The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated

About the annotated edition: For context, I have read Lolita about 10 times now, the last 2 of which were with the annotated edition. I would have to break with the advice of many of the other reviewers here and actually recommend this edition even for first time readers, although only for the French translations on a first reading (there is a lot of French in the novel, which can be confusing and frustrating without translation). For those who have read the novel before, however, the additional annotations are of great interest and help to reveal how unbelievably rich the text is with references to other writers, characters, events, etc. Even after reading the novel many times over, there were literally hundreds of references that I would never have noted were it not for these annotations. As a small example, the most immediately helpful of these for me was an explanation of Carmen and how the various references to it function in the text. About the novel as a whole: Lolita is my favorite novel. The "pedophilia" is certainly the most immediately noticeable and shocking feature of the work, but I think this aspect is sometimes focused on too much. The novel is much richer emotionally than such a cursory description of its subject matter might lead one to believe. It is nostalgic and plaintive, wistful, comic at times, yet with a deep sustained undercurrent of longing and regret. Nabokov's use of language is, to my mind, unmatched, and the prose is often strikingly beautiful in its own right, yet the narrative is also brilliantly structured. Having just finished rereading Lolita, I am once again almost overcome with emotion. That, to me, is the great power of this book -- its ability to elicit an emotional response; to make the reader feel deeply for a main character who is monstrous in many ways. In particular, Humbert's visit to Coalmont late in the novel moves me nearly to tears every time I read it. There are few books I revisit again and again, but Lolita is at the top of that list. I cannot recommend it highly enough. I hope that anyone who might happen to read this who is put off by the idea of the subject matter will give it a chance -- it is not racy, nor voyeuristic, nor crude, but rather deeply contemplative and moving. It is one of the greatest novels ever written, by one of the greatest writers ever to have lived.

I'm a great fan of Nabokov's novel - but also know that there's a lot here that a casual reader might miss. That's why The Annotated Lolita is such an attraction. My review relates to the digital version of the book. The Appel version is convenient, and definitely has some advantages - and one or two drawbacks: 1. Instead of flipping back and forth between the text and annotations in a book, the ebook has links that allow you to switch back and forth from page numbers and the annotations. Certainly an improvement. In fact, the Kindle version allows the user to immediately look up definitions - a huge advantage with a book with a huge vocabulary. 2. Print quality is very close to PDF standards - clear, accurate, and without the kind of glitches that can be a problem with some ebooks. 3. When you read the text itself, the notes are appended to the individual chapter numbers. Once you're accustomed to the notes, using them is quite simple. You can also read this book through Adobe Digital Editions, but ADE doesn't have a dictionary, and the interface is somewhat more difficult to use. Stay with the Kindle version It's rare to find an annotated book that's done perfectly, but there's no question that the notes themselves - while sometimes variable in quality - is for the most part very useful.

I came across the unannotated version of Lolita in summer 2004 when I was a raging philosophy maniac whose obsession was everything existentialism and thinking about The Meaning of Life - in general, I wasn't a very happy person to say the least. Toward the end of a strenuous and almost cruel summer reading syllabus I had imposed on myself (Soren and Friedrich I could handle, but Martin and J.P. gave me the existential headache), came this brilliant gem of fiction, an oasis in the desert of angst and bad faith, a breather for my nothingness of a mind that craved being-not-in-the-world. Thanks to Vivian Darkbloom, I achieved veritable transcendence of my ego. Onto my impressions of the novel. I remember the first part being tantalizingly erotic and second part average. So engrossed was I in poor Humbert Humbert's fantasies and seduction that, in a manner of speaking I had to repeatedly resort to the good old manuo-frictional means of extinguishing the fire of my loins. The second part, however, disappointed me and when I began my second fill of Lolita, I remembered nothing about the second part, save the scene where Humbert Humbert makes an advance at Dolores when she's studying and she says, "Oh not again." Gentlemen and ladies of the jury, if you have had your fill of Lolita once without the benefit of the annotations, you can easily understand my plight when I decided to go through it again, especially when one is loath to have recourse to the all too conventional means of extinguishing the aforementioned fire. But my apprehensions, it turns out, came to naught. The annotations, I must confess, are tremendously helpful. I did not recognize to what magnitude I missed the allusions, echoes, jokes, and delightful word plays our Hum engages in. It is staggering how much he is able to weave into the narrative. Frankly, I missed, without exaggeration, 100% of it. I was, as the diligent annotator notes in his recondite and illuminating 64-page introduction, Nabokov's ideal reader-puppet. Not so, this time. Thanks to the annotations and two years of reading hard literature plus two years of French, I was able to see the cracks and holes in Lolita and enjoy it as an artistic artifice that it is. Strangely, I experienced no tumescence - not one bit - and enjoyed it on a totally different aesthetic level. In short, although the prolix and detailed annotations may have taken away from the reading experience, I still enjoyed Lolita very much. There are slow parts, however, I had a hard time getting through. For example, the first 20 pages of Part Deux where H.H. and Dolly travel across les etats unis boasts more than enough expositions to drive you to the edge of despair and tantrum. My favorite scenes are, in order: 1)the last scene with Humbert and Quilty; 2) the Enchanted Hunters hotel scene; and 3) the interviews with the Beardsley School headmistress. Like any work of literature, there are more than its fair share of slow parts whose necessity is in big question at least from the humble reader's perspective. Insofar as the novel manages to both engage on the gut emotional level (especially the first time without the annotations) and intellectual, literary, and artistic level, Lolita remains, and will remain, one of my absolute favorites. The four stars for the second level of reading. Overall, I give it 5 stars. Another must read.

Having just reread Lolita after 30 years, I still find it to be one the most exquisite and well-written novels I have ever read. Disturbing subject matter aside, Nabakov takes us into the mind of one of the most eloquent and despicable protagonists of all time. Truly remarkable prose.

An un-(Poe)-ethical road trip. Lolita revisited. Embarking on a new excursion into Nabokov's writing, I started with this annotated pocket book version of Lolita. It is edited by a former student of VN's at Cornell, with plenty of notes, some essays by the editor, and VN's own afterword. (All this interpreting and annotating gets a little too much though. This edition is meant for college students, explicitly. It convinced me, that I don't want to be a student of literature when I go to college in my next life. It can beat the fun out of reading. I rather go for lepidopterology.) What is Lolita, actually? A crime story told by the criminal. The apology of an insane pedophile rapist and murderer. A road movie script, with substantial American mileage under its belt. It waxes lyrical about American nature. The rape of young America by decadent Europe. The seduction of decadent Europe by young America. The Americanization of a great Russian writer, who drilled deeply into American geography, pop culture, and slang. A satirical look at middle American life. Movies, pop music, cartoons play into it. (It helps to listen to late 1940s pop music while reading Lolita.) A mythical tale of a mortal destroyed by his love for an unreal, supernatural femme fatale. A fairy tale of metamorphosis. A Doppelgänger mystery (which is for me the weakest aspect of this convoluted monster. Wasted imaginative energy, which almost made me deduct half a star from my general applause. After the girl has escaped with the Doppelgänger, VN returns to normal form. The final chapters are the best.) Fun for some, unbearably boring for many, especially if they came with the hope of something steamy. Lolita is unique. If you need to compare it with anything, think of Ulysses. What is Lolita not? Porn. Steamy. A justification of pedophilia. (Humbert Humbert tries to defend himself, lamely. Criminals will do that.) About allusions: among the most frequent ones, we find Joyce, Freud, Poe, Shakespeare, Stevenson, Proust, Carroll, Merimée....Regular references to Carmen serve the purpose of misleading you about the plot. Freud is, as always with VN, the target of merciless derision. It is hard to believe that such a top heavy, cerebral piece of writing can have been a best seller. It is also hard to deny that VN was made rich by a misunderstanding.

Very interesting book. It really give more of a deep dive into the Loltia book. I recommend it!

If you were going to read Lolita, you should read this version, as the annotations will be of great help. So will the following advice. First, my personal history with a novel: Nabokov was one of my mother's professors when she attended Cornell. So I always wanted to read this novel. I made my first attempt in my 20's and gave up at page 90. I tried again in my 30's, and quit at page 95. This time (much older), I finally finished; the annotated version was a big help. For new readers I suggest this preparation: In this novel, Nabokov is just doing a variation of what Edgar Allen Poe does with his unreliable first-person narrators. So I would suggest, if you never encountered these in school, first reading the Poe short stories "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Cask of Amotillado." Not to ruin these stories for you, but in "The Tell-Tale Heart" the narrator is obviously crazy, but spends the story trying to convince the reader that what he did--murdering his roommate--made absolutely perfect sense. In "The Cask of Amontillado," the narrator is obviously extremely intelligent. He has committed the perfect murder. But it is also obvious that he has totally insane, as it appears that his victim's alleged offenses against him are a complete figment of his imagination. Again this narrator tries to convince you that what he did--killing a friend--was something wonderful. Nabokov is using the same technique with Lolita. But since Poe had already used the crazy-but-eloquent-first-person-narrator-trying-to-convince-you-the-murder-he-committed-was-justifiable plotline, if Nabokov wanted to be original he had to use a variation on this approach--switch out murder and replace it with perversion. (Sex with a 12-year-old girl.) The narrator is right out of Poe, trying to convince the reader that what he did was perfectly fine. You'll also want to read the Poe poem "Annabel Lee," as the narrator often references that. And also remember that Edgar Allan Poe married a 14 year old girl when he was 27. I'm sure that relationship was an inspiration for Lolita. This whole novel comes right from Edgar Allan Poe. The problem I have with this novel is that the narrative approach borrowed from Edgar Allan Poe works a lot better in a short story than it does in a novel. After a while the story becomes tedious. After 100 pages you will probably be thinking, "Okay, I get the point. The narrator needs to be on a sex-offender registry, but sure does a good job trying to convince us that what he's doing is okay. And there are plenty of people in the world just like this. Frightening thought." Unless you are a pervert yourself, you'll have that concept down in the first half of the book. Then you'll have to slog through the second half of the book where not much happens until our narrator meets a very unusual playwright. On the plus side, it's rare to see a novel written in such a beautiful prose style. I can think of only F. Scott Fitzgerald and David Foster Wallace being equal to this. So this book is worth reading, but just realize that you'll get the author's point at page 100 with 150 more to read, so finishing the novel might get a little annoying. By the way, my mother didn't think the novel was any good.

I can't imagine that I can write a better review of Lolita than some of the ones already out there, so I won't even try. Instead, I'll try to focus on one specific detail that maybe gets overlooked: Not only is Nabokov an incredible, incredibly intelligent writer (and you can see this immediately from his prose, which is just like.... a drug for your brain, and it's all the more impressive when you consider the fact that English wasn't even his first language!), and not only is this story one of his most famous because it truly IS a good one and not just because it's scandalous; it's also incredibly FUNNY. The movie (which he worked on with Kubric) is funny too, in the same kinds of ways (even when the character's lines or actions differ a bit from what's in the book), but the book is even funnier, because the humor is delivered in that incredible, intelligent prose of his. Read it! (And if you don't want to read it because you think it's somehow immoral, then, I dunno, there's no hope for you. Clearly a book doesn't endorse pedophilia just because it has a pedophile character in it, and that's all the MORE true when that pedophile character is awkward and pathetic.)

若かりし頃、無理して背伸びして読了したLolita。話しの流れを見失いながらもバカラのグラスのような文体に妙に感心した。当時は曖昧模糊としたままやり過ごした疑問点を解明すべく、このannotation付きロリータを購入。やっと半分くらいは疑問点を解消できた。そこまでは嬉しいんだけど、この印刷は何だ！paperbackにて購入したけれど、戦前の岩波文庫のような印刷はきついワ。よって星ひとつマイナス。こんなこと私の手にしたcopyだけであって欲しい。

Perfeito, o texto é ótimo, mas a capa é um pouco fragil.

Vladimir Nabokov und sein berühmtestes Werk, "Lolita", ist in den letzten Jahren zu Unrecht immer mehr in den Hintergrund getreten, obwohl gerade jetzt in unserer Zeit das Verbrechen des Kindesmissbrauchs immer mehr in den Blick der Öffentlichkeit gerät. Es vergeht keine Woche, in der nicht erneut über Verdächtige und Verdachtsfälle berichtet wird... aber halt! War es nicht Lolita, die ihren "Humbert Humbert" verführte? War es das wirklich? Vladimir Nabokov lässt den Erzähler der "Lolita", den Literaturprofessor Humbert Humbert berichten. Spätestens wenn dieser erzählt, dass Lolita nach und bei jedem intimen Verkehr weint, wird klar: Der Mann hat gelogen, vielleicht von Anfang an. Dies lässt das Lesen dieses Werkes einem Detektivroman gleichkommen: Wann und wo widerspricht er sich? Wo lügt er, offensichtlich? Die "Annotated Lolita" ist hier eine sehr große Hilfe. Dabei wird, wenn man die Werke Vladimir Nabokovs etwas recherchiert, auch klar, dass Nabokov hier sein Thema gefunden hat: Nicht zum ersten Mal schrieb er über die Liebe älