Lolita (Pocket Penguin Classics): Amazon.de: Vladimir Nabokov: Englische Bücher

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Despite its lascivious reputation, the pleasures of Lolita are as much intellectual as erogenous. It is a love story with the power to raise both chuckles and eyebrows. Humbert Humbert is a European intellectual adrift in America, haunted by memories of a lost adolescent love. When he meets his ideal nymphet in the shape of 12-year-old Dolores Haze, he constructs an elaborate plot to seduce her, but first he must get rid of her mother. In spite of his diabolical wit, reality proves to be more slippery than Humbert's feverish fantasies and Lolita refuses to conform to his image of the perfect lover. Playfully perverse in form as well as content, riddled with puns and literary allusions, Nabokov's 1955 novel is a hymn to the Russian-born author's delight in his adopted language. Indeed, readers who want to probe all of its allusive nooks and crannies will need to consult the annotated edition. Lolita is undoubtedly, brazenly erotic, but the eroticism springs less from the "frail honey-hued shoulders ... the silky supple bare back" of little Lo than it does from the wantonly gorgeous prose that Humbert uses to recount his forbidden passion: "She was musical and apple-sweet ... Lola the bobby-soxer, devouring her immemorial fruit, singing through its juice ... and every movement she made, every shuffle and ripple, helped me to conceal and to improve the secret system of tactile correspondence between beast and beauty--between my gagged, bursting beast and the beauty of her dimpled body in its innocent cotton frock. " Much has been made of Lolita as metaphor, perhaps because the love affair at its heart is so troubling. Humbert represents the formal, educated Old World of Europe, while Lolita is America: ripening, beautiful, but not too bright and a little vulgar. Nabokov delights in exploring the intercourse between these cultures and the passages where Humbert describes the suburbs and strip malls and motels of post-war America are filled with both attraction and repulsion: "Those restaurants where the holy spirit of Huncan Dines had descended upon the cute paper napkins and cottage-cheese-crested salads." Yet however tempting the novel's symbolism may be, its chief delight--and power--lies in the character of Humbert Humbert. He, at least as he tells it, is no seedy skulker, no twisted destroyer of innocence. Instead, Nabokov's celebrated mouthpiece is erudite and witty, even at his most depraved. Humbert can't help it--linguistic jouissance is as important to him as the satisfaction of his arrested libido. --Simon Leake -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verf�gbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

Amazon.com

Playfully perverse in form as well as content, riddled with puns and literary allusions, Nabokov's 1955 novel is a hymn to the Russian-born author's delight in his adopted language. Indeed, readers who want to probe all of its allusive nooks and crannies will need to consult the annotated edition. Lolita is undoubtedly, brazenly erotic, but the eroticism springs less from the "frail honey-hued shoulders ... the silky supple bare back" of little Lo than it does from the wantonly gorgeous prose that Humbert uses to recount his forbidden passion:

She was musical and apple-sweet ... Lola the bobby-soxer, devouring her immemorial fruit, singing through its juice ... and every movement she made, every shuffle and ripple, helped me to conceal and to improve the secret system of tactile correspondence between beast and beauty--between my gagged, bursting beast and the beauty of her dimpled body in its innocent cotton frock.

Much has been made of Lolita as metaphor, perhaps because the love affair at its heart is so troubling. Humbert represents the formal, educated Old World of Europe, while Lolita is America: ripening, beautiful, but not too bright and a little vulgar. Nabokov delights in exploring the intercourse between these cultures, and the passages where Humbert describes the suburbs and strip malls and motels of postwar America are filled with both attraction and repulsion, "those restaurants where the holy spirit of Huncan Dines had descended upon the cute paper napkins and cottage-cheese-crested salads." Yet however tempting the novel's symbolism may be, its chief delight--and power--lies in the character of Humbert Humbert. He, at least as he tells it, is no seedy skulker, no twisted destroyer of innocence. Instead, Nabokov's celebrated mouthpiece is erudite and witty, even at his most depraved. Humbert can't help it--linguistic jouissance is as important to him as the satisfaction of his arrested libido. --Simon Leake -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine andere Ausgabe: Taschenbuch .

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Humbert Humbert, der große Manipulator 22. April 2005

Von Michael Dienstbier TOP 500 REZENSENT

Format:Taschenbuch

Der Fall scheint eigentlich sonnenklar: Humbert Humbert, ein Mann schon in den reiferen Jahre, heiratet eine Frau, die er eigentlich garnicht liebt, nur um an sein wahres Objekt der Begierde zu gelangen: Deren Tochter, Dolores Haze, genannt Lolita, gerade mal 12 Jahre alt. Durch Ereignisse die hier nicht verraten werden sollen, gelangt er im Laufe des Romans in den alleinigen "Besitz" Lolitas. Diese hat dann, bevor er ihr das Frühstück gestattet, ihre "morning duty" zu erfüllen. Wie diese genau aussieht, bleibt der Phntasie des Lesers überlassen.

Ein Dreckskerl also, oder? Klar, nur merkt man das beim Lesen nicht so schnell wie bei einem flüchtigen Blick auf eine Inhaltsangabe. Die Geschichte wird uns nämlich von Humbert Humbert persönlich erzählt. Und dieser ist durchaus eloquent und hat gute Gründe für all seine verwerflichen Taten vorzubringen. Als Leser neigt man ja in den meisten Fällen dazu, die Autorität des Ich-Erzählers zu akzeptieren und sein (oder ihr) Wertesystem zu übernehmen, wenn dieser oder diese sich nicht allzu plump anstellt.
Humbert Humbert tut dies nicht. Er beschreibt nicht, wie er sabbernd, geiffernd und Lolita beim Duschen zuschaut. Vielmehr legt er in geradezu poetischer Art und Weise seine wohl ehrliche Liebe zu dem jungen Mädchen dar. Dass dieses Gefühl nicht auf Gegenseitigkeit beruht, verschweigt er. Dies wird nur an einigen wenigen Textstellen, wie an der oben zitierten, implizit deutlich.

"Lolita" verlangt somit einen kritischen Leser, der sich der manipuliernden Erzählweise Humbert Humberts bewusst ist und sich nicht dem Charme und rhetorischem Geschick des pädophielen Protagonisten hingibt.

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Try to read LOLITA before you read reviews 10. September 1999

Von Ein Kunde

I bought LOLITA knowing of it only by its reputation as a controversial novel and by its first-place position on a recent critical list of the best novels in decades. I began LOLITA on a recent business trip and found it a very clever work of absolute creative genius, so fascinating that I didn't notice the time and missed a connection home, which however gave me time to finish it.

Its surprises made it all the more wonderful. So I suggest reading the book before you reading reviews that might disclose its contents.

LOLITA is, or includes, a story of filial love. Lolita helps old Humbert to grow into a father more than he helps her to develop as a youth. She does her weird chores and earns her tiny allowance. She loyally keeps their secrets to the end. Humbert, who must be the least effective fictional American father since Huckleberry Finn's, barely notices her supreme adolescent compliment that he was a good father to her. The character of poor Lolita, not of Humbert, reminded me of a comment by Nabokov's countryman Dostoyevsky: "One feels compassion for the ridiculous man who does not know his own worth as a good man, and consequently sympathy is invoked in the reader. This awakening of compassion is the secret of humor." (Quoted in Boorstin, THE CREATORS, 1992).

A work of fantastic fiction in the 1950s, LOLITA is eerily prescient about today when 15-year-old girl athletes dodge marriage offers from fans and even younger children describe "my first time" on the Internet.

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A True Original 14. Juli 2000

Von oh_pete

"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all." --Oscar Wilde

Often banned by those who consider it "immoral," LOLITA is far better than just "well written." Stylistically, there are few novels in English that match Nabokov's masterpiece for the seriously playful love and use of language. And English was at least Nabokov's third tongue! LOLITA is neither a moral nor an immoral book. It is brilliantly written. But Wilde was slightly off: that is NOT all.

French academic Humbert Humbert comes to America to renew his life after stagnation and divorce in Paris. He soon meets the 12-year-old Dolores Haze. Lolita. She who reminds him so powerfully of the young Annabel he so innocently fell in love with on the Riviera when he was thirteen. The trouble is, Humbert was thirteen twenty-five years before and he wants to love Dolores as if he were thirteen again. It's just not so innocent this time around, and the fact that he knows this does not stop him.

That LOLITA is a love story cannot be convincingly denied any more than that it is a twisted tale of illicit, deranged obsession--novels, like life, often revel in ambiguity. Nabokov encourages these multiple shades of gray by employing one of the most enchanting yet unreliable narrators I've ever encountered. We see not only his obsessive, unheathily insatiable lust for the young girl, but also what life with him does to her: how she cries at night despite her brave front during the day, how she learns to manipulate him, how she grows to hate him. How much of what Humbert says can really be believed? Trying to figure that out is part of the enjoyment.

The whole book is a story of decadence and decline, of the beautiful ugliness of corruption. LOLITA is an aesthetic dream gone horribly wrong under the bright hot sun of the highways of middle America. It is also a treasure of twentieth century literature, a work of genius in how it persuades us, from time to time, to sympathize with its charming yet ruthless villain. But to say that Nabokov endorses pedophilia would be like saying that Sophocles endorses patricide and sleeping with one's mother because he wrote OEDIPUS REX. Read LOLITA and be amazed!