Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov / ISBN 9780241638439 / 331-page book published in 2023 in the Penguin Clothbound Classics series
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Vladimir Nabakov’s shocking masterpiece, now in a beautifully designed clothbound edition
‘Lolita is comedy, subversive yet divine’ Martin Amis
Poet and pervert, Humbert Humbert becomes obsessed by twelve-year-old Lolita and seeks to possess her, first carnally and then artistically, out of love, ‘to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets’. Is he in love or insane? A tortured soul or a monster? Humbert Humbert’s seduction is one of many dimensions in Nabokov’s dizzying masterpiece, which is suffused with a savage humor and rich, elaborate verbal textures.
Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), born in St Petersburg, exiled in Cambridge, Berlin, and Paris, became the greatest Russian writer of the first half of the twentieth century. Fleeing to the US with his family in 1940, he then became the greatest writer in English of the second half of the century. He lived in Europe from 1959 onwards, and died in Montreux, Switzerland.
