Lolita: Vladimir Nabokov

Humbert Humbert - scholar, aesthete and romantic - has fallen completely and utterly in love and lust with Lolita Haze, his landlady's silky-skinned nymphette twelve-year-old daughter. Reluctantly agreeing to marry Mrs. Haze just to be close to his Lolita, Humbert suffers agonies in the pursuit of Lolita; but then Lo starts looking for attention elsewhere... Lolita is probably the first literary nymphette; the book is full of ingenious word play and written as a confession - justification - bending of reality...? It is certainly told retrospectively but from whose perspective? While H.H. awaits trial? Or has he been sentenced and is now in prison? Is the reader the 'ladies and gentlemen of the jury'? And who is really the seducer? Humbert, the old roué? Or Lolita, the nymphette, dangerously talented and wise in the ways of physical love? Lolita has been described as 'an unforgettable masterpiece of obsession, delusion and lust... deviant, queer, puerile, and yet ever so human, darkly human, perverted in the corner...exacting, alluring, inventive, sexy, pleading, conceited, lurid, savory, languid...' You, dear Reader, must make up your own mind.