Word: lolitas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Gradually the prison assumes the aspect of the world-a world in conspiracy to mock the prisoner's hopes and humble his humanity. The prison director's daughter, a kind of pre-Lolita of coquettish innocence, promises to lead him to freedom but never does; the jailers themselves stage an elaborate comedy only to laugh at his false hopes for escape. His past life emerges as a base and saddening farce-his bastard birth, his sluttish wife, his crippled, oafish children who are not really his. And always there is the maddening Alice-in-Wonderland logic by which...
...writer late, reprints of his earlier works sometimes become exciting discoveries. This is what Boris Pasternak's publishers hope for with his slim, 1934 story The Last Summer (see below); similarly, Vladimir Nabokov's literary handlers hope that The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) will acquire Lolita's gilt by association. The first book Nabokov wrote in English (his workshop was the bathroom of his one-room Paris flat), Sebastian Knight has a low sex quotient and no nymphets. Instead, it is devoted to themes that novelists seem to be born with: the question of identity...
...always year 1." There is the verbal clowning, e.g., "optimystics," "sexaphone." Wit and humor often sugar-coat horror in Nabokov's novels, but the poignance of exile haunts his pages like a vestigial memory of original sin. From Sebastian Knight to Lolita, Nabokov has sprung ever more fascinating trap doors, and his ambiguous hell, like Sartre's, has no exit...
...Lolita, Nabokov...
...Lolita, Nabokov...