Word: lolitas
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...book-author lunch in Manhattan not long ago, Vladimir Nabokov faced a formidable force of 1,000 literature-loving women, and when it was announced that, as a feature of the lunch, one of them had won an autographed copy of Lolita, the excited "ooooh" could be heard all the way to Larchmont. Few novels have stirred up so much critical controversy as Nabokov's account of a middle-aged psychopath's passion for a gum-chewing, teenage "nymphet" (TIME, Sept...
Frederic Babcock, editor of the Chicago Tribune's Magazine of Books, proclaimed: "Lolita is pornography, and we do not plan to review it." Other abstainers: the Christian Science Monitor and the Baltimore Sunpapers. But most publications did brace themselves to review the book, and attacks were vehement. The Providence Journal was tempted, but resisted: "After wading along with a kind of fascinated horror through 140,000 words, most readers will probably become bored . . . at times downright sickened . . ." The New York World Telegram's Leslie Hanscom fumed that "there were moments . . . when my whole instinct was to land...
...liberal Catholic weekly, Commonweal: "It has been said that this book has a high literary value; it has much more; a style, an individuality, a brilliance which may yet create a tradition in American letters." Said The New Yorker: "The special class of satire to which 'Lolita' belongs is small but select, and Mr. Nabokov has produced one of its finest examples...
...brightness and fragrance of her hair, and the shape of her body, and her look of readiness for adventure? Why, what other end than that she shall be a really capable airline hostess?" In Esquire, Dorothy Parker succumbed to Nabokov's charms before the reader's eyes: "Lolita is a fine book, a distinguished book-all right, then-a great book...
Split Personalities. Lolita's atmosphere of mental illness seems pervasive, and at least three publications developed schizoid tendencies from reading the book. The New York Herald Tribune sprouted two critical heads with contradictory views: in the Sunday book magazine, Gene Baro praised "a notable consistency and artistic force," but in a daily review John K. Hutchens decided that Lolita "is not, I think, a distinguished work." In the New York Times Sunday book section Novelist Elizabeth Janeway praised Lolita at length ("One of the funniest and one of the saddest books that will be published this year...