Few novels of the twentieth century have provoked, disturbed and dazzled readers in equal measure as consistently as Nabokov’s Lolita — a book that ‘There’s no funnier monster in literature than poor, doomed Humbert Humbert’, as the Independent put it, while Martin Amis in the Observer declared it ‘comedy, subversive yet divine’. Humbert Humbert — poet and pervert — becomes consumed by his obsession with twelve-year-old Lolita, seeking to possess her first carnally and then artistically, ‘to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets’. Whether he is in love or insane, a tortured soul or a monster, is among the questions Nabokov’s dizzying masterpiece refuses to answer simply. Humbert’s fixation is only one strand in a novel suffused with savage humour and rich, elaborate verbal textures that reward every rereading. Filmed by Stanley Kubrick in 1962 and again by Adrian Lyne in 1997, Lolita has lost none of its power to shock and awe.
ISBN 13: 9780141182537
Author: Vladimir Nabokov
