that bombshell of a book, Nabokov's Lolita

[Ecurb]

Didn't Charles the Beloved, last king of Zembla, have a penchant for young boys? I'm thinking of vacationing in Zembla this summer (although my sexual proclivities differ from Charles's.)

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

Well why don't you want to believe the killer? You heard it from the horse's mouth. I believe what this person said that he was inspired by the book because he admitted it.

I didn't say I didn't believe the killer; I'm pretty sure I said quite the opposite. My point is the book, in this case Catcher in the Rye, nor its author shouldn't be blamed for one nut-case's interpretation.

[Emil Miller]

I reviewed this novel some time ago and while the subject matter is obviously disturbing for many readers, despite its controversial nature, the precociousness of young girls is not infrequently encountered in everyday life. Here is an amusing take on a silly suggestion that girls take their infant siblings to school as an example in sex lessons. The caption reads:

“Look Doris, taking Baby to school
for practical sex demonstration’s
one thing -taking Daddy’s another!”

[R.F. Schiller]

Sorry to bump an old thread, but seeing as this is my favourite book of all-time I'd like to point out a few comments:

- It's asinine that cacian is denouncing the book based on "flipping through a few pages". How are you supposed to get any context? You would've missed the part at the end:

"What I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapor of blended voices, majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic -- one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord."

I also have no idea why you seem to think Nabokov shares the same feelings as Humbert. Did Dostoevsky really inhabit murderous feelings inside? If you read the book carefully, it is clear that Nabokov is writing about a villain and is siding with Dolores Haze.

Secondly, it seems like many are talking about the novel in terms of love. While I do believe the novel does contain allegorical elements of Nabokov's love of English and America, I think the book has more to do with tyranny and Nabokov's disgust with totalitarianism. In Speak, Memory, Nabokov repeatedly speaks about the purity and beauty of his own childhood and life in Russia. When he was 17, the Communist regime took over, eventually resulting in his father's death, and he was forced to flee to Berlin, leaving his native homeland. Then again, he was forced to flee from Berlin to France during the uprise of the Nazi party, as his wife was Jewish (and therefore his son as well by the Nuremberg Laws). He was then forced to flee from France to New York upon Hitler's invasion of France. Many of his friends, including his brother Sergei, were killed in the Holocaust. Nabokov then began to absolutely loathe totalitarianism, both because he championed individualism over collectivism and because he was personally affected by it.

When he was writing his first "American" book, Nabokov began to wonder deeply about what would have happened to his son if he had failed to protect him from Nazi Germany. This is reflected in Bend Sinister as it is about a character who fails to protect his child who is then killed by the totalitarian state. These sentiments leak into Lolita where Nabokov now writes from the perspective of the tyrant. Superficially Humbert has many similarities with Nabokov, both Europeans who later arrived in America, both middle-aged, both men of letters ect. but it is actually Lolita who shares the same innermost nature with Nabokov. Just like many tyrants, Humbert is incredibly seductive with his speech - Hitler's oratory skills were legendary which made him exceptionally popular with the German people, and even foreign leaders, like the Canadian Prime Minister (if I remember my high school history correctly) had a man-crush on him. Nabokov uses Humbert to show us how powerfully persuasive tyrants can be and we, the readers have to find Nabokov's clues within the story to not be seduced by Humbert and focus on the facts.

The book is not about sex, it is about corruption and loss of childhood. Sex is merely one of the mechanisms which Humbert "broke" Lolita.

I know Nabokov has said that he does not write with a moral in mind and does not consider himself a didactic writer, but that is only on the surface. I took an undergraduate course just on Nabokov with a well-known scholar who has published several articles (mainly on his Russian works) and books on Nabokov. I've read King, Queen, Knave, Laughter in the Dark, Despair, The Gift, Glory, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Lolita, Pnin and Pale Fire and in almost all of them, Nabokov does have a "point" to make, instead of just the aesthetic bliss his claims, but never does it explicitly.