Word: lolita
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...LOLITA (319 pp.)-Vladimir Nabokov -Putnam...
Nabokov's intellectual luggage included fragments of a book that later, published in Paris in 1955, became a must item of the contraband spice trade in which Henry Miller's Tropics have bulked large. Now. after several years of subterranean fame, Lolita has finally found a U.S. publisher. Following Nabokov's earlier excellent, offbeat novels (including Pnin, TIME, March 18, 1957), Lolita should give his name its true dimensions and expose a wider U.S. public to his special gift-which is to deal with life as if it were a thing created by a mad poet...
...Lolita is a major work of fiction; it is also a shocking book. Prefaced by a fictitious academic fathead who presents it as a message to "parents, social workers, [and] educators," the book describes the transcontinental debauch of a twelve-year-old girl by a middle-aged monomaniac. As it turns out, the narrator is writing his apologia from a prison cell (he is to be tried for murder). As far as erotic detail is concerned, the book tells little that has not been dealt with in a lot of bestselling fiction; but where the sexy bestsellers talk about...
...shame and death, he incessantly searches for a return to that lost, childish kingdom by the sea. He searches through the mail order catalogues of Paris whoredom, through a low-comedy marriage, through Central Park-until he finally finds Annabel's reincarnation in Dolores Haze, known as Lolita. She is his culture-vulture landlady's daughter in a small New England town where Humbert has holed up to do some literary work. The girl is just a gum-chewing, Coke-filled, comic-book-educated sub-teen-ager -but she is Humbert's fatal love...
...Customs, which immaturely barred Ulysses, finds nothing legally obscene in Lolita. But the mature French Ministry of the Interior, apparently pressured by the British Home Secretary, has brought suit to prevent the continued French publication of Lolita on the ground that it is falling into the hands of immature British and American tourists. Nabokov is happily busy with a less controversial work of art, his 2,000-page translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin...