By: Vladimir Nabokov
With an introduction by Claire Messud
Libby ebook Part One (33 chapters), Part Two (36 chapters), "Vladimir Nabokov on a Book Entitled Lolita," Author Bio, and Reading Group Guide
Published: 1955 (this edition / intro 2025)
Genre: fiction
I only got to chapter five in the first part before I decided I didn't want to read this book. I try to read at least one "classic" work of literature each year, to broaden my horizons. I had some vague notions about this book based on references to it (especially the Police song sung by Sting - Don't Stand So Close to Me - which references "that book by Nabokov").
If you're curious about the book, just read the Wikipedia page about it. I'm glad to have a bookmark in my brain for the name Humbert Humbert, but I'll find a different book to spend my time reading.
Introduction: The real world around us, seventy years after Lolita's publication, unsettlingly resembles that of Humbert Humbert's account, one in which men are psychotically obsessed with women (or girls, in his case), whose human reality is all but obliterated by their projected fantasy.
This creeped me out and immediately brought to mind the Epstein files and the many, many men who lived out their sexual fantasies with underage girls. Nasty. Not fiction.
Foreword: Viewed simply as a novel, "Lolita" deals with situations and emotions that would remain exasperatingly vague to the reader had their expression been etiolated by means of platitudinous evasions.
From Wikipedia: "The novel is prefaced by a fictitious foreword by John Ray Jr., an editor of psychology books. Ray states that he is presenting a memoir written by a man using the pseudonym "Humbert Humbert", who had recently died of heart disease while in jail awaiting trial for an unspecified crime" So . . . Nabokov wrote the foreword as though a psychology book editor wrote it. Weird.
Chapter 3: . . . . and four months later she died of typhus in Corfu.
Holy cow! He's talking about a young love for Annabel and is describing a scene at the beach. This comment comes at the end of a sentence and chapter.
Chapter 5: . . . and soon I found myself maturing amid a civilization which allows a man of twenty-five to court a girl of sixteen but not a girl of twelve.
Um . . . yeah. Because that's just creepy. At this point, I went to wikipedia and read the summary of the story. I am not interested in trying to understand this book from an academic point of view and I certainly don't want to read it for "pleasure." So I figured I'd blog this much, return it, and move on. His discussion of "nymphettes" was just too much for me.
