Book Review 075 / Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

 

Lolita

by Vladimir Nabokov

The 100 best novels written in English / The full list

Book Review

The 100 best novels / No 75 / Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)

By Charles J. Rolo

September 1958

Here it is at last, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (Putnam, $5.00)—first issued in 1955 by an unorthodox Paris press after being rejected by a string of American publishers; banned by the French government, presumably out of solicitude for immature English-speaking readers (the ban was later quashed by the French High Court); pronounced unobjectionable by that blue-nosed body, the U. S. Customs office; and heralded by ovations from writers, professors, and critics on both sides of the Atlantic.

 

Rowan Somerville's top 10 of good sex in fiction

From Bram Stoker to Vladimir Nabokov, the novelist selects the best writing about a subject 'central to much of our lives and indeed life itself'

Rowan Somerville
Wed 15 Dec 2010 12.21 GMT

Rowan Somerville is the author of two novels, The End of Sleep and this year's The Shape of Her, described by the Economist as "deceptively simple in plot and singularly musical in its voice, it is a study of the place where our past has become our present. A summer read to be kept – and visited in the dark days of winter..." Last month, the novel followed authors including John Updike and Norman Mailer in winning the Literary Review's Bad Sex in fiction award.

"Most adults are interested in sex. I am. My father was, and said as much to me when he was 92. I suspect that you are too. You're reading this after all. Being so central to much of our lives and indeed life itself, it is a valid and important topic for fiction.

"The challenge of writing about sex is to evoke the physicality, the yearning, the counterpoint between magnificent operatic grandiosity and ludicrous bestial grunting – without resorting to cliché. As the American author Elizabeth Benedict wrote: 'A good sex scene is not always about good sex, but it is always an example of good writing.' As an enthusiastic reader and a writer too, my opinion is that it doesn't matter how weird things get as long as it remains original and feels authentic.

"Some of the sex in the books below works as a device for revealing the state of society, some is a device for characterisation; a way of revealing truths about characters that they themselves may not be able to see – but most of it is just about desire, lust and sex itself."

10. Platform by Michel Houellebecq (2003)

Strange perhaps to begin this list with a book I really dislike – but churlish I feel to leave it out when it is such a reflection of contemporary views. Bleak, cold and mechanical, it's sex in a world without spirit with a faint possibility of redemption through heartless shagging.

9. The Story of O by Pauline Réage (1954)

A male fantasy of total female submission. It was hugely popular but also despised for its objectification of woman – the protagonist is called "O" – no more than a letter, a zero, an orifice. Half a century later it is discovered to be the work of a woman, Anne Desclos, who wrote not for publication but for the pleasure of her lover. It's fascinating: erotic, intense, in parts repellent, frequently pornographic and ultimately self-annihilating.

8. A Boy's Own Story by Edmund White (1982)

Aficionados the world over will laugh at my tentative and no doubt outdated steps into fiction about gay sex, but as a (so far) straight man this was my introduction. Beautiful language, powerful story; saucy too if you can let yourself go.

7. Thongs by Alexander Trocchi (1955)

I bought this because it was meant to be disgusting and then found it to be much more than that. I was disappointed and later inspired – although it is pretty grubby. It was published by the Olympia Press – a Parisian publishing company specialising in erotica and the avant-garde. Five of the 10 books on this list were first published by this extraordinary house along with a host of classics such as Naked Lunch, Tropic of Cancer and The Ginger Man .

6. Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)

This Victorian classic has never been out of print, spawning dozens of books, films and more recently all those camp US teen dramas where sexual passion is faintly camouflaged as bloodlust. The original is a superb gothic tale of repressed sexuality and the savagery of its release. Strange today, that a society can gaze calmly at surgically enhanced teenagers ripping out each others throats and gorging on blood but one naked breast in the American Superbowl and moral panic erupts.

5. Lady Chatterley's Lover by DH Lawrence (1928)

Has to go in. Since everything's already been said about this, let's hear from a great poet: "Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three (which was rather late for me) / Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban/ And The Beatles' first LP." (Philip Larkin "Annus Mirabilis")

4. The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter (1979)

Short stories retelling traditional tales and uncovering the sexual politics within. Her sentences reclaim and radicalise patriarchal language: "her cunt a split fig below the great globes of her buttocks". Funny, original, and brilliant.

