Lolita
SynopsisPlot
Awe and exhilaration—along with heartbreak and mordant wit—abound in Lolita, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsession 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.
Story
About this book
Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita centers on Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged European man living in postwar America, who develops an obsessive fixation on twelve-year-old Dolores Haze. The novel is presented as Humbert's own account, written in elaborate, self-justifying prose. Through his narration, Nabokov builds a portrait of a man who reshapes his predatory behavior into the language of romance and devotion, leaving the reader to see through the performance.
The book moves across American highways, motels, and small towns as Humbert pursues and controls Dolores. Nabokov, a Russian emigrant who had lived in Germany, France, and the United States, draws a sharp contrast between Humbert's cultivated European sensibility and the roadside culture of 1950s America. The geographical sweep gives the story a restless, displaced quality that mirrors the characters' circumstances.
Nabokov originally wrote Lolita in English, and several American publishers rejected the manuscript before the Paris-based Olympia Press published it in 1955. It was subsequently banned in France and elsewhere before appearing in the United States in 1958 from G.P. Putnam's Sons. The novel's reception was divided between those who considered it a serious literary work and those who viewed it as obscene.
