“I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita...But in my arms she was always Lolita.”
DESCRIPTION
Humbert Humbert - scholar, aesthete and romantic - has fallen completely and utterly in love with Lolita Haze, his landlady's gum-snapping, silky skinned twelve-year-old daughter. Reluctantly agreeing to marry Mrs Haze just to be close to Lolita, Humbert suffers greatly in the pursuit of romance; but when Lo herself starts looking for attention elsewhere, he will carry her off on a desperate cross-country misadventure, all in the name of Love. Hilarious, flamboyant, heart-breaking and full of ingenious word play, Lolita is an immaculate, unforgettable masterpiece of obsession, delusion and lust.
FACT
- Film by Stanley Kubrick with Sue Lyon in 1962, another in 1997
- On many best book list
“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul."
PRAISE
Awe and exhiliration--along with heartbreak and mordant wit--abound in Lolita, Nabokov's most famous and controversial novel, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion 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.
Extract
…one will not necessarily choose the nymphet among them. You have to be an artist or a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine ( oh how you have to cringe and hide!) in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs – the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a dowdy limb, and other indices which despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate the little deadly demon among my wholesome children; she stand unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power.
The trouble was that those gentlemen had not, and I had caught glimpses of an incomparably more poignant bliss. The dimmest of my pollutive dreams was a thousand times more dazzling than all the adultery and the most virile writer of genius or the most talented impotent might imagine.
I find it most difficult to express with adequate force that flash, that shiver, that impact of passion recognition.
…this was one of the reasons why I tried to keep as far away from people as possible, while (she) on the other hand, would do her utmost to draw as many potential witnesses onto her orbit as she could
Thus I had delicately constructed my ignoble , ardent, sinful dream;
"This was one of the reasons why I tried to keep as far away from people as possible, while (she) on the other hand, would do her utmost to draw as many potential witnesses onto her orbit as she could."
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