3. The Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille (1928)

Unnerving, delicious, completely wrong, provocative, unbridled, surreal, graphically erotic, boundless and imaginative, indulgent and beautiful. What more can I say?

2. The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber (2002)

A work of art by our greatest living writer. The 19th century seen through a fiercely modern cinematic lens. Faber tears the gauze and the drawers off Victorian England with his skilful prose and virtuoso structure. Behold the wonderful heroine Sugar – complex, flaky of skin, keen of mind – ready to do what no one else will. A big book in every sense. Essential.

1. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)

Although about a sociopath's utterly self-serving "love" for a minor this is also one of the greatest novels in the English language. The force of the writing is unparalleled. The balance of humour and horror, sex and satire, irony and delusion is extraordinary, and to me, without flaw. Just as the narrator and protagonist Humbert Humbert seduces Lolita through deceit and thus reveals himself, so we too are seduced, deceived and revealed to ourselves with an artistry and uncompromising cruelty that is an appropriate and profoundly moral commentary on society.

THE GUARDIAN

Nabokov / The man who scandalized the world

Vladimir Nabokov

VLADIMIR NABOKOV: THE MAN WHO SCANDALIZED THE WORLD

Who and what is Vladimir Nabokov (the author of Lolita) and why  

by Helen Lawrenson
December 23, 2019

One of the more diverting aspects of Lolita, the most controversial best seller of the century, has been the considerable speculative curiosity about the private life and personality of Vladimir Nabokov, the virtually unknown university professor who now, at the age of sixty-one, finds himself world famous as the author of this nettlesome novel. The book, denounced in the British Parliament and formerly banned in France, has sold, midst a cacophonic medley of rapturous encomium and emetic distaste, an estimated three million copies in the United States, has been translated into fifteen foreign languages, including the Japanese, and is now, incredibly enough, being made into a Hollywood movie.

Christopher Hitchens / Hurricane Lolita

HURRICANE LOLITA 

by Christopher Hitchens

In Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, in which young female students meet in secret with Xeroxed copies of Nabokov’s masterpiece on their often chaste and recently chadored laps, it is at first a surprise to discover how unscandalized the women are. Without exception, it turns out, they concur with Vera Nabokov in finding that the chief elements of the story are “its beauty and pathos.” They “identify” with Lolita, because they can see that she wants above all to be a normal girl-child; they see straight through Humbert, because he is always blaming his victim and claiming that it was she who seduced him. And this perspective—such a bracing change from our conventional worried emphasis on pedophilia—is perhaps more easily come by in a state where virgins are raped before execution because the Koran forbids the execution of virgins; where the censor cuts Ophelia out of the Russian movie version of Hamlet; where any move that a woman makes can be construed as lascivious and inciting; where goatish old men can be gifted with infant brides; and where the age of “consent” is more like nine. As Nafisi phrases it,

This was the story of a twelve-year-old girl who had nowhere to go. Humbert had tried to turn her into his fantasy, into his dead love, and he had destroyed her. The desperate truth of Lolita’s story is not the rape of a twelve-year-old by a dirty old man but the confiscation of one individual’s life by another. We don’t know what Lolita would have become if Humbert had not engulfed her. Yet the novel, the finished work, is hopeful, beautiful even, a defense not just of beauty but of life … Warming up and suddenly inspired, I added that in fact Nabokov had taken revenge on our own solipsizers; he had taken revenge on the Ayatollah Khomeini …

Nabokov / Playboy interview

Vladimir Nabokov

VLADIMIR NABOKOV: PLAYBOY INTERVIEW (1964)
BIOGRAPHY OF VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Few authors of this generation have sparked more controversy with a single book than a former Cornell University professor with the resoundingly Russian name of Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov. Lolita, his brilliant tragicomic novel about the nonplatonic love of a middle-aged man for a 12-year-old nymphet, has sold 2,500,000 copies in the United States alone.

It has also been made into a top-grossing movie, denounced in the House of Commons, and banned in Austria, England, Burma, Belgium, Australia and even France. Fulminating critics have found it to be “the filthiest book I’ve ever read,” “exquisitely distilled sewage,” “corrupt,” “repulsive,” “dirty,” “decadent” and “disgusting.” Champions of the book, in turn, have proclaimed it “brilliantly written” and “one of the great comic novels of all time”; while Nabokov himself has been compared favorably with every writer from Dostoievsky to Krafft-Ebing, and hailed by some as the supreme stylist in the English language today. Pedants have theorized that the book is actually an allegory about the seduction of the Old World by the New—or perhaps the New World by the Old. And Jack Kerouac, brushing aside such lascivious symbolism, has announced that it is nothing more than a “classic old love story.”

