Word: lolitas
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...leading a double life, for the most remarkable demonstration of his fictional powers is a novel virtually unknown in the U.S. or abroad. As dark and demoniac as Pnin is gentle and sunlit, this novel has in the past year become a sotto voce scandal on two continents. Lolita, published in English by France's Olympia Press, gives the pornography-v.-art debate its most combustible tinder since Judge Woolsey handed down his famed decision on Ulysses...
Pursuit of Nymphets. The theme of Nabokov's Lolita is the carnal pursuit of a twelve-year-old American girl named Dolores Haze by a middle-aged European emigre in the U.S. named Humbert Humbert. The lurch toward the farcical, implicit in the hero's name, sets the mood and tempo of the entire work. The first of the novel's two volumes becomes an elaborately breakneck, amorally funny chase that mixes the Marx Brothers with Krafft-Ebing. This blurs but does not erase the underlying sensuality of Humbert's admittedly perverse tastes...
...shocker that leaves Humbert a chastened European innocent is that Lolita seduces him. For she is an experienced hoyden who has already been ravished at a fashionable summer camp. In the second volume the sexual farce is more corrosive and the human comedy less exuberant. The couple embark on a kind of illicit grand tour of the 48 states; the settings-hotels, motels and tourist traps-have the infernal cast of a Hieronymus Bosch painting...
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...