Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

Description

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 the sordid or tragic facts of life in staccato sociology, couch jargon or four-letter words, Lolita is the more shocking because it is both intensely lyrical and wildly funny. It is (in many of its pages) a Medusa’s head with trick paper snakes, and its punning comedy as well as its dark poetics will disappoint the smut hounds—a solemn breed.
Lolita, the critic concluded, wasn’t merely a book worthy of publication despite its subject matter—it was a work of literature with something to teach the world.
Nabokov himself, TIME added, had only a “writer’s interest in nymphets.” It was a different part of the Lolita plot that he had a real personal interest in: the journey from motel to motel. “I love motels,” he told the magazine. “I would like to have a chain of motels—made of marble. I would put one every ten minutes along the highway, and I would travel from one to another with my butterfly net.”
Read the full review here, in the TIME Vault: To the End of Night
First printing published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in 1959, a second impression 1959
A near fine book, tight copy, clean, except, for light coffee stain on pages 91-96, but pages not warped and the text is still vry very visible, (probably and accident) can still be read, No ink inscriptions. The book is tightly bound in “black cloth. The Dust Wrapper is price clipped, in a protective cellophane cover (easily removable no sticky tape) See OUR OWN picture for quality control