Whatever it is, Nabokov would seem to be incongruously miscast as its author. A reticent Russian-born scholar whose most violent passion is an avid interest in butterfly collecting, he was born in 1899 to the family of a wealthy statesman in St. Petersburg. Fleeing the country when the Bolsheviks seized power, he made his way to England, where he enrolled as an undergraduate at Trinity College in Cambridge. In the Twenties and Thirties he drifted between Paris and Berlin earning a spotty living as a tennis instructor and tutor in English and French; achieving a modest degree of fame as an author of provocative and luminously original short stories, plays, poems and book reviews for the émigré press; and stirring praise and puzzlement with a trio of masterful novels in Russian—Invitation to a Beheading, The Gift and Laughter in the Dark. Finding himself again a refugee when France fell to the Nazis in 1940, Nabokov emigrated with his wife to the United States, where he began his academic career as a research fellow at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. Now writing in English—in a style rich with inventive metaphors and teeming with the philosophical paradoxes, abstruse ironies, sly non sequiturs, multilingual puns, anagrams, rhymes and riddles which both illuminate and obscure his work—he produced three more novels during his subsequent years as a professor in Russian and English literature at Wellesley, and then at Cornell. First came “Bend Sinister,” an unsettling evocation of life under a dictatorship; then “Pnin,” the poignant, haunting portrait of an aging émigré college instructor; and finally the erotic tour de force which was to catapult him almost overnight to worldwide eminence—Lolita.

Nabokov Interviewed by Penelope Gilliatt

Vladimir Nabokov writing in a notebook on the bed.
Photo by Carl Mydans

VLADIMIR NABOKOV 

INTERVIEWED BY PENELOPE GILLIATT 

(1966)

BIOGRAPHY OF VLADIMIR NABOKOV

by Penelope Gilliatt

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), the American novelist, was born in St Petersburg in Russia. He came from an aristocratic family which left Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1919, and studied Russian and French literature at Cambridge. Thereafter he lived in Berlin until the late 1930s, moved to Paris for a couple of years, and emigrated to the United States, taking out US citizenship in 1945. He published novels, written in Russian, in both Berlin and Pans. In the USA he became a university teacher and started writing novels in English, including Bend Sinister (1962) and Lolita (1959), the latter of which provoked an uproar because of its explicitly paedophiliac content. It also brought sufficient fame to enable Nabokov to devote himself to writing on a full time basis. After 1959 he lived in Montreux, Switzerland.

Top 10 authentic romances

Before anyone gets carried away with Valentine’s Day fantasies, these books give a genuine sense of how passion is lived and often lost in the real world


When people recommend love stories to girls, more often than not, they’re cosy, undemanding books, so transparent you can see the outline of the plot just by flicking through the pages. These are books you could never lose yourself in, which never really get under your skin and instead just leave you feeling sluggish. Limp, sparkly books with sparkly covers. Mills and Baloney. Their love stories have nothing to do with the ones we actually live. They tell of affairs that begin badly, end well, and last forever. But the memory of the book, once the final page is turned, fizzles out more quickly than the briefest of passions.

In writing Trysting, I wanted to bring together fragments of love stories that would feel familiar, to record awe, desire, surges of tenderness, rituals, ludicrous obsessions that become necessary crutches, creeping feelings of routine and boredom, suspicion, jealousy, attrition, moments of intense shared loneliness, simple joys, breakups, wrong turnings, beginnings, brief love, everlasting love, and most of all, everyday love. I wanted to write a book about all those moments. I wanted my words to preserve them, keep them from slipping away, and let them surface in my readers’ memories, to help them remember their own past loves, help them love and be loved.

Here are 10 books that give superb accounts of authentic romance – in brief encounters, and also in shared lives. They may be the subject of the whole book or story, or perhaps they are just a moment in the narrative. These encounters are sometimes extraordinary, sometimes ordinary, but never bland: they’re anti-baloney.

