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Title: Lolita by Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, Jeremy Irons ISBN: 0-679-45786-0 Publisher: Random House Audio Publishing Group Pub. Date: 01 April, 1997 Format: Audio Cassette Volumes: 8 List Price(USD): $39.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.54 (377 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Piece of Art.....
Comment: This was a wonderful sad novel,it was a mixture of guilt, humor,conflicts, morality, loss of innocence and sexuality.The language was very well written and beautiful prose,its amazing to know that Nabakov wrote this novel in his second language.This is a tale of a middle aged professor ( Humbert) obsessed with a 12 year old girl (Lolita).Humbert allows himself to live his fantasy at the same time running from reality,he replaces his loss of Annabel in his childhood with Lolita. However the audio book which is read by Jeremy Irons is something else.Jeremy Irons voice draws you deeper into the novel and no one can deny that he has a perfect wonderful voice,makes you want to listen over and over again.A true classic.
Rating: 5
Summary: Astonishing, Heartbreaking, Eloquent - and Evil.
Comment: Nabokov's Lolita may be the only major novel of this century that will probably never cease to be controversial. Morals dim, taboos are loosened, but it seems unlikely that this fictional memoir of a pedophile and murderer will ever be 'acceptable' as Joyce and Miller have come to be. But don't let that keep you away from this novel, unless you're easily offended by the subject. Even then, you might want to give it a try.
It's not a work of pornography,nor a straight confessional work. It is a rhapsody in an adopted language; it is an ode to strange, impossible, even disgusting love; it is the greatest tour-de-force any writer since James Joyce has ever pulled off. The text is lovingly, obsessively, horrifically written as a morass of details and metaphors sinking toward a great forbidden subject; the subject is a pre-adolescent 'nymphet,' the hero is insane and twisted, as well as the only real, likable person in the book.
Nabokov's narrator, Humbert Humbert, is a sardonic, cool European (exact origin unknown) who comes to postwar America in the late 1940s, having grown weary of the Old World with its anachronistic, worn-out ways, and sad associations with his past. In particular, there was a girl he knew, a beautiful young nymphet called Annabel, that he met and fell in love with as an adolescent. She was dead a few months later, and she stayed there in Humbert's mind - he spent the rest of his life searching for her, obsessing over her, despairing that he could never have her. Then he spots Dolores Haze, 11 years old, called 'Lolita,' sunning herself as she bops to the radio on the lawn - the typical American girl. She's shallow, whiny and self-absorbed. And, as Humbert sees it, the reincarnation of his lost Lenore - er, Annabel.
So we follow Humbert as his passion, and his madness, consumes him: he marries Lolita's obnoxious mother to be near her, hoping against all reason for a chance to seduce her, and after a fortuitous accident rids him of Charlotte Haze, he takes Lolita off on an endless ride across the American landscape, after she unexpectedly seduces him in a hotel. It's no wild and boisterous Kerouacian road trip; Humbert vividly describes the tedium and ordinariness of American road life - highways, hotels, and hot weather. Then boredom turns to paranoia as Lolita grows weary of his company, and he begins to feel a dark shadow tracing his every step. He knows there is someone following him, very much like him, and desiring Lolita as he did before he had her. By the time his pursuer spirits the willing Lolita away from her hospital bed after she is separated from Humbert's side by a brief malady, he seems almost to have accepted that it will happen, and that he has lost her forever - but he never stops trying to get her back, pursuing his invisible quarry for months, taunted by his evil double's punning false names left in hotel registers. Years later, he finally gets his revenge: not on Lolita, who ends up in a pretty sad position, but on her 'kidnapper' and his mortal opponent, the mysterious Clair Quilty. As he awaits trial in prison, he writes his memoirs, believing that somehow he can make sense of his story only by telling it to others, that they may understand how hypnotized and tortured he was by his 'victim,' and not the other way round.
Nabokov clearly wasn't out to make us sympathize with the desires and motives of a pedophile; indeed, he wants us to feel revulsion at HH's thoughts, however beautifully expressed they are. It sets us up for some dazzling irony: Humbert is both a sympathetic outcast and a menacing predator; almost every other character is portrayed in such a way that he looks attractive and charming by comparison. That is not only the way Humbert sees himself, but the way others see him: as the fictional 'editor' of the novel writes in the introduction, his very charm and wit make us uneasy: this is the disguise of a monster whose real-life counterparts could be, and are, all around us.
Lolita is great literature; it is heartbreaking drama, not because of what happens, but how it happens, and how we are told about it. It is a masterpiece of melancholy; it is evil incarnate. It is, it is.
Rating: 4
Summary: Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins
Comment: Although this is not my favorite writing style, there is no doubt that Nabokov was a highly gifted stylist. This is the story of a middle-aged man and his obsession with a teenage girl-child named Delores. The eroticism is often understated and subliminal but no less intriguing and disturbing, as the first-person narrator reveals this relationship and doomed secret infatuation with the girl.
David Rehak
author of "A Young Girl's Crimes"
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Title: Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi ISBN: 081297106X Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks Pub. Date: 30 December, 2003 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov ISBN: 0679725318 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 19 September, 1989 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title:Lolita ASIN: B00001IVFG Publisher: Vidmark/Trimark Pub. Date: 05 February, 2002 List Price(USD): $9.98 Comparison N/A, buy it from Amazon for $9.98 |
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Title: Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov ISBN: 0679723420 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 23 April, 1989 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald ISBN: 0684801523 Publisher: Scribner Pub. Date: 01 June, 1995 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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