Lolita is probably one of the most controversial books ever written. Quite why is a bit of a mystery to me; it’s about as far from pornography as it is possible to get. Lolita is a work of pure novelistic play and anyone scanning its pages for cheap erotic thrills is going to be very disappointed.
This is probably the most multi-layered novel I know. On the surface, there is a beautifully written novel about a paedophile taking his step-daughter on a road trip around the United States, but below it there are myiad correspondences with other works of literature, and a hidden detective story. There is word play using puns, anagrams, spoonerisms and neologisms, and this makes it at least as dense as Ulysses (to which it frequently refers), although it is both significantly shorter and easier to read.
Nabokov’s style is unbelievably polished and there are frequently sentences of great beauty. Take this, for example:
Next day, an asthmatic woman, coarsely painted, garrulous, garlicky, with an almost farcical Provencal accent and a black mustache above a purple lip, took me to what was apparently her own domicile, and there, after explosively kissing the bunched tips of her fat fingers to signify the delectable rosebud quality of her merchandise, she theatrically drew aside a curtain to reveal what I judged was that part of the room where a large and unfastidious family usually slept.
This is deliberately reminiscent of Proust. In fact, hardly a sentence goes by without an allusion to or pastiche of some great prose master.
Lolita can be read and enjoyed in a normal edition, with no key and with minimal footnoting, but this edition, annotated by Alfred Appel, Jr., allows one to explore the almost endless depths of the text in ways that one would otherwise not be able to.
For all its brilliance though, there is still the question of what Lolita is for. Nabokov is without question a brilliant writer, but is there anything here other than word games and a felicitous style? After having read Lolita twice now, I’m still not sure.
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