Lolita

By Vladimir Nabokov

The most famous and controversial novel from one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century tells the story of Humbert Humbert’s obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. • With a new introduction by Claire Messud

“The conjunction of a sense of humor with a sense of horror [results in] satire of a very special kind.”—The New Yorker

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

Awe and exhilaration—along with heartbreak and mordant wit—abound in Lolita, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsession for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America.

Most of all, it is a meditation on love—love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Release date: Aug 24, 2010
• ISBN: 9780307744029

Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov (San Petersburgo, 1899-Montreux, 1977), uno de los más extraordinarios escritores del siglo XX, nació en el seno de una acomodada familia aristocrática. En 1919, a consecuencia de la Revolución Rusa, abandonó su país para siempre. Tras estudiar en Cambridge, se instaló en Berlín, donde empezó a publicar sus novelas en ruso con el seudónimo de V. Sirin. En 1937 se trasladó a París, y en 1940 a los Estados Unidos, donde fue profesor de literatura en varias universidades. En 1960, gracias al gran éxito comercial de Lolita, pudo abandonar la docencia, y poco después se trasladó a Montreux, donde residió, junto con su esposa Véra, hasta su muerte. En Anagrama se le ha dedicado una «Biblioteca Nabokov» que recoge una amplísima muestra de su talento narrativo. En «Compactos» se han publicado los siguientes títulos: Mashenka, Rey, Dama, Valet, La defensa, El ojo, Risa en la oscuridad, Desesperación, El hechicero, La verdadera vida de Sebastian Knight, Lolita, Pnin, Pálido fuego, Habla, memoria, Ada o el ardor, Invitado a una decapitación y Barra siniestra; La dádiva, Cosas transparentes, Una belleza rusa, El original de Laura y Gloria pueden encontrarse en «Panorama de narrativas», mientras que sus Cuentos completos están incluidos en la colección «Compendium». Opiniones contundentes, por su parte, ha aparecido en «Argumentos».

Book preview

Part One

1

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.

2

I was born in 1910, in Paris. My father was a gentle, easy-going person, a salad of racial genes: a Swiss citizen, of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube in his veins. I am going to pass around in a minute some lovely, glossy-blue picture-postcards. He owned a luxurious hotel on the Riviera. His father and two grandfathers had sold wine, jewels and silk, respectively. At thirty he married an English girl, daughter of Jerome Dunn, the alpinist, and granddaughter of two Dorset parsons, experts in obscure subjects—paleopedology and Aeolian harps, respectively. My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.

My mother’s elder sister, Sybil, whom a cousin of my father’s had married and then neglected, served in my immediate family as a kind of unpaid governess and housekeeper. Somebody told me later that she had been in love with my father, and that he had lightheartedly taken advantage of it one rainy day and forgotten it by the time the weather cleared. I was extremely fond of her, despite the rigidity—the fatal rigidity—of some of her rules. Perhaps she wanted to make of me, in the fullness of time, a better widower than my father. Aunt Sybil had pink-rimmed azure eyes and a waxen complexion. She wrote poetry. She was poetically superstitious. She said she knew she would die soon after my sixteenth birthday, and did. Her husband, a great traveler in perfumes, spent most of his time in America, where eventually he founded a firm and acquired a bit of real estate.

I grew, a happy, healthy child in a bright world of illustrated books, clean sand, orange trees, friendly dogs, sea vistas and smiling faces. Around me the splendid Hotel Mirana revolved as a kind of private universe, a whitewashed cosmos within the blue greater one that blazed outside. From the aproned pot-scrubber to the flanneled potentate, everybody liked me, everybody petted me. Elderly American ladies leaning on their canes listed toward me like towers of Pisa. Ruined Russian princesses who could not pay my father, bought me expensive bonbons. He, mon cher petit papa, took me out boating and biking, taught me to swim and dive and water-ski, read to me Don Quixote and Les Misérables, and I adored and respected him and felt glad for him whenever I overheard the servants discuss his various lady-friends, beautiful and kind beings who made much of me and cooed and shed precious tears over my cheerful motherlessness.

I attended an English day school a few miles from home, and there I played rackets and fives, and got excellent marks, and was on perfect terms with schoolmates and teachers alike. The only definite sexual events that I can remember as having occurred before my thirteenth birthday (that is, before I first saw my little Annabel) were: a solemn, decorous and purely theoretical talk about pubertal surprises in the rose garden of the school with an American kid, the son of a then celebrated motion-picture actress whom he seldom saw in the three-dimensional world; and some interesting reactions on the part of my organism to certain photographs, pearl and umbra, with infinitely soft partings, in Pichon’s sumptuous La Beauté Humaine that I had filched from under a mountain of marble-bound Graphics in the hotel library. Later, in his delightful debonair manner, my father gave me all the information he thought I needed about sex; this was just before sending me, in the autumn of 1923, to a lycée in Lyon (where we were to spend three winters); but alas, in the summer of that year, he was touring Italy with Mme de R. and her daughter, and I had nobody to complain to, nobody to consult.

3

Annabel was, like the writer, of mixed parentage: half-English, half-Dutch, in her case. I remember her features far less distinctly today than I did a few years ago, before I knew Lolita. There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, with your eyes open (and then I see Annabel in such general terms as: honey-colored skin, thin arms, brown bobbed hair, long lashes, big bright mouth); and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes, on the dark innerside of your eyelids, the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors (and this is how I see Lolita).

Let me therefore primly limit myself, in describing Annabel, to saying she was a lovely child a few months my junior. Her parents were old friends of my aunt’s, and as stuffy as she. They had rented a villa not far from Hotel Mirana. Bald brown Mr. Leigh and fat, powdered Mrs. Leigh (born Vanessa van Ness). How I loathed them! At first, Annabel and I talked of peripheral affairs. She kept lifting handfuls of fine sand and letting it pour through her fingers. Our brains were turned the way those of intelligent European preadolescents were in our day and set, and I doubt if much individual genius should be assigned to our interest in the plurality of inhabited worlds, competitive tennis, infinity, solipsism and so on. The softness and fragility of baby animals caused us the same intense pain. She wanted to be a nurse in some famished Asiatic country; I wanted to be a famous spy.

All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other’s soul and flesh; but there we were, unable even to mate as slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do. After one wild attempt we made to meet at night in her garden (of which more later), the only privacy we were allowed was to be out of earshot but not out of sight on the populous part of the plage. There, on the soft sand, a few feet away from our elders, we would sprawl all morning, in a petrified paroxysm of desire, and take advantage of every blessed quirk in space and time to touch each other: her hand, half-hidden in the sand, would creep toward me, its slender brown fingers sleepwalking nearer and nearer; then, her opalescent knee would start on a long cautious journey; sometimes a chance rampart built by younger children granted us sufficient concealment to graze each other’s salty lips; these incomplete contacts drove our healthy and inexperienced young bodies to such a state of exasperation that not even the cold blue water, under which we still clawed at each other, could bring relief.

Among some treasures I lost during the wanderings of my adult years, there was a snapshot taken by my aunt which showed Annabel, her parents and the staid, elderly, lame gentleman, a Dr. Cooper, who that same summer courted my aunt, grouped around a table in a sidewalk café. Annabel did not come out well, caught as she was in the act of bending over her chocolat glacé, and her thin bare shoulders and the parting in her hair were about all that could be identified (as I remember that picture) amid the sunny blur into which her lost loveliness graded; but I, sitting somewhat apart from the rest, came out with a kind of dramatic conspicuousness: a moody, beetle-browed boy in a dark sport shirt and well-tailored white shorts, his legs crossed, sitting in profile, looking away. That photograph was taken on the last day of our fatal summer and just a few minutes before we made our second and final attempt to thwart fate. Under the flimsiest of pretexts (this was our very last chance, and nothing really mattered) we escaped from the café to the beach, and found a desolate stretch of sand, and there, in the violet shadow of some red rocks forming a kind of cave, had a brief session of avid caresses, with somebody’s lost pair of sunglasses for only witness. I was on my knees, and on the point of possessing my darling, when two bearded bathers, the old man of the sea and his brother, came out of the sea with exclamations of ribald encouragement, and four months later she died of typhus in Corfu.

4

I leaf again and again through these miserable memories, and keep asking myself, was it then, in the glitter of that remote summer, that the rift in my life began; or was my excessive desire for that child only the first evidence of an inherent singularity? When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past. I am convinced, however, that in a certain magic and fateful way Lolita began with Annabel.

I also know that the shock of Annabel’s death consolidated the frustration of that nightmare summer, made of it a permanent obstacle to any further romance throughout the cold years of my youth. The spiritual and the physical had been blended in us with a perfection that must remain incomprehensible to the matter-of-fact, crude, standard-brained youngsters of today. Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the same dreams. We compared notes. We found strange affinities. The same June of the same year (1919) a stray canary had fluttered into her house and mine, in two widely separated countries. Oh, Lolita, had you loved me thus!

I have reserved for the conclusion of my Annabel phase the account of our unsuccessful first tryst. One night, she managed to deceive the vicious vigilance of her family. In a nervous and slender-leaved mimosa grove at the back of their villa we found a perch on the ruins of a low stone wall. Through the darkness and the tender trees we could see the arabesques of lighted windows which, touched up by the colored inks of sensitive memory, appear to me now like playing cards—presumably because a bridge game was keeping the enemy busy. She trembled and twitched as I kissed the corner of her parted lips and the hot lobe of her ear. A cluster of stars palely glowed above us, between the silhouettes of long thin leaves; that vibrant sky seemed as naked as she was under her light frock. I saw her face in the sky, strangely distinct, as if it emitted a faint radiance of its own. Her legs, her lovely live legs, were not too close together, and when my hand located what it sought, a dreamy and eerie expression, half-pleasure, half-pain, came over those childish features. She sat a little higher than I, and whenever in her solitary ecstasy she was led to kiss me, her head would bend with a sleepy, soft, drooping movement that was almost woeful, and her bare knees caught and compressed my wrist, and slackened again; and her quivering mouth, distorted by the acridity of some mysterious potion, with a sibilant intake of breath came near to my face. She would try to relieve the pain of love by first roughly rubbing her dry lips against mine; then my darling would draw away with a nervous toss of her hair, and then again come darkly near and let me feed on her open mouth, while with a generosity that was ready to offer her everything, my heart, my throat, my entrails, I gave her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of my passion.

I recall the scent of some kind of toilet powder—I believe she stole it from her mother’s Spanish maid—a sweetish, lowly, musky perfume. It mingled with her own biscuity odor, and my senses were suddenly filled to the brim; a sudden commotion in a nearby bush prevented them from overflowing—and as we drew away from each other, and with aching veins attended to what was probably a prowling cat, there came from the house her mother’s voice calling her, with a rising frantic note—and Dr. Cooper ponderously limped out into the garden. But that mimosa grove—the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honeydew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since—until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another.

5

The days of my youth, as I look back on them, seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation car. In my sanitary relations with women I was practical, ironical and brisk. While a college student, in London and Paris, paid ladies sufficed me. My studies were meticulous and intense, although not particularly fruitful. At first, I planned to take a degree in psychiatry as many manqué talents do; but I was even more manqué than that; a peculiar exhaustion, I am so oppressed, doctor, set in; and I switched to English literature, where so many frustrated poets end as pipe-smoking teachers in tweeds. Paris suited me. I discussed Soviet movies with expatriates. I sat with uranists in the Deux Magots. I published tortuous essays in obscure journals. I composed pastiches:

… Fräulein von Kulp

may turn, her hand upon the door;

I will not follow her. Nor Fresca. Nor

that Gull.

A paper of mine entitled The Proustian theme in a letter from Keats to Benjamin Bailey was chuckled over by the six or seven scholars who read it. I launched upon an Histoire abrégée de la poésie anglaise for a prominent publishing firm, and then started to compile that manual of French literature for English-speaking students (with comparisons drawn from English writers) which was to occupy me throughout the forties—and the last volume of which was almost ready for press by the time of my arrest.

I found a job—teaching English to a group of adults in Auteuil. Then a school for boys employed me for a couple of winters. Now and then I took advantage of the acquaintances I had formed among social workers and psychotherapists to visit in their company various institutions, such as orphanages and reform schools, where pale pubescent girls with matted eyelashes could be stared at in perfect impunity remindful of that granted one in dreams.

Now I wish to introduce the following idea. Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as nymphets.

It will be marked that I substitute time terms for spatial ones. In fact, I would have the reader see nine and fourteen as the boundaries—the mirrory beaches and rosy rocks—of an enchanted island haunted by those nymphets of mine and surrounded by a vast, misty sea. Between those age limits, are all girl-children nymphets? Of course not. Otherwise, we who are in the know, we lone voyagers, we nympholepts, would have long gone insane. Neither are good looks any criterion; and vulgarity, or at least what a given community terms so, does not necessarily impair certain mysterious characteristics, the fey grace, the elusive, shifty, soul-shattering, insidious charm that separates the nymphet from such coevals of hers as are incomparably more dependent on the spatial world of synchronous phenomena than on that intangible island of entranced time where Lolita plays with her likes. Within the same age limits the number of true nymphets is strikingly inferior to that of provisionally plain, or just nice, or cute, or even sweet and attractive, ordinary, plumpish, formless, cold-skinned, essentially human little girls, with tummies and pigtails, who may or may not turn into adults of great beauty (look at the ugly dumplings in black stockings and white hats that are metamorphosed into stunning stars of the screen). A normal man given a group photograph of school girls or Girl Scouts and asked to point out the comeliest one will not necessarily choose the nymphet among them. You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine (oh, how you have to cringe and hide!), in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs—the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limb, and other indices which despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate—the little deadly demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power.

Furthermore, since the idea of time plays such a magic part in the matter, the student should not be surprised to learn that there must be a gap of several years, never less than ten I should say, generally thirty or forty, and as many as ninety in a few known cases, between maiden and man to enable the latter to come under a nymphet’s spell. It is a question of focal adjustment, of a certain distance that the inner eye thrills to surmount, and a certain contrast that the mind perceives with a gasp of perverse delight. When I was a child and she was a child, my little Annabel was no nymphet to me; I was her equal, a faunlet in my own right, on that same enchanted island of time; but today, in September 1952, after twenty-nine years have elapsed, I think I can distinguish in her the initial fateful elf in my life. We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives. I was a strong lad and survived; but the poison was in the wound, and the wound remained ever open, and soon I found myself maturing amid a civilization which allows a man of twenty-five to court a girl of sixteen but not a girl of twelve.

No wonder, then, that my adult life during the European period of my existence proved monstrously twofold. Overtly, I had so-called normal relationships with a number of terrestrial women having pumpkins or pears for breasts; inly, I was consumed by a hell furnace of localized lust for every passing nymphet whom as a law-abiding poltroon I never dared approach. The human females I was allowed to wield were but palliative agents. I am ready to believe that the sensations I derived from natural fornication were much the same as those known to normal big males consorting with their normal big mates in that routine rhythm which shakes the world. The trouble was that those gentlemen had not, and I had, caught glimpses of an incomparably more poignant bliss. The dimmest of my pollutive dreams was a thousand times more dazzling than all the adultery the most virile writer of genius or the most talented impotent might imagine. My world was split. I was aware of not one but two sexes, neither of which was mine; both would be termed female by the anatomist. But to me, through the prism of my senses, they were as different as mist and mast. All this I rationalize now. In my twenties and early thirties, I did not understand my throes quite so clearly. While my body knew what it craved for, my mind rejected my body’s every plea. One moment I was ashamed and frightened, another recklessly optimistic. Taboos strangulated me. Psychoanalysts wooed me with pseudoliberations of pseudolibidoes. The fact that to me the only objects of amorous tremor were sisters of Annabel’s, her handmaids and girl-pages, appeared to me at times as a forerunner of insanity. At other times I would tell myself that it was all a question of attitude, that there was really nothing wrong in being moved to distraction by girl-children. Let me remind my reader that in England, with the passage of the Children and Young Person Act in 1933, the term girl-child is defined as a girl who is over eight but under fourteen years (after that, from fourteen to seventeen, the statutory definition is young person). In Massachusetts, U.S., on the other hand, a wayward child is, technically, one between seven and seventeen years of age (who, moreover, habitually associates with vicious or immoral persons). Hugh Broughton, a writer of controversy in the reign of James the First, has proved that Rahab was a harlot at ten years of age. This is all very interesting, and I daresay you see me already frothing at the mouth in a fit; but no, I am not; I am just winking happy thoughts into a little tiddle cup. Here are some more pictures. Here is Virgil who could the nymphet sing in single tone, but probably preferred a lad’s perineum. Here are two of King Akhnaten’s and Queen Nefertiti’s pre-nubile Nile daughters (that royal couple had a litter of six), wearing nothing but many necklaces of bright beads, relaxed on cushions, intact after three thousand years, with their soft brown puppybodies, cropped hair and long ebony eyes. Here are some brides of ten compelled to seat themselves on the fascinum, the virile ivory in the temples of classical scholarship. Marriage and cohabitation before the age of puberty are still not uncommon in certain East Indian provinces. Lepcha old men of eighty copulate with girls of eight, and nobody minds. After all, Dante fell madly in love with his Beatrice when she was nine, a sparkling girleen, painted and lovely, and bejeweled, in a crimson frock, and this was in 1274, in Florence, at a private feast in the merry month of May. And when Petrarch fell madly in love with his Laureen, she was a fair-haired nymphet of twelve running in the wind, in the pollen and dust, a flower in flight, in the beautiful plain as descried from the hills of Vaucluse.

But let us be prim and civilized. Humbert Humbert tried hard to be good. Really and truly, he did. He had the utmost respect for ordinary children, with their purity and vulnerability, and under no circumstances would he have interfered with the innocence of a child, if there was the least risk of a row. But how his heart beat when, among the innocent throng, he espied a demon child, enfant charmante et fourbe, dim eyes, bright lips, ten years in jail if you only show her you are looking at her. So life went. Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it was Lilith he longed for. The bud-stage of breast development appears early (10.7 years) in the sequence of somatic changes accompanying pubescence. And the next maturational item available is the first appearance of pigmented pubic hair (11.2 years). My little cup brims with tiddles.

A shipwreck. An atoll. Alone with a drowned passenger’s shivering child. Darling, this is only a game! How marvelous were my fancied adventures as I sat on a hard park bench pretending to be immersed in a trembling book. Around the quiet scholar, nymphets played freely, as if he were a familiar statue or part of an old tree’s shadow and sheen. Once a perfect little beauty in a tartan frock, with a clatter put her heavily armed foot near me upon the bench to dip her slim bare arms into me and tighten the strap of her roller skate, and I dissolved in the sun, with my book for fig leaf, as her auburn ringlets fell all over her skinned knee, and the shadow of leaves I shared pulsated and melted on her radiant limb next to my chameleonic cheek. Another time a red-haired school girl hung over me in the métro, and a revelation of axillary russet I obtained remained in my blood for weeks. I could list a great number of these one-sided diminutive romances. Some of them ended in a rich flavor of hell. It happened for instance that from my balcony I would notice a lighted window across the street and what looked like a nymphet in the act of undressing before a co-operative mirror. Thus isolated, thus removed, the vision acquired an especially keen charm that made me race with all speed toward my lone gratification. But abruptly, fiendishly, the tender pattern of nudity I had adored would be transformed into the disgusting lamp-lit bare arm of a man in his underclothes reading his paper by the open window in the hot, damp, hopeless summer night.

Rope-skipping, hopscotch. That old woman in black who sat down next to me on my bench, on my rack of joy (a nymphet was groping under me for a lost marble), and asked if I had stomachache, the insolent hag. Ah, leave me alone in my pubescent park, in my mossy garden. Let them play around me forever. Never grow up.

6

A propos: I have often wondered what became of those nymphets later? In this wrought-iron world of criss-cross cause and effect, could it be that the hidden throb I stole from them did not affect their future? I had possessed her—and she never knew it. All right. But would it not tell sometime later? Had I not somehow tampered with her fate by involving her image in my voluptas? Oh, it was, and remains, a source of great and terrible wonder.

I learned, however, what they looked like, those lovely, maddening, thin-armed nymphets, when they grew up. I remember walking along an animated street on a gray spring afternoon somewhere near the Madeleine. A short slim girl passed me at a rapid, high-heeled, tripping step, we glanced back at the same moment, she stopped and I accosted her. She came hardly up to my chest hair and had the kind of dimpled round little face French girls so often have, and I liked her long lashes and tight-fitting tailored dress sheathing in pearl-gray her young body which still retained—and that was the nymphic echo, the chill of delight, the leap in my loins—a childish something mingling with the professional frétillement of her small agile rump. I asked her price, and she promptly replied with melodious silvery precision (a bird, a very bird!) Cent. I tried to haggle but she saw the awful lone longing in my lowered eyes, directed so far down at her round forehead and rudimentary hat (a band, a posy); and with one beat of her lashes: Tant pis, she said, and made as if to move away. Perhaps only three years earlier I might have seen her coming home from school! That evocation settled the matter. She led me up the usual steep stairs, with the usual bell clearing the way for the monsieur who might not care to meet another monsieur, on the mournful climb to the abject room, all bed and bidet. As usual, she asked at once for her petit cadeau, and as usual I asked her name (Monique) and her age (eighteen). I was pretty well acquainted with the banal way of streetwalkers. They all answer dix-huit—a trim twitter, a note of finality and wistful deceit which they emit up to ten times per day, the poor little creatures. But in Monique’s case there could be no doubt she was, if anything, adding one or two years to her age. This I deduced from many details of her compact, neat, curiously immature body. Having shed her clothes with fascinating rapidity, she stood for a moment partly wrapped in the dingy gauze of the window curtain listening with infantile pleasure, as pat as pat could be, to an organ-grinder in the dust-brimming courtyard below. When I examined her small hands and drew her attention to their grubby fingernails, she said with a naïve frown "Oui, ce n’est pas bien," and went to the washbasin, but I said it did not matter, did not matter at all. With her brown bobbed hair, luminous gray eyes and pale skin, she looked perfectly charming. Her hips were no bigger than those of a squatting lad; in fact, I do not hesitate to say (and indeed this is the reason why I linger gratefully in that gauze-gray room of memory with little Monique) that among the eighty or so grues I had had operate upon me, she was the only one that gave me a pang of genuine pleasure. "Il était malin, celui qui a inventé ce truc-là," she commented amiably, and got back into her clothes with the same high-style speed.

I asked for another, more elaborate, assignment later the same evening, and she said she would meet me at the corner café at nine, and swore she had never posé un lapin in all her young life. We returned to the same room, and I could not help saying how very pretty she was to which she answered demurely: Tu es bien gentil de dire ça and then, noticing what I noticed too in the mirror reflecting our small Eden—the dreadful grimace of clenched-teeth tenderness that distorted my mouth—dutiful little Monique (oh, she had been a nymphet all right!) wanted to know if she should remove the layer of red from her lips avant qu’on se couche in case I planned to kiss her. Of course, I planned it. I let myself go with her more completely than I had with any young lady before, and my last vision that night of long-lashed Monique is touched up with a gaiety that I find seldom associated with any event in my humiliating, sordid, taciturn love life. She looked tremendously pleased with the bonus of fifty I gave her as she trotted out into the April night drizzle with Humbert Humbert lumbering in her narrow wake. Stopping before a window display she said with great gusto: Je vais m’acheter des bas! and never may I forget the way her Parisian childish lips exploded on bas, pronouncing it with an appetite that all but changed the a into a brief buoyant bursting o as in bot.

I had a date with her next day at 2.15 P.M. in my own rooms, but it was less successful, she seemed to have grown less juvenile, more of a woman overnight. A cold I caught from her led me to cancel a fourth assignment, nor was I sorry to break an emotional series that threatened to burden me with heart-rending fantasies and peter out in dull disappointment. So let her remain, sleek, slender Monique, as she was for a minute or two: a delinquent nymphet shining through the matter-of-fact young whore.

My brief acquaintance with her started a train of thought that may seem pretty obvious to the reader who knows the ropes. An advertisement in a lewd magazine landed me, one brave day, in the office of a Mlle Edith who began by offering me to choose a kindred soul from a collection of rather formal photographs in a rather soiled album (Regardez-moi cette belle brune!). When I pushed the album away and somehow managed to blurt out my criminal craving, she looked as if about to show me the door; however, after asking me what price I was prepared to disburse, she condescended to put me in touch with a person qui pourrait arranger la chose. Next day, an asthmatic woman, coarsely painted, garrulous, garlicky, with an almost farcical Provençal accent and a black mustache above a purple lip, took me to what was apparently her own domicile, and there, after explosively kissing the bunched tips of her fat fingers to signify the delectable rosebud quality of her merchandise, she theatrically drew aside a curtain to reveal what I judged was that part of the room where a large and unfastidious family usually slept. It was now empty save for a monstrously plump, sallow, repulsively plain girl of at least fifteen with red-ribboned thick black braids who sat on a chair perfunctorily nursing a bald doll. When I shook my head and tried to shuffle out of the trap, the woman, talking fast, began removing the dingy woolen jersey from the young giantess’ torso; then, seeing my determination to leave, she demanded son argent. A door at the end of the room was opened, and two men who had been dining in the kitchen joined in the squabble. They were misshapen, bare-necked, very swarthy and one of them wore dark glasses. A small boy and a begrimed, bowlegged toddler lurked behind them. With the insolent logic of a nightmare, the enraged procuress, indicating the man in glasses, said he had served in the police, lui, so that I had better do as I was told. I went up to Marie—for that was her stellar name—who by then had quietly transferred her heavy haunches to a stool at the kitchen table and resumed her interrupted soup while the toddler picked up the doll. With a surge of pity dramatizing my idiotic gesture, I thrust a banknote into her indifferent hand. She surrendered my gift to the ex-detective, whereupon I was suffered to leave.

7

I do not know if the pimp’s album may not have been another link in the daisy-chain; but soon after, for my own safety, I decided to marry. It occurred to me that regular hours, home-cooked meals, all the conventions of marriage, the prophylactic routine of its bedroom activities and, who knows, the eventual flowering of certain moral values, of certain spiritual substitutes, might help me, if not to purge myself of my degrading and dangerous desires, at least to keep them under pacific control. A little money that had come my way after my father’s death (nothing very grand—the Mirana had been sold long before), in addition to my striking if somewhat brutal good looks, allowed me to enter upon my quest with equanimity. After considerable deliberation, my choice fell on the daughter of a Polish doctor: the good man happened to be treating me for spells of dizziness and tachycardia. We played chess: his daughter watched me from behind her easel, and inserted eyes or knuckles borrowed from me into the cubistic trash that accomplished misses then painted instead of lilacs and lambs. Let me repeat with quiet force:

Reviews for Lolita

[MariaED · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A book of wonderful prose and a very harsh theme. In its pages, there is no room for love; love does not exist in this story, and I still wonder (with quite a bit of disgust) how this novel can be classified as "romantic," for anyone who considers it a love story must be insane.

The author manages to convey a feeling of horror and unease from the confession of the protagonist, already in prison, which is nothing more than a string of justifications and romanticizations of a monster. To achieve this, he uses brilliant and beautiful prose, which I adored, in contrast to the horrible truth: a pedophile trying in vain to empathize with the reader, a brutal monster that leaves a trail of victims in his wake. (Translated from Spanish)

[Lismonroy · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Honestly, I was afraid to read this novel because of its controversial themes. The story is repulsive because it deals with very dark and morally questionable topics. At the same time, I was captivated by the way Nabokov writes, with his elegant prose and his ability to develop complex and deep characters. This mix of feelings showcases his great talent as a writer, and in the end, I can say that I enjoyed the reading. (Translated from Spanish)

[yuyuchaan7 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book left me with an existential void and a desire to unsubscribe H.H from life. (Translated from Spanish)

[Anelena · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Lolita is a great contemporary classic that hooks, horrifies, and repulses in equal parts; it is a difficult read. The first part is enticing, but in the second, sometimes "Humbert" wanders into paths and reflections that are easy to get lost in; at times it becomes very tedious and burdensome. It is a book written exquisitely, with an admirable skill for storytelling, full of wordplay. But beware! Nabokov humanizes the protagonist, shows us his feelings, his suffering, his doubts... and with this, there is a danger that malicious minds may misinterpret the text and empathize too much with the protagonist, justifying his thoughtless actions and considering this novel an innocuous love story where Lolita inevitably ends up as the villain of the tale. For all this, I cannot give it a higher rating, I'm sorry, but there were moments in the reading where I felt true disgust. (Translated from Spanish)

[mipedtor · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A complex, coarse novel that does not leave one indifferent. Nabokov writes very well; he has a surprising skill for storytelling, metaphors, and wordplay. Enrique Tejedor, the translator of this edition, surely had to work hard to bring as much as possible from the original narrative. It is true that the storyline sometimes progresses through complicated paths and reflections or in planes so removed from the scene's moment that it is easy to get lost. Even so, I acknowledge that Nabokov, whose native language was Russian and who decided to write this work in English, was a genius of letters.

But aside from the style, the story told is equally uncomfortable and captivating. It recounts in the first person the life of Humbert, a Parisian with an English mother and a Swiss father, whose early adolescent happiness was forever marked by an idyllic love for a pubescent girl. This will cause a lifelong longing for that idealized girl that he will never be able to compensate for with his future relationships. He will always seek ways to satisfy his obsession and the need to smother that passion for pre-adolescent girls.

Supreme ideas of love are expressed, fully romantic and vital, but intertwined with the sensation of morally reprehensible thoughts. Moreover, the protagonist is aware at all times that what he does or feels is not right and that society will never understand him. Yet, his impulses, far from being those of an obsessive psychopath, remain ever-present, taking the reins of his life from time to time. It is when he moves to the United States and meets the widow Charlotte Haze that his life takes a turn upon meeting her 12-year-old daughter, Dolores Haze (Lolita).

I won’t divulge more about the plot, but I will mention how the novel evolves through increasingly tangled styles and paths. The eroticism of some scenes, abuse, jealousy, obsession, the prostitution of the relationship, lies, desperation, hopelessness, loyalty, idealism, morality, self-satisfied society... Perversion, kidnapping, revenge... There are so many scenes, so many themes to address, that it seems incredible to me that this work was published in 1958 in the United States, not without enormous difficulties. And it is that, above the reprehensible pedophilic obsession and the actions of its protagonist, the work plays with feelings and, like a con artist, handles the most painful truths about our society: extreme conformism, systematic acceptance, or excess in self-indulgence. Humbert is self-indulgent to the point of excess. But the other people he encounters who could truly do something to help him or prevent the drift of his actions are too. Even the system itself is an unwitting accomplice.

A novel that at times felt a bit slow or heavy to me, but which is a carousel of emotions. A journey from which you want to escape but want to know how it ends. A reflective and provocative text that does not leave one indifferent. It must be read. (Translated from Spanish)

[MeruXim · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I thought it was quite strong but very well written. (Translated from Spanish)

[Rocio Sol · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

How terrifying is the human mind? ?‍?
A psychological book that I loved. It takes you inside the head of a pedophile.
I heard that the prose was very lyrical, and although I didn't feel it was that much, I liked it.
I feel sorry for Lolita. Just thinking about what it would be like to live in her shoes makes me shudder.
The author leaves it up to us, the readers, to have opinions on the subject. He tells us about pedophilia in a natural way. It's ugly to think that this happens in real life.
How many pedophiles exist? How many are treated? How do we identify them? How do we protect ourselves?
These are some of the questions that lingered in my mind while and after reading the book.
The two main characters are well-structured. It’s harder to understand Lolita’s behavior, but how can one fully understand the actions of a girl abused since childhood?
On the other hand, being narrated by the pedophile helps you understand, but you don’t agree with what is happening. You are on the edge of your seat the whole time to see how the story unfolds.
It is definitely one of my favorite books of the year. You can’t stop reading it. It grabs you. You devour it despite its length. The entire story moves you. It’s a terrifyingly beautiful book. (Translated from Spanish)

[Carlos83 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Lolita:

After reading it, I was left with the concept that it is a work that, while having quality in its prose and offering a rich language with appropriate pacing for us, as readers, to engage in what is happening and how the characters evolve, owes much of its aura as a mythical novel, a classic of the 20th century, to the fact that Lolita has become an archetype and the controversial (and prohibited) nature of the relationship between the characters.

This taboo, and nothing more, is the author’s main resource to keep the reader engaged until the end. I acknowledge that it is a classic and, as such, I encourage anyone to read it, but I consider it somewhat overrated as entertainment. (Translated from Spanish)

[RUE · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It's incredible that this book has horrified me, in the sense that it is beautifully written that it almost makes me understand Humbert; Vladimir is dangerous when writing.

It tells the story of the pedophile Humbert Humbert, as he sees through his twisted gaze and bestial actions toward Dolores Haze. One must be very careful, as the way he describes and treats her is how he perceives her. Humbert can be a damn manipulator, and it is incredible how he gradually destroys the mental and emotional balance of little Lolita (Dolores Haze). (Translated from Spanish)

[Yunah · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

In the infinite forms of the universe, statistics reserves a space where all the ingredients come together for a pedophile to fulfill their dreams.... Oh surprise, it's not that much fun. Is it easier to judge than to give in to temptation? Is there any difference? I struggle to find the adjectives, the words elude me.

There are no great surprises in the story; what's surprising is that in the end, you don't want to tear the protagonist's head off. I even have to admit that they stole a bit of my heart, and that already has a lot of value in itself, because it's hard to empathize with the protagonist; they have earned their reputation for a reason.

If you liked my little review, you can leave me a ❤️ and let me know what you think? Would you read it...? Without a doubt, an invitation to reflect on oneself. (Translated from Spanish)

[Stephanie.Books · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I had many doubts about reading this book because of the context; in the end, I decided to do it. I told myself that if I've already read "Memories of My Melancholy Whores," I could read this one ?
Buuut... I didn't like the book that much, and I know there are many people who loved it.
I liked the beginning of the book and it caught me; the context is good in a certain sense, it's very well narrated, and the way it expresses Humbert's feelings resonates with you (up to a point, I felt he was romanticizing a lot of what Humbert felt for 12-year-old Dolores).
I feel like there were parts where the story hardly advanced, and it became a bit boring ? there were too many pages dedicated to narrating the whole journey they took, and the last pages were the ones that caught me again; they were even moving, especially this phrase: "He broke my heart. You broke my life" ?
In conclusion, this book wasn't for me ? (Translated from Spanish)

[1gabrielpaz · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

To talk about "Lolita," it is an inescapable fact to talk about Nabokov. For many years, he dedicated himself to teaching literature. He maintained a stance that affirmed and defended literature as an artistic manifestation. For Nabokov, writing was art. We can see this reflected in his extremely elegant and aesthetic prose, flirting with poetic snippets. Besides that, Nabokov is one of those authors who demands from the reader. Not all of his works are easy reads; one must pay significant attention to details, and he often leaves messages between the lines. "Lolita" is no exception.

I refrain from commenting on the plot, as I am sure that the vast majority know what it is about or have an idea of it. Perhaps the premise in the past was somewhat exaggerated, leading to the work and the author being vilified for writing "pornography." In fact, Nabokov expressed on more than one occasion that "Lolita" is not an apologia for pedophilia.

Much has been said about this book and will continue to be said; for a reason, it is considered a contemporary classic nearly 70 years after its publication. Reading reviews and comments from some readers, I noticed that most expressed sympathy for Humbert Humbert, as his prose was very seductive and invited the reader to remain entranced. That was not my case. I did not sympathize with Lolita either. No character stirred any emotion in me. I was a mere spectator of the events.

Personally, I think the second part of the book becomes repetitive and somewhat boring. I did not abandon it because of Nabokov's masterful prose and how Humbert Humbert interacts with the reader. It is impressive the mastery and the number of literary resources that Nabokov employed to write this work, to the point of seeming easy, but it is not.

If anyone is considering reading "Lolita" and is hesitant, I hope they give themselves the opportunity; it is completely worth it. As I mentioned earlier, the reading demands from the reader, but the final reward is satisfying.

P.S. Nabokov was also an entomologist, a specialist in lepidopterology, having discovered several species of butterflies and moths. (Translated from Spanish)

[José Antonio Lopera Vilchez · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The author's crowning work. The physical attraction to a 12-year-old girl later turns into a morbid passion, filled with love and wrapped in a thirst for revenge against the person who took her away, also a depraved individual suffering from pedophilia who forced minors into prostitution or made pornographic films, to the point of killing him. A rich prose and perfectly constructed phrases based on metaphors that sometimes go unnoticed. In the Anagrama edition, there are various typographical errors. At the end of the book, the author himself analyzes the world of pornography and what it means for him to write a novel, far from conventionalisms, so that the reader feels empathy for literature, for words.

Its main protagonists are:

Annette: The love of childhood that left a deep mark on Humbert, the protagonist of the novel, after her death.

