Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita III

"To take the heretical view that Lolita, by the ostentatiously-learned and thankfully dead Vladimir Nabokov, is on a par with The Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure, the recently-banished ebook by the hapless molester Philip R. Greaves II, is to place oneself in immediate risk of being labeled a literary Philistine, unable to appreciate the finely-tuned art of the male pedophiliac urge and its containment on a page. But I take such a view, happily.
...
Ultimately, however, it has no more artistic merit than Greaves's 'how-to' because it is merely a fancy 'I-did.'

It's a well-constructed lie within a lie within a lie within a lie. It's a sick joke. It's a pedophile's self-referential love story about himself, to himself. It's fantastically realistic because it is fantastically real ... Imagine the Humbertian ego-gasm that resulted from committing a crime, dressing up the crime as art, publicly confessing the crime, returning to the theme of the crime over and over again, and having the crime judged one of the century's greatest acts.

The reluctance by the literary world to see the crime—to instead howl about art vs. reality, writer vs. character, fact vs. fiction—is perhaps the writer’s biggest triumph."


"a story of a insane."


"I read this book at age thirteen. It was in my parents basement. I was so jealous of Lolita. I wanted to be a nyphette, but I knew I was not. Still when I think about the book, I grow jealous of that girl."


"Read when I was Lolita!"


"Lolita's actions only encouraged this man who continually raped her night after night."


"When I finished the book, I no longer trusted old men who had the same first and last name."


"The paragraphs well sometimes they were longer than a page"


"I want to say that I completely understand Humbert's preference, however I didn't find the guy to honestly be such an intellectual, but more of a person who is simply mixed up about his choice in women. A more normal person in his situation would marry a women that could make him feel loved, and masturbate to child porn in secrecy like an actual person, but there is not a single nymphet in the world that would actually be like any of the ones in this book."


"Nabokov could have saved the world a lot of pain by making this a novella and ending it before Humbert did something stupid."


"Although he never took advantage of Lolita against her will, there was something that just didn't sit right with me and made me uneasy."


"Too disturbing to read...I can find soooo many other lyrical books with better subject matter."


"Nabokov, while teaching at Wellesley College, was surrounded by young female students ... How was he able to portray the psychology of a pedophile so intimately ?
Actually how we know (those who are NOT pedophiles ;-))
that his portraying of pedophile is accurate ?"


"There was also too much French, which never got translated aswell. Not everyone speaks French."


"The premise is so disturbing, the character's thoughts and actions so rash and detestable...I suppose I hoped the author would turn the man to repentence by the end of the book, that the entire reason for writing it was to highlight redemption."


"But all and all, this is a story about pedophilia. Not only that, but the author encourages us to actually sympathize with the criminal, and see little girls, or 'nymphets' as the author refers to them...as objects of exquisite erotic beauty.

Now I don't care how well this author writes, I don't care how well the author is able to move a reader, I refuse to read something where I am positioned to feel sympathetic towards something which is so wrong."


"This book was so, so eyeroll inducing for me"


"I know that during this time the book was written, it was accepted to be with a much younger woman. There were times when 12-17 year old girls were being married off to much much older men as long as they had money. It happens. So, to an extent, I see where he would be attracted to this girl. And I guess I saw the movie and thought, well, maybe he's attracted to this one girl. It does happen."


"For my readers who have not read Lolita (and I don't necessarily recommend that you do, but more about that later), Humboldt is a perverted middle-aged European man living in America."


"Nabokov is possibly using his art and literary skills for the propaganda of the morally disgusting idea that it is possibly excusable to be a pedophile ....

I firmly believe (using the same line of thought that the writer only writes about what is really dear to him) that Dostoevsky at some point of his life, when he was the member of the terrorist organization, was approving idea of murdering a human being"


"The author makes it okay to be a pedophile."