![]() ![]() Humbert introduces himself as a European of mixed stock who, at the age of twelve, "in a princedom by the sea," loved and lost a petite fille fatale named Annabel Leigh, and has thereafter remained in sexual bondage to "the perilous magic" of subteen sirens-he calls them "nymphets." There follows a sketch of his tortured career up to the time when, in his late thirties, he settles in a quiet New England town (an American uncle has left him a legacy, and he dabbles in scholarship) under the same roof as a fatally seductive nymphet, Dolores Haze-a mixture of "tender dreamy childishness and eerie vulgarity." This "Lolita" is the daughter of his landlady, whom he marries with murderous intent. Nabokov, a Russian émigré now working in his second tongue, has few living equals as a virtuoso in the handling of the English language.Ī mock sententious foreword explains that the manuscript which follows is the confession of one Humbert Humbert, who died in captivity in 1952 just before his trial was due to start. His book is slightly reminiscent of Thomas Mann's Confessions of Felix Krull but Lolita has a stronger charge of comic genius and is more brilliantly written. Nabokov has distilled from his shocking material hundred-proof intellectual farce. Lolita blazes, however, with a perversity of a most original kind. But there is not a single obscene term in Lolita, and aficionados of erotica are likely to find it a dud. ![]() The novel's scandal-tinted history and its subject-the affair between a middle-aged sexual pervert and a twelve-year-old girl-inevitably conjure up expectations of pornography. Customs office and heralded by ovations from writers, professors, and critics on both sides of the Atlantic. ![]() ![]() 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. ![]()
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