Word: lolitas
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Along Humbert's and Lolita's way, there are scenes of horrible irony. CHILDREN UNDER 14 FREE, says a sign at one hotel. But the most truly horrible part of the book is the intimate fashion in which the reader is made to see how from a monstrous relationship a kind of shadow of a good life emerges. Humbert, the false father, often becomes a truly tender pseudo parent; Lolita, the perverted child, becomes a true innocent. In the end-to Humbert's great agony-she is pregnant and happy with a young, goonlike husband...
...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...
...Final Farce. Humbert marries Lolita's mother in order to be near the child. The mother, through Humbert's diaries, discovers his true predilections, runs distraught out of the house and is killed by a car. Now begins the prodigiously clumsy business of Humbert's trying to seduce his own stepdaughter-the fumbling, phony-paternal tenderness, the elaborate scheming, the agony of longing which Author Nabokov manages to make at once ludicrous, terrible and utterly convincing. But in the end, as Humbert tells the event, "it was she who seduced me . . . Modern coeducation, juvenile mores, the campfire...
Nabokov is resigned to the idea that Lolita will be attacked on moral grounds, but he humorously questions the moral standards of at least some U.S. publishers. One firm, he notes, offered to publish the book three years ago if he turned Lolita from a girl into a boy-homosexuality presumably being much more acceptable than nymphet-mania...