Book summary

Vladimir Nabokov's notorious, hilarious erotic murder mystery takes the form of a monologue by his hero, Humbert Humbert, as he attempts to justify his love for and obsession with the barely adolescent Dolores Haze, known as Lolita. Humbert's cross-country flight with his adored nymphet ends with her betrayal of him with his rival, the evil Quilty, who pursues Lolita not out of love but out of lust and selfishness, and who functions as a kind of double for the more pure-hearted (if perverse) Humbert. Some critics see Humbert (who, like Nabokov, was a European émigré) and Lolita (the quintessentially vulgar American) as personifications of the Old and New Worlds, one corrupting the other (but which?). One of the astonishing aspects of Nabokov's masterpiece is his dazzling command of English, including puns and wordplay worthy of Joyce. Another is the novel's famously checkered publishing history: LOLITA was rejected, banned, censored, and published underground, and it remained unpublished in the US until 1958.

Media reviews

"In recent fiction no lover has thought of his beloved with so much tenderness, no woman has been so lovingly evoked....It is one of the few examples of rapture in modern writing...."