Lolita
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4.1 • 620 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
The most famous and controversial novel from one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century tells the story of Humbert Humbert’s obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze.
“The conjunction of a sense of humor with a sense of horror [results in] satire of a very special kind.”—The New Yorker
One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
Awe and exhilaration—along with heartbreak and mordant wit—abound in Lolita, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsession for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America.
Most of all, it is a meditation on love—love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.
Customer Reviews
See AllA quirky farce...
All pedo jokes aside, this is one of the best modernist novels. Overtly, a blatant attack on Freudianism (what constituted pop psychology in the 60's), this novel is as playful and exuberant as it is visceral and fetishistically offensive. The style and wordplay on display are Nabokov at his very best. Every page offers up its moments of cognitive dissonance as you are laughing at the style while simultaneously cringing at the subject matter. What really drew me in was the almost travelogue language of seeing America through the eyes of an educated, but mad European...not the America celebrated on the covers of magazines, but the one lurking in the cramped spaces of a motor lodge, the roadside diner, and the endless freeways that are meant to connect us, but sometimes only lead us to detour after detour...kinda like the subconscious, eh Vladimir?
Yuck
At first I thought this book was well written, interesting, and so sad. But then it just dragged on and on and was thoroughly disgusting. I hated it.
Well Written
Not exactly what I was expecting since I never research a book before reading it. I found the book to be a well written story of a very taboo subject. Nabokov explores the subject through believable humans struggling and surrendering to the human condition and its consequences.