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Summary: melodramatic, flowery prose
Review: Most laud this book for what they usually call "wordplay", "fun with a foreign language", "literary allusion", etc.I can understand this, but nevertheless find Nabukov's style a bit too flowery--a bit too literary, whatever that means. I couldn't shake the feeling that I was being lectured to or that I was being asked to coo in awe over his masterful prose. I just couldn't go along with it. The wordplay, the toying with English, just goes over the edge. It's like being in some sort of time warp, letting an 19th century romantic writer (and there are allusions galore to 19th century prose) loose with 20th century nihilistic taboo-breaking. Nabokov's style is too pretentious--possibly carried over from his academic vocations. I mean no offense to those who have enjoyed Lolita--Nabokov successfully manages to salvage the embellishments of Victorian English for modern literature. If this sounds appealing (as it does to many), you will love this book. If you are like me, however, and feel that embellishments are best left to poetry and the 18th century, I would give it a try or pass it by.
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Summary: Buy this book!
Review: This is perhaps the most brilliant book I've ever read. It's sad, pathetic, crazed and amazingly witty and funny. I promise you won't be disappointed if you buy this book.
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Summary: One of the best novels written in the 20th century
Review: I've read more books that I can count. Most extremely avid readers of great literature find the task of ranking the top five best novels out of the dozens that have passed their eyes, a difficult one. I have a hard time making that list as well. But I can honestly say that Lolita, in my book (no pun intended, of course) resides somewhere among those coveted five works of art.
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Summary: BEAUTIFUL, MY FAVORITE BOOK
Review: "Lolita" is an unforgettable, flawlessly written novel. The language is artful in ways that few other novels have achieved. It is far too good to have any negatives associated with its reputation, and it would be particularly silly for people to avoid it based on a blind aversion to classic literature. "Lolita" reads like the most perfect modern love story, yet it is a romantic love of an older man for a child. This is creepy and wrong, and the first person narrator knows it, but can't help himself. The book leaves moral paradoxes and sorrow in its wake, not to mention a general feeling of having just participated in something very special. The themes of the novel are never as simplistic as the set-up would suggest, and the characters have far more dimension than one would expect from the types that Nabokov creates. Everyone must read this book, if only to have an informed opinion of it. Hopefully, better reasons than that will develop as the narrative takes its hold.
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Summary: one more review to this book couldn't hurt
Review: This is one of the greatest books I have ever read. Dolly Haze is just so cute I understand why Humbert Humbert wants to be with her. Of course I really did enjoy reading this book and would recommend this book to anyone with good taste. The main characters are very realistic. I don't know how people could hate this book, I think it's one of he greatest books ever written. The reason Humbert Humbert loved Lo is because he loved Annabel and since Lo looked Like Annabel of course he would want to be with her because of what she represents, Annabel his child hood love. And when they do get together they stay together for so long he loves Lo for being Lo.
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Summary: Nabokov's love affair with the English language compels
Review: Vladimir Nabokov's most famous novel, LOLITA, has persistently bore an undeserved reputation as a risque book because of its tale of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsession for the 12-year old Dolores Haze. But, as Nabokov writes in his afterword, "On a Book Entitled Lolita," someone searching for pornography will find nothing satisfying in this novel, as the aim is literary excellence. Although he rose to prominence as a writer in Russian, the originally English-language LOLITA is, by his own admission, a product of Nabokov's love for the English language. Puns abound in this novel, and in fact Humbert's quite the amusing speaker. Nabokov's first language was not English (Russian), and his magisterial command of English here butresses his already well-known genius I would also like to repeat the notion that LOLITA is a love story. Critics of that idea, aghast, claim that because Lo is too young to love and because Humbert treats Dolores as mere property, it's not a love story. Those people are ignorant of the relationships of the world, having fled into the shell of romantic daydreaming. So many of the "love affairs" of the world are full of backstabbing, bitterness, haggling, and pressure. Because LOLITA explores this idea, it deserves Vanity Fair's title of "the only convincing love story of our century." LOLITA is among Nabokov's finest novels, and one should read it themselves so that they can see it for themselves without relying on literary criticism (the kind that spawned Nabokov's next novel, PALE FIRE). It is one of the finest books of the 20th century, and it's wordplay, tragedy, and vivid characters remain with the reader long after the last page of Humbert's confession is turned.
