power now exists almost separately from the endlessly inventive novel. If only it were read as often as it is alluded to. Alfred Appel Jr., editor of the annotated edition, has appended some 900 notes, an exhaustive, good-humored introduction, and a recent preface in which he admits that the "reader familiar with Lolita can approach the apparatus as a separate unit, but the perspicacious student who keeps turning back and forth from text to Notes risks vertigo." No matter. The notes range from translations to the anatomical to the complex textual. Appel is also happy to point out the Great Punster's supposedly unintended word play: he defends the phrase "Beaver Eaters" as "a portmanteau of 'Beefeaters' (the yeoman of the British royal guard) and their beaver hats."


The annotated text of this modern classic. It assiduously illuminates the extravagant wordplay and the frequent literary allusions, parodies, and cross-references. Edited with a preface, introduction and notes by Alfred Appel, Jr.

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