Word: lolitas
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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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...
Humbert's would-be child bride is stolen from him by a playwright with an Aztec Red convertible. When Humbert sees Lolita again she is a post-nymphet 17, pregnant and married to a wholesome ex-G.I. But she still loves the playwright, and in a hilarious and nightmarish murder scene Humbert pumps bullet after bullet into him while the victim protests with phony British aplomb: "Ah. that hurts, sir, enough! Ah, that hurts atrociously, my dear fellow. I pray you, desist...
...Anchor Review, that he need not have gone to this much trouble to be pornographic since "in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of cliches." One critic believes that what Nabokov intended was "a joke on/our national cant about Youth." Graham Greene, who calls Lolita a "distinguished novel," has founded a fictitious anti-pornographic society which needles the book's moralistic critics. Harvard's Professor Harry Levin insists Lolita is "a great book, not primarily sexual at all . . . a symbol of the aging European intellectual coming to America, falling in love with...
...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...