Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Lolita
Book Review: I Felt Soiled After Reading This
Summary: 2 Stars
Nabokov is a genius. His mastery of prose is without peer. His words dance, they sing, they cavort.
I just wish he had written another story, instead of this miserably depressing tale of a crazy pedophile on a cross-country raping spree with a twelve year old girl.
I guess I am not one of the "wise, sensitive, and staunch people who understood my book" which Nabokov writes about in his condescending 1956 afterward.
Book Review: I hated Lolita
Summary: 1 Stars
I am aware there is a difference between an author and his characters. I am aware that art does not need to plead for morality. I acknowledge Nabokov's skill as a stylist of english prose.
I hated the book after it left planet earth about half way through and orbited somewhere in Nabokov's childish brain while treating a deeply troubling theme. Lolita never became real as a character - a fatal literary, rather than psychological or moral, flaw.
I could not read it without being acutely aware that: why does L. appear not to ever grieve her mother's death? WHy does she not miss her friends? Why is she not cutting up her arms with a piece of broken glass? Why does she have so little to say? After driving around the country in a small car for a year cooped up with the H why has she long ago not throttled him and left his carcass for the vultures to feed on (road tip rage - we've all felt it)?
Where are the authorities, the police?
If HH is so gah gah over her why can he not seem to remember anything specific about her - her interests or conversations? We know plenty about what she smells like, by contrast.
Why does she not act or talk like a 14 year old but instead exactly like HH himself? WHy is she so shadowy, 2 dimensional? At one point I started to wonder if maybe L was HH's deranged hallucination or phantom - which made me slightly warm up to the book - but that doesnt seem to be Nabokov's intent at all.
All of these questions - and many more which I would have to return to the novel to remember (and I have no intention of doing that) - spoiled my 'enjoyment' of the work and interjected a draft of cold wet reality into the fun so that I lost interest.
Nabokov's stylistic brilliance was used only to serve up HH's non-stop sardonic and caustic observations on American middle class life, and they became ennervating over the long long haul. And pleading Nabokov's psychological insights doesnt help much. Is this a comedy, tragedy, psychological portrait? It fails on all those counts because it is tiresome, shallow and obtuse. But I guess I DID learn a lot about motels in middle america in the 50s.
And all the little literary games and such, and the self-serving, classless forwards and afterwards only made it worse.
Book Review: If Satan took up literature, he'd write like Nabokov...
Summary: 5 Stars
As I grow old and older, I ask myself all too often why I bother? Haven't I eaten enough toast? Haven't I bent over to tie enough shoes? Then I come across an author like Vladimir Nabokov and a book like *Lolita,* an author and a book that, although Ive read thousands and thousands of books in my time, I somehow never read before. Maybe it was his name, or fame, or the fact that a movie was made of his most famous novel. There are books that you feel you've already read, even though you havent, just because they are so famous, or infamous. This is one of those books. But if you havent read it and think you know what its all about, youre wrong, utterly and 100% wrong, and youre missing one of the great joys of a reader's life: the prose of Vladimir Nabokov.
This book is fiendishly good. It undermines everything we "ought" to feel, then it makes us feel it; finally it pulls the rug out from under us altogether. Nabokov's narrator, Humbert Humbert, is a child molestor, that's what we'd call him in the bald and unfancy terminology of today. He's a sick, abusive, predatory[...]. Yet it's his voice that entertains us throughout *Lolita,* and entertains us it does. Humbert is urbane, intelligent, self-deprecating, cynical, and laugh-out-loud funny. He's a poet and a romantic. He's the English professor we all wish we had. He knows that what he's doing is wrong. He's the first to admit it. He's the first to admit everything, including that he can't help himself. He is, you see, in love, hopelessly and authentically and obsessively in love. The problem is that she's [....]
Now the truly devilish thing about *Lolita* is that of all the characters in the novel, including even Lolita herself, its Humbert that draws our "sympathy," so to speak. Sympathy for the devil, it is, in spite of ourselves, in the sense that we see the world most vividly from his point-of-view, in the sense that he seems more alive than anyone else in the novel, more perceptive, more uncompromisingly self-honest, more human and, in the end, the most tragic of all the characters. He's a man with an indelible flaw, he's a man in love, no matter how misguided, no matter how criminal, and its Nabokov's "evil" genius to get us to accept Humbert Humbert as our sick hero, man who we might send to prison for fifty years, but who we couldn't help feeling more than a twinge of regret having to do so.
One would be hard-pressed to come up with a prose-stylist whose voice is smoother, more casually erudite, and more post-contemporary than Nabokov...and this in a novel that is already half-a-century old! An amazing text from an author who has after 300 pages of pure reading bliss, shot instantaneously to the top of my favorite author's list, *Lolita* is a book I should have read a hundred years ago, but instead sat wasting my time in graduate literature courses! What are they teaching in schools anyway? I'm ordering up some more Nabokov novels immediately, if not sooner. You should too.
Book Review: Lo. Li. Ta.
Summary: 5 Stars
Nabokov's Lolita is simply an incredible book.
Humbert Humbert is infatuated with 'nymphets', oddly beautiful girls aged 9-14. Upon arriving in the United States, he lodges with Charlotte Haze; he takes the lodging after spotting Charlotte's nymphet daughter Delores (Lolita). In order to stay close to Delores he weds Charlotte, who is in love with him. Due to tragic circumstances sometime later, Humbert claims Delores and the duo embark on an extensive road trip across the states.
The voice of humbert is so intriguing - Nabokov has created a narrator that is depraved, yet intelligent and somehow sympathetic. His depravity and awful behavior is often forgotten or ignored because of Humbert's incredible wit, charm, taste and physical beauty; Humbert Humbert is successful in gaining sympathy and amity for his narrative is magnificent and loaded with intellectual and cultural references that are often both smart and humorous.
Due to Nabokov's eloquent, intelligent and much layered prose, Lolita is one of the greatest, most tragic yet strangest love stories of all time. A beautiful book.
Book Review: Probably one of the best ever written.
Summary: 5 Stars
The controversial emotional turmoil in this fictional work is immense with the obsession of the main character beautifully crafted in an eloquent and poetic style.