Claire Messud in the Los Angeles Review of Books:
At 70, Vladimir Nabokov’s most famous book, Lolita, is decidedly problematic. It is, after all, a novel narrated by a pedophile, kidnapper, and rapist (also, lest we forget, murderer) who tells his story from prison, who relates his crimes with a pyrotechnic verbal exhilaration that is tantamount to glee, who seduces each reader into complicity simply through the act of reading: to read the novel to the end is to have succumbed to Humbert Humbert’s insidious, sullying charms. Framed by the banal platitudes of John Ray Jr., the fictional psychologist whose foreword introduces the account (“‘Lolita’ should make all of us—parents, social workers, educators—apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world”), Humbert’s exuberant voice seduces the reader, even as so many of the novel’s characters are foolishly, sometimes fatally, seduced. What are we doing, when we read this book with such pleasure? What was Nabokov doing, in writing this unsettling novel?
More here.
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