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Eh, to be honest...
“Am I allowed to say that Lolita is overrated? The prose was fine, sure...but great? Probably not. Samuel Beckett's prose is great, David Foster Wallace's prose is great...Nabokov, as others have pointed out, perhaps tries too hard, or is simply better in his native Russian. Nabokov's prose is, I dunno, somewhat clunky and dry and boring? And then the story itself...well, it's interesting, but Nabokov's delivery is tedious. Not quite the "aesthetic bliss" he spoke of in the afterword.
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-11-04.
I expected to love this book. The first paragraph was gorgeous. After that, I found myself trudging through the book.
I never had the feeling of Humbert as an actual character, a person, narrating his own story and giving us his emotions and whatnot. He always seemed to me someone who was being written through. What I mean is: the whole thing felt a bit contrived.
My biggest moment of frustration with the book came near the end, on the top of page 283 (section 31 of part two), where Nabokov seems to, at least to me, have Humbert give a very shabby regurgitation of Dostoevsky's brilliant conversation between Alyosha and Ivan Karamazov in which Ivan refuses to accept the suffering of children, even if it all gets "worked out" in the big picture...
By this I don't mean that I don't think this book isn't decent...it's just not at all great, not an excellent book. I.e. not a five-star book. That's it.” -
1 of 1 members found this review helpful.
Haunting and Chilling
“What a beautiful, haunting tale of perverse love.
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-10-21.
Nabakov is able to explore the story of a middle-aged man obsessed with a (pre-) adolescent girl with such power and depth that at times, I had to wonder at the inspiration for it. At the basis, the inspiration can be seen as any love, desire, and obsession for someone outside of your acceptable grasp. I can see the inspiration being that of love that drives you to insanity, which is just about any unreciprocated love. I can see the inspiration being pain, and wanting to come up with a justification for the pain...
Either way, I was both disturbed and enraptured by Nabokov's descriptions of love, and his understanding of what being swept up with someone really entails. The lack of a structured timeline, for one, is a key indicator that this is a true-to-emotion tale. How many of us, who have every really felt a rush of love have any grasp over the days, weeks, and years that surround that object of our desire?
Yes, it is a hard read. Yes, it might be noted only for it's subject matter. Yes, there are reasons to not want to turn another page after some of the descriptions of love and lust in a relationship most all of us will deem unacceptable by any stretch of the imagination. But encompassed in this book, too, are reasons to want to reach the end, to see how HH comes to the end of his story, to see how he deals with the loss of a love and his grace.” -
1 of 1 members found this review helpful.
cruel, anarchic tragedy
“I picked up Lolita one day. It caught my attention and I wanted to see for myself what all the fuss was about- good and bad- that's loomed over-head since and before it's publication.
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-10-18.
My immediate impression and what ordered me to order a few other Nabokov titles before finishing Lolita, was the artistic, secretive prose, that flows like smooth running water.
On the surface of the current, the words glide with aesthetic precision creating fantastic windows of vision from the most simple and ordinary phrases. It seems within each hole opening before us, is a little detail that magnifies a story within a story. One has to be more than a passive observer, but also a detective- like when watching a Bergman movie; because underneath the verse-like prose is a chess-match of wit.
As far as the morality of the story, read it and think for yourself. What I've found when talking to people about it, some who are familiar with it aren't afraid of the subject matter; they don't let words like: pedophile, rape, pornographic stop them from observation. While others who haven't taken a look, are stuck, probably not going to pick it up because of taboo WORDS!
At the very least I would recommend reading this for a conversation piece. Because it raises very good questions that are fun to try to analyze by oneself and with the help of others.” -
0 of 1 members found this review helpful.
Titilating
“I really enjoyed this book. It's eroticism appealed to my perverted, filthy mind, altho in today's world, you could be arrested for saying so, almost anyway. At least, better not have anything on your laptop supporting it. I read it simply because I wanted to see what passes for literature though, and I was not disappointed. Okay, okay, I really wanted to see just how dirty it was. hehe he”
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-10-17. -
2 of 2 members found this review helpful.
A Dark Masterpiece Of Irony, Hypocrisy, and Self-Delusion
“LOLITA is difficult to approach in part because of its reputation. Upon beginning to read the novel, some find it so highly styled that it is difficult to grasp. Throughout the novel, many wonder if the art involved can justify the nature of the story and the point of view it offers. This is not and never has been a novel for a quick Sunday afternoon read; so many issues swirl around it and through it that the book requires critical thought even as one reads it. As a result many people actively dislike it. Even so, LOLITA has seemed entirely secure in its status as a landmark of western literature since its first publication, an almost inevitable creation that pushes the boundaries of what literature can effectively do in terms of subject, style, and technique.
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-10-08.
The story is infamous. Humbert Humbert is of European origin and in his early teenage years developed a passionate attachment to a girl of his own age, an attachment that was never entirely satisfied and over which he has obsessed for many years. Now residing in a small New England town, he becomes equally obsessed with a twelve year old girl named Lolita Haze who recreates for him the magic he felt in that first relationship. In order to be near her, Humbert rents a room from and ultimately marries Lolita's mother Charlotte--but Charlotte uncovers Humbert's motives and in a twist of fate is killed in the street as she runs from the house to expose him. The circumstance places Lolita entirely in Humbert's power. They travel extensively, partly in order that he might continue his molestation undetected, partly in order that he might prevent Lolita from forming other relationships that might offer a means of escape. But Lolita is not a simple victim, and in spite of her years already has a certain sexual expertese. Over time she begins to push the extent of her power over Humbert, trading on her sexual favors to manipulate Humbert much as he initially expected to manipulate her. Determined to escape Humbert, she does so by the shocking manouver of giving herself to another molestor. It is an act that effectively destroys all concerned.
The story was incredibly shocking for 1955 and indeed remains incredibly shocking today. But more shocking than the story is the fact that author Vladimir Nabokov tells it entirely from Humbert's point of view. Humbert is eloquent, clever, witty. One gradually comes to sympathize with him, his desperation, and the extremes to which it drives him. It is here that the novel suddenly suddenly uncoils like a snake and bites the reader with a deadly toxin. Humbert is not a detached observer; he sees what he wishes to see and tells what he wants to tell, and through him Nabokov has lured you into a genuine feeling of sympathy for the devil. You have become complicit in his crime. Quite suddenly the fact that Lolita is only a child is again thrust back upon you and you realize in full that you have smiled upon her rapist. It is among one of the most astonishing and profoundly disturbing literary effects imaginable.
For all its word play and literary stylings, the element about LOLITA which most impresses me is its deep and bitter irony shot through with unexpected and extremely disconcerting humor. The very title of the novel is ironic, for LOLITA is not actually about Lolita; it is about Humbert. He does not really see Lolita as she exists. He sees her as he imagines her to be. He does not love Lolita. He loves the fantasy he projects upon her. He realizes this with an increasing frequency and knows full well that Lolita is not an extraordinary creature of endless delight. She is just a little girl who was not quite as innocent as Humbert thought she was, considerably more intelligent than he expected her to be, and who with a child's logic ultimately becomes equally manipulative of him in self-defense. But just as Humbert deludes the reader for much of the novel, so too does he delude himself, repeatedly setting aside the fundamental and abhorrent facts of the relationship and paving his road to hell with endless self-justification in order to live out the obession.
Many readers have been thoroughly outraged by LOLITA, and the criticism tends to fall into two categories: those who consider the book pornographic and those who consider it a defense of child molestation. No doubt there have been pediophiles who read the book and considered it both; no doubt there have been moralists unable to see the actual drift of the novel due to their horror at the elements from which it is formed. But we cannot judge something by the extreme interpretations of warped minds on either side of the moral fence. LOLITA is not sexually graphic, still less sexually stimulating, and it is hardly an endorsement of sexual abuse. The novel's strange and potent mixture of romanticism and bitterness is too intense to allow for such superficial and commonplace notions, and it seems to consistently defeat whatever expectation a reader brings to it. Difficult, and at times distasteful, unexpectedly funny in a remarkably disconcerting way, love it, hate it, both or something in between--there is no denying that LOLITA has remarkable power. It is a dark masterpiece capable of making you question your own suppositions and hypocrisies in an often frightening way.
Recommended.
GFT, Amazon Reviewer”
