A great writer can take you inside the mind of someone like Humbert Humbert and make you sympathize with him and want to understand him. Lolita was the first book by Nabokov I’ve ever read, and the greatest. (Though have you read Pale Fire? I had to read that book when I was in grad school, for the Masters in English exam, and it was brilliant! Very odd and funny and sad…). Reading this work I’m constantly amazed at Nabokov’s mastery of the English language, which was not, of course, his native one.
I also love what Nabokov says here about the book:
“I shall never regret Lolita. She was like the composition of a beautiful puzzle — its composition and its solution at the same time, since one is a mirror view of the other, depending on the way you look. Of course she completely eclipsed my other works — at least those I wrote in English: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Bend Sinister, my short stories, my book of recollections; but I cannot grudge her this. There is a queer, tender charm about that mythical nymphet.” (from Playboy, 1964).
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A great writer can take you inside the mind of someone like Humbert Humbert and make you sympathize with him and want to understand him. Lolita was the first book by Nabokov I’ve ever read, and the greatest. (Though have you read Pale Fire? I had to read that book when I was in grad school, for the Masters in English exam, and it was brilliant! Very odd and funny and sad…). Reading this work I’m constantly amazed at Nabokov’s mastery of the English language, which was not, of course, his native one.
I also love what Nabokov says here about the book:
“I shall never regret Lolita. She was like the composition of a beautiful puzzle — its composition and its solution at the same time, since one is a mirror view of the other, depending on the way you look. Of course she completely eclipsed my other works — at least those I wrote in English: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Bend Sinister, my short stories, my book of recollections; but I cannot grudge her this. There is a queer, tender charm about that mythical nymphet.” (from Playboy, 1964).
If you like this, read Disgrace, by J.M.Coetzee