Up the Creek Book Club
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© 2000 Kathy Craig |
Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov
November 1999
Synopsis
"Awe and exhilaration-along with heartbreak and mordant wit-abound in Lolita, Nabokov's most famous and controversial novel, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America. Most of all, it is a meditation on love--love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation." (Publisher)
Reviews
- "[Lolita's] illicit nature will both shock the reader into paying attention and prevent sentimentally false sympathy from distorting his judgment. Contrariwise, I believe, Mr. Nabokov is slyly exploiting the American emphasis on the attraction of youth and the importance devoted to the "teen-ager" in order to promote an unconscious identification with Humbert's agonies. Both techniques are entirely valid. But neither, I hope, will obscure the purpose of the device: namely, to underline the essential, inefficient, painstaking and pain-giving selfishness of all passion, all greed-of all urges, whatever they may be, that insist on being satisfied without regard to the effect their satisfaction has upon the outside world. Humbert is all of us." (Elizabeth Janeway - New York Times Book Review)
- "Intensely lyrical and wildly funny." (Time)
- "Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written...that is, ecstatically." (John Updike)
Book Club Rating and Comments
If you or your book club has read this book and would like to share your comments, please email us at upthecreekbc@yahoo.com.
Other Books by Vladimir Nabokov
- 'Ada or Ardor'
- 'The Defense'
- 'Dispair'
- 'Invitation to a Beheading'
- 'Pale Fire'
- 'Pnin'
- 'Speak, Memory'