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Summary: Genius
Review: It's rather disturbing that so many fellow readers--even those effusive in their praise of the book-- seem blind to the real essence of VN's magic here. Lolita emphatically is not a "metaphor" about the old and new worlds clashing; it is not a meditation (a la Dostoevsky or Mailer--a pox on the houses of both those old frauds) on the "criminal mind;" and it is only marginally concerned with "sex." Lolita's true aim, accomplished both through the world it describes and through its imcomparably subtle, precise, and original language (a style that might be likened to a fun-house filled with mirrors that are really prisms),is nothing less than to describe the actual texture--the weave-- of so-called "reality" ("one of the few words that mean nothing without the quotes"--VN). If instead of this , you're getting from the book hoary English-lit platitudes (see the start of this review), you are, I swear to you, getting only a pitiful, negligible fraction of all this book has to offer. For your own sake (if this is you), look harder.
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Summary: Dismissing The Shackles Of Convention In Both Plot And Prose
Review: It's true that Lolita is known much more for its controversial content than for what really makes the book worthy -- a Russian writer delivering succinct, excellent, directed prose in his adopted English language. Which brings me to the next point -- it's a cultivated art, the ability to pay equal attention to both prose and plot and excel brilliantly in both. Lolita is a shining example of that. I must admit I haven't read much about the impetus behind Nabakov's inspiration to write a novel about the raunchy lust of a 40-year-old man for a 12-year-old nymphet, but here is my offering: Any story less wild, less haunting, less surreal, less un-moral than that would not have served to be as appropriate a backdrop for Nabakov's literary wit, sardonism and acrobatics. His timing was unfortunate -- the repressed Pleasantville era of the 1950s -- yet I wouldn't doubt that that might have been his exact intention. You will be shocked, enthralled, and disgusted by this novel -- but I think that is what critics really meant when they say a story is "engaging." Too often, with today's contemporary fiction, there isn't a sense of interaction with the words running across the page. There's a barrier to literature, and our great masters never meant for it to be that way. And at the end of it all, Nabakov offers his definition of true love (without lauding it as the end-all of all human emotions, mind you), but you must push your way through the novel before you get to this carrot. And feel free to fight the novel's themes, recoil from Humbert Humbert's grotesque lust, and be dragged along on Hum and Lo's adventures through the tourist traps of America. Because, as you may well know, no guts no glory.
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Summary: Most likely the most perfect book ever written.
Review: Nabakov's prose is more like poetry in this most beautifully written novel of popularly forbidden love. He has captured in words perfectly the emotions evoked by what he calls, the nymphet. No matter what the world thinks, Humbert and Lo are really much closer than their ages present. Humbert's quest to recapture his lost innocence is logical but futile in his total love for Lo. I am not worthy of the words to describe the humor and intense passion any human with a heart will feel while reading this book. All I can really say is that everyone on earth should read this ... it is the only book I have truly understood inherently from the moment I opened the cover.
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Summary: (Review)
Review: Sneaky, sneaky, wonderful book. The best parts -- the most revealing and most entertaining -- of Lolita are contained in parentheses, asides, oddments, lists, or clauses offset by dashes. So revelatory are these moments that one might be tempted to ignore the main narrative of this amazing book, but for the fact that every passage of any sort is a wonder. Some examples follow: "I imagined Lo returning from camp -- brown, warm, drowsy, drugged -- and was ready to weep ...". "A few more words about Mrs. Humbert while the going is good (a bad accident is to happen quite soon)" "My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three ..." What this all actually reveals in some symbolic way I have no idea, but I have never seen such a full-scale use of the tools of language in a straightforward (non-Ulysses) book, and I love it. I have read exactly one other novel that comes close to being as entertaining and well-written: the uncelebrated Love Songs of the Tone-Deaf (pleasing, rewarding). A postscript: you know, dear friends, that English wasn't even Nabokov's first language, do you not? (Good God, what absurd talent.)
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