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Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita," that disquieting story about a suave and silver-tongued European émigré who seduces a 12-year-old American girl, was published 50 years ago this month, and Vintage is celebrating with a special anniversary edition. "Lolita" is unlike most controversial books in that its edge has not dulled over time. Where "Ulysses" and "Lady Chatterley's Lover," say, now seem familiar and inoffensive, almost quaint, Nabokov's masterpiece is, if anything, more disturbing than it used to be.
-- Charles McGrath for The NY Times
The dark novel does freely play upon man's curiosity or appetite for that most forbidden of sweetest fruit. For all of Nabokov's troubles in getting the book published, one can marvel that he succeeded at all. Although the book is not pornography, the narrative is relentlessly frank in relating the debauching of the preteen girl, even if she was not a virgin by the time Humbert got her in his clutches.
Mr. McGrath draws out the nice point that a big reason why the novel might be only more provocative today has to do with the heightened consciousness for pedophilia and its prevalence, in our world of predatory Internet and Amber alerts. One recalls the point in the novel in which even our rather pornorific primate-protagonist found Humbert Humbert utterly distasteful: when Hum started imagining being able to have sex with any daughter that might spring from his godforsaken union with Lolita, and then with any granddaughter thereafter. That dispelled whatever fantasy element one might have been enjoying.
Then, of course, the reader is overwhelmed with the unquestionable power of Nabokov's prose, especially in the service of such borderline dreams. As McGrath closes his aticle, "Lolita is a study in seduction of many sorts, not least the seduction of art, which turns out to have no morality at all." And we are so weak.
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Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita," that disquieting story about a suave and silver-tongued European émigré who seduces a 12-year-old American girl, was published 50 years ago this month, and Vintage is celebrating with a special anniversary edition. "Lolita" is unlike most controversial books in that its edge has not dulled over time. Where "Ulysses" and "Lady Chatterley's Lover," say, now seem familiar and inoffensive, almost quaint, Nabokov's masterpiece is, if anything, more disturbing than it used to be.
-- Charles McGrath for The NY Times
The dark novel does freely play upon man's curiosity or appetite for that most forbidden of sweetest fruit. For all of Nabokov's troubles in getting the book published, one can marvel that he succeeded at all. Although the book is not pornography, the narrative is relentlessly frank in relating the debauching of the preteen girl, even if she was not a virgin by the time Humbert got her in his clutches.
Mr. McGrath draws out the nice point that a big reason why the novel might be only more provocative today has to do with the heightened consciousness for pedophilia and its prevalence, in our world of predatory Internet and Amber alerts. One recalls the point in the novel in which even our rather pornorific primate-protagonist found Humbert Humbert utterly distasteful: when Hum started imagining being able to have sex with any daughter that might spring from his godforsaken union with Lolita, and then with any granddaughter thereafter. That dispelled whatever fantasy element one might have been enjoying.
Then, of course, the reader is overwhelmed with the unquestionable power of Nabokov's prose, especially in the service of such borderline dreams. As McGrath closes his aticle, "Lolita is a study in seduction of many sorts, not least the seduction of art, which turns out to have no morality at all." And we are so weak.
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