Lolita

Name: Lolita
Author: Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov

— 1955 —

“

Nabokov gave his monstrous narrator the most gorgeous prose in the English language, and that was deliberate.

The record

Time
An eveningA season
336 pages, about 7 hours: about the length of a typical book on the shelf.
Getting in
Walk right inSteep climb
Two readers report stalling at Humbert’s early definition of ‘nymphets’, one of them at page 16.
One of a kind
Others do thisNothing else does
A book blog rejects the common comparison to The Collector, and a Substack review calls Laughter in the Dark Nabokov’s best.

on the first paragraph
“I fell in love with this book after the first paragraph.”
five stars · a book blog
on real America
“a love affair with the real America”
R.W. Flint · The New Republic, 1957
on the prose
“a superbly florid and beautifully written book”
a book blog
on the wordplay
“the language and wordplay was indeed delightful”
four stars · a book blog

on the length
“Three hundred pages of sex in the head.”
Jerry Talmer · The Village Voice, 1958
on the repetition
“praying that he would stop repeating himself and just for once say ‘freckles’”
two stars · a book blog
on Humbert’s feelings
“Humbert’s feelings for Lolita are completely solipsistic.”
Roxana Robinson · LitHub, 2015
on the narration
“the entire book steeped in the mind of a pedophile rhapsodizing over a young girl”
Heather Bottoms · Book Riot, 2019