Death in Venice
by Thomas Mann
1913

1. Death in Venice by Thomas Mann (translated by Joachim Neugroschel)In search of beauty, an ageing writer falls in love with a teenage boy. As he tracks the boy’s movements through the streets of Venice, the writer is only extrapolating his artistic research. But his goal is as ineffable as it is ephemeral and only death will be there to greet him when he reaches it. When I read this beautiful text for the first time I too was a teenager, but the book’s spell remains just as powerful now.

2. Be Mine by Laura KasischkeSherry, married and in her 40s, receives an anonymous Valentine’s Day card with the message “Be Mine”. Kasischke gives us a minute portrayal of an American reality in which everything, including desire, seems perfectly ordered. She pushes her characters, ordinary people, to the point where their destiny is overturned. We watch as the superficial order is stripped away and they lose control of their lives.

3. The Wake of Forgiveness by Bruce MachartBetween 1895 and 1924, somewhere in the vast expanses of Texas, Machart draws us into a family saga in which four boys confront their father’s coldness and violence. In the midst of these harsh, wonderfully described lives, an all-consuming love is born during a horse race: in the driving rain, the meeting of bodies between horse and rider is echoed in the meeting of bodies between a man and a woman.

4. Sounds by Vladimir Nabokov (translated by Dimitri Nabokov)In this brief story – one of Nabokov’s first published pieces – the narrator describes the end of a love affair in poignant and delicate detail. Yet the story is also, and fundamentally, about the author’s sensuous relationship with nature, which he identifies with Russia and therefore also with his childhood.

5. Where the Sea Used to Be by Rick BassIn a tiny Montana village, life revolves around the bar and the general store. Mel is the daughter of Dudley, a rich, tyrannical geologist. Wallis arrives at the beginning of winter. Bass weaves a many-faceted narrative in which Mel and Wallis’s relationship takes root, grows, and blossoms in a wonderful nocturnal scene in which Mel, on skis, carries Wallis on her back through the snowy forest.

6. Hotel Iris by Yoko Ogawa (translated by Stephen Snyder)In spare and finely nuanced writing, Ogawa describes the unexpected relationship between a rather ordinary young girl and an elegant older man, a solitary and wayward intellectual who will lead his young protege into a highly unusual sexual initiation, pushing her to the very limits of what she can bear. Switching skilfully between scenes of S&M sex and everyday routine, Ogawa engages her readers in a novel that’s both clever and disturbing.

7. A Balcony in the Forest by Julien Gracq (translated by Richard Howard)Deep in the Ardennes at the beginning of the second world war, before any fighting has started, Lieutenant Grange takes up his position at a solitary outpost: a little, tumbledown house in the immense forest. One night he meets Mona: there follows a brief, timeless, sensual happiness, quickly crushed by history. Mona is constantly changing: child-fairy, unicorn, sprite, witch, meadow, stream, rock, rain, waterfall, melting ice, ray of light. In Grange’s imagination, she merges with the forest itself.

8. The Possession by Annie Ernaux (translated by Anna Moschovakis)Having walked away from a man, then learned that he walked straight into another woman’s bed, the narrator is overtaken by a devastating fit of jealousy. Beginning with the most ordinary event, Ernaux plots the incursion of the strange, absurd and consuming sentiment that is jealousy. For it is jealousy that drives the narrator into ever more undignified and ridiculous reactions, all minutely described, as if this machine once set in motion can never be stopped again.

9. Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig (translated by Anthea Bell)On the eve of the first world war, a poor young officer garrisoned in a small Austrian village is filled with pity for a rich young invalid who misinterprets his attentions. This misunderstanding sucks her into an unrequited passion, before she who began as victim turns into tormentor and manipulator. Years later, the officer tells the story of the trap into which his irreconcilable feelings led him, giving us a novel that’s subtly disturbing.

Edward Eriksen’s sculpture of The Little Mermaid in Copenhagen

10. The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen (translated by HP Paull)

There’s no right or wrong age to read – and relive – the most beautiful and appalling love stories. During her brief sojourn on solid ground, the day of her 15th birthday, the little mermaid meets a man. Out of love for him, she agrees to give up her tongue to a witch and to have her tail split in two and transformed into a pair of legs. This causes her dreadful pain, “as if she were stepping on sharp knives”. Agonised anew with every step she takes, the mermaid’s pain feels all the crueller when her beloved, charmed by the mute little mermaid for a while, decides ultimately to marry someone else.

THE GUARDIAN

The three faces of Lolita, or how I learned to stop worring and love the adaptation

Sue Lyon and James Mason
Lolita by Stanley Kubrick

THE THREE FACES OF LOLITA, OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE ADAPTATION

BIOGRAPHY OF VLADIMIR NABOKOV

by Rebecca Bell-Metereau

In 1962, the catholic legion of decency was bound to condemn Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, the story of a middle-aged pedophile who marries a widow, loses her, and then becomes the lover of his adolescent stepdaughter. Thirty-six years later, Adrian Lyne’s 1998 remake confronted a number of the same problems that Kubrick faced in terms of adaptation, censorship, and distribution. The two film adaptations of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita do not exactly follow the old sexist adage about women—the beautiful ones aren’t faithful and the faithful ones aren’t beautiful. In fact, Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film was neither particularly beautiful nor faithful, at least in superficial terms. Robert Stam has questioned the legitimacy of the entire concept, arguing that “we need to be less concerned with inchoate notions of ‘fidelity’ and to give more attention to dialogical responses—to readings, critiques, interpretations, and rewritings of prior material.”¹ When Kubrick released Lolita, the film’s audiences, critics, and would-be censors could not agree on how true to the novel Kubrick’s version was, but fidelity was not the most pressing issue at the time. Kinky sex was the sticking point for many readers and viewers, and although some “felt cheated that the erotic weight wasn’t in the story,” Production Code arbiters objected to its supposed tawdriness.²

Sue Lyon

Sue Lyon, Who Played Lolita in Kubrick Film at 14, Dies at Age 73

By Associated Press
December 30, 2019

(NEW YORK) — Sue Lyon, who at age 14 played the title character in director Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film “Lolita,” has died.

Lyon’s longtime friend Phil Syracopoulos told The New York Times she had been in declining health for some time, and died Thursday in Los Angeles. No further details on her death were provided. She was 73.

Sue Lyon

Lyon was reportedly chosen from some 800 girls who sought the role of “Lolita” for the film based on Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel about a middle-aged literature professor’s sexual obsession with a 12-year-old girl.

Nabokov also wrote the screenplay for Kubrick’s adaptation, whose cast included movie luminaries James Mason, Peter Sellers and Shelley Winters.

Sue Lyon

A close-up of her face wearing heart-shaped sunglasses with a lollipop at her lips was used as the movie’s poster and became its lasting iconic image, despite neither the glasses nor the sucker appearing in the film, which eliminated the book’s more graphic sexual depictions and played up its comic aspects. For Lyon, it was her first film. She had taken a pair of tiny TV roles before it, and would act for nearly 20 years after it, but would never be known for anything nearly as much as for “Lolita.”

Born the youngest of five children in Davenport, Iowa, in 1946, Lyon’s father died before she was one year old. Her mother soon after moved the family to Dallas, then a few years later took her children to Los Angeles, where Lyon took up acting.

Sue Lyon

She got roles in 1959 on “The Loretta Young Show,” where Kubrick noticed her, and in 1960 on “Dennis the Menace.”

Her post-“Lolita” credits included 1964’s “Night of the Iguana” and 1971’s “Tony Rome.” Her final acting job was in the 1980 horror film “Alligator.”

TIME

Wings of desire: how butterflies have captivated artists

From Bruegel to Nabokov and The Silence of the Lambs, butterflies have flitted through our imaginations and into our culture. Patrick Barkham pins up the choice specimens – and finds out why new film The Duke of Burgundy is awash with them

Patrick Barkham
Sunday 15 March 2015 18.00 GMT

S

ignifying sunshine, beauty and freedom, butterflies are ubiquitous in our culture, ever-present on greeting cards and used to sell everything from oven chips to SUVs. For artists, novelists and film-makers, however, butterflies and moths have often taken on darker meanings. In John Fowles’s The Collector, the protagonist (played by Terence Stamp in the film adaptation) is a butterfly obsessive who decides to collect young women. In The Silence of the Lambs, a sinister-looking moth (actually the death’s-head hawkmoth) is a serial killer’s signature. And in The Duke of Burgundy, a new film by Peter Strickland, the story of an S&M relationship is told through butterflies and moths. How have these insects come to symbolise sexual deviancy?