Monique: A young prostitute.
Valeria: His first wife, who left him for another man and later died.

Charlotte: The mother of Lolita and Humbert's second wife, whom he did not love and married to be near Lolita.

Lolita: The teenager for whom Humbert feels a strong attraction and becomes a possessive love, unable to let anyone be close to her.

Page 195.- He makes an excellent argument about modern teaching, based more on experience than on theory, although he later finds that all education falls into conventionalisms. (Translated from Spanish)

[Ana Loras · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Everyone knows what this book is about. I knew it too, but I had no idea what I was going to encounter, and I found a novel that I liked very much, wonderfully written, which, despite dealing with such a harsh subject as pedophilia, uses a language that never becomes vulgar, does not use obscene words, does not describe explicit scenes, but this does not mean it doesn't clearly talk about the subject.

Told in the first person, we will learn this story from the mouth of its protagonist, Humbert Humbert, a forty-something writer who is attracted to girls, specifically those he labels as "nymphets," girls aged between 9 and 14 who exert a seductive power over men, and this description serves Humbert to excuse his attitude, his desires, which lead him to seek places where he knows he will find these girls and sit and observe them. Until circumstances lead him to meet Lolita, a girl of barely twelve years old whom he claims to fall in love with.

There are many reviews of this book, with a variety of opinions. I will leave mine.

For me, Humbert is simply a pedophile who goes from observing the girls to abusing one of them, Lolita, as soon as the opportunity arises. An opportunity that he makes sure to force.

And Lolita is an abused child. It doesn't matter if at some point she tries to take advantage of the situation, of that attraction she knows Humbert feels for her. She is a child, barely twelve years old, and no creature should be subjected to the manipulations and sexual harassment of an adult.

Humbert is very aware of what he is doing. He himself describes his desires as degrading and dangerous, he defines himself as pathetic, as a sexual offender, and admits that he has robbed Lolita of her childhood, whom he refers to as girl-slave. He knows very well that he is abusing her, an abuse that he prolongs over time, acts aggravated by the fact that he is her legal guardian.

Much more could be said about this work, which must be read slowly to not miss anything between its lines, but better yet, if it piques your interest, read it.

To conclude, I would like to comment that in some places I have read about LOLITA that it is "a love story between an adult and a teenager." I completely disagree. It is not a love story; I have not found love in any of its pages. It is a story of obsession and abuse of an adult towards a child. (Translated from Spanish)

[CuquisSandoval · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A book narrated from the perspective of the protagonist, who steals the voice of the heroine, a 12-year-old girl who is violated time and again. It is a very erotic book that portrays the passions of a man towards a young girl who is barely developing. He claims that she incites him, motivates him to possess her. It is not written with an educational intent, but to shed light on how incest can occur when least expected and to showcase the fierce instincts of certain men. (Translated from Spanish)

[Aurinka · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Reading Lolita has completely changed my understanding of it. Undoubtedly influenced by the cinema and other adaptations.

Nabokov presents us with a story of pedophilia, where Humbert, a 40-year-old man, "falls in love" with a 12-year-old girl. He knows at all times that he is sick and openly declares this in his memoirs, which is why I don't understand the perspective some people have, saying that it is a love story. Not at all, she is 12 years old!

The character of Humbert is very well crafted; therein lies the crux of the matter. How he leads some people to his ground and they believe justifications that he doesn't even propose. He is cultured, educated, and attractive... a true snake charmer... detestable! The book is gripping; it had me talking to myself. I was eager for nightfall to dive into it and take down Humbert.

It is written really well, with a spectacular richness of vocabulary, but at times it felt a bit dense to me.

My debut with the Russians has been a success. While I don't think it's a reading to recommend openly, it is definitely worth it. And if you get the chance to do it with someone else, even better! A joint reading with Maren, without whom I would never have thought to read it. A pleasure ?? (Translated from Spanish)

[Mamen Puerto · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It's a book that you have to read, no matter what, it's also written!!!! Although the story is... crazy. (Translated from Spanish)

[lamoleanaya · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A troubled man incessantly seeks how to culminate an act that he could not leave behind. Once he finds the lolita of his story, he travels for two years giving free rein to his most intimate desires. Humbert (the protagonist) ends up abandoned by lolita, who has found a man who seems to take good care of her.

It's an interesting read. I thought I would see a more vulgar lexicon, a more naked text; however, the allegories and the almost poetic way of writing gave the novel a new image in my eyes. It's also interesting to see how Humbert himself realizes his psychological problem; however, he was never fully committed to addressing his mental health. A good book, recommended as a study read or simply for enjoyment. (Translated from Spanish)

[el desván de Libros de Kat · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I really enjoyed reading it; before this book, I had heard about the "lolita" trend, and it was interesting and entertaining to learn about its origins. Nabokov's writing style was simply extraordinary in this book. (Translated from Spanish)

[BitrizOrrego · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I have always wanted to read this book and I feel it mostly met my expectations, although at times it would digress, deviate from the main idea, use difficult-to-understand similes, and include many passages in French. Despite the fact that it is evident that the villain is Humbert, I ended up feeling a lot of pity for him throughout the entire book. (Translated from Spanish)

[Danielgarcialan65 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book has brought about, I believe unlike almost any other, a huge disparity of opinions among readers regarding whether it is a literary masterpiece or a perverse story. It was banned in many places for a long time, especially considering the sociocultural context of the 1950s. In my opinion, it is a remarkable literary work where satire, the psychological conflict of Humbert Humbert (the main character alongside Dolores, Lolita), the precision in the detailing of the landscape and American society of that time, and a critique of society are intertwined. The narrative is gripping, and its plot still has sensual connotations today. Highly recommendable. It's also good to watch the 1999 film with Jeremy Irons and Melanie Griffith. (Translated from Spanish)

[Untalgonzalez · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A novel that made me feel uncomfortable like no other book. I was about to abandon it on several occasions. I'm glad I didn't. It's truly a great book. (Translated from Spanish)

[Andy Diaz · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

First of all, I have to admit how much I enjoyed Mr. Nabokov's writing style; it was largely his delicious storytelling that kept me hooked to the reading, and yet it took me yyyyyeeeaaars to finish it.
I find this book dense not only because of the plot but also because there are paragraphs that are very descriptive or some that have tremendous monologues from Humbert Humbert that, wow, I really had to make a huge effort to concentrate and follow the thread. However, I think it's a book that, even just for general knowledge, deserves a chance.

I'm sure you already know the plot: a guy, or rather a gentleman, "falls in love" with a little girl and does everything possible to keep her by his side, either by her own will or by forcing her to do so.
I'm not going to lie to you, although for a good part of the story, poor Lolita seemed tremendously unbearable to me, I did feel a lot of pity for her, especially when, **SPOILER ALERT! (Or I think it might be a spoiler for some, I don't know) Humbert himself shows us that she knew she was a prisoner not only of her companion but also of the unfortunate circumstances that had left her so vulnerable.**

I have acquaintances who have refused to read it because they say, Nabokov is a little pervert. I honestly don't know about that, but I do recommend giving it a chance so that when they are asked about it, they can provide an argument beyond "Nabokov is a little pervert." (Translated from Spanish)

[NatA · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I had conflicts with this book from its early pages, and it has nothing to do with the narrative, which is simply exquisite, even in its twisted conception... I literally wanted to smash a chair over Humbert Humbert, the protagonist of this novel. Reading his syrupy and delirious account of how he took advantage of Dolly while claiming he loved her is disturbing, painful, and uncomfortable; I wished it would stop, that something or someone would appear! I even thought about abandoning the reading, but curiosity got the better of me; I needed to know the outcome, for better or worse.

"Oh my poor little barely-formed darling. I wanted you.
It was a pentapod monster, but I
wanted you. It was despicable and brutal,
and depraved beyond anything I could imagine,
but I wanted you! And there were
moments when I knew exactly how much time
was passing for you, and knowing it was hell, my small
sweet little Dolly, my sugary Dolly Schiller."

Lolita is not for everyone, it does not aim to impart any moral lesson; it is a work of fiction that provides aesthetic pleasure, plain and simple, as its author points out, and I agree. It is written in a wild and extraordinary way, though confusing as well; I attribute that to the translation. I think that no matter how careful it is, it can never do total justice to the original writing, with the nuances of its language and culture. In any case, I don’t know Russian, so that’s that.

I entered those pages under warning; I was wary of the story... But I survived!

Although I did end up a bit traumatized ? (Translated from Spanish)

[micaaborzino · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book is very controversial but I love it; it was very difficult for me to read because I found everything that Dolores had to go through at the hands of Humbert very disgusting. Nabokov is a very good writer because he literally created this story from the perspective of a pedophile, and that's extremely complicated, and even more complicated is making it seem like a romantic story. Be careful, because this book is not about romance no matter how much it seems that way; it tells a very sad and even distressing story and also a reality that is pedophilia, sexual abuse, and kidnapping. Despite being a quite difficult book to read (I struggled a lot because some things that were quite explicit grossed me out), I recommend it, and I think it wouldn't be a bad idea for a writer (who knows a lot about Nabokov and the book) to write a book from Dolores's point of view; it would obviously be much harder to read, but many would understand that Dolores was not trying to provoke Humbert; rather, that was how he perceived her. (Translated from Spanish)

[GustavoIGG · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

We all know the topic of this novel, whether through popular culture or simply Kubrick's film. And it's not easy to start reading it, because it deals with such a controversial and reprehensible subject, and it presents pedophilia in a romanticized way. This is exactly what the author of this novel intends. One must not be fooled, as from the very first pages, the author himself mentions that the topic addressed here is due to a pathological illness and should be punished. However, the protagonist (who is 40 years old) tries to deceive you by leading you towards a romantic side of the "relationship" he has with a 12-year-old girl. The novel begins with the protagonist already in prison; although we don't know why, the story unfolds through a diary written by him. The phrases and prose that Nabokov uses are sublime, as he constantly employs a false romanticization of the events, which evokes feelings of nausea and revulsion. This is what makes this book special; with such beautiful words, it creates a surreal world out of the protagonist's twisted reality because he indeed believes it to be so. It is not a novel you can read in one go, and I also recommend reading it alongside another novel, as it is dense and requires significant effort from the reader. (Translated from Spanish)

[Tinezalva · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

We are faced with one of the most read works of universal literature; what a surprise!

And Lolita is not the central character. Lolita is the projection, the obsession of a mind... disturbed?

A platonic love rarely described, just as Humbert Humbert, a forty-year-old professor who lives for, and around a twelve-year-old girl, does in the first person.

The time his imagination dedicates to her, all the details of her body that become seared into the retina of her admirer, and those unforgettable shared moments, form a delightful adventure that is quite romantic, at least for our protagonist. And why not say it, also for the reader.

But, without a doubt, something is not right here; as I turned the pages, I kept reading, motivated by the hope that at some point, this character would confess some sort of disorder or mental problem.
If I’m not careful, the one who might end up a bit affected is me.

I believe that Vladimir Nabokov, the author, wrote this work in the first half of the 20th century, seeking some change of opinion or social freedom, perhaps a rebellion of that time. I can at least imagine that this controversial literary work should not have gone unnoticed. (Translated from Spanish)

[Antoine LeBlanc · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I read this book in my adolescence, and beyond the story, what stays with me is how much it taught me about reading a story.

To develop critical thinking and not to judge an author by their story or vice versa. This book is a masterpiece of literary exposition. (Translated from Spanish)

[PaoSama · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It's incredible how they can make us sympathize with a pedophile; the book is written in such a beautiful way that it almost doesn't seem like a bad thing. (Translated from Spanish)

[L.Rivadeneira · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I have to be fair and impartial and highlight two aspects that cannot be ignored:

The masterful narrative of Novakof. Solid, perfect, coherent, and with a beautiful cadence; with an enviable richness of grammatical resources that makes it a clear example of what a well-written book is.

The construction of HH, which, although exhausting for me to read, I cannot deny was a concrete character and, indeed, well-conceived. He is unexpected and chaotic as he had to be, with a desperate luck, manipulative to the core, nothing that was not in parallel with anyone capable of being like him, with a bunch of incongruities that load him with humanity, and although it did not awaken my empathy even in half a line, it did not lose strength or veracity either.

But... has it ever happened to you that you cannot separate who they are from the fiction you are reading or watching? It's not something that happens to me often, but this was one of those times when enjoying the reading was impossible for me. (Translated from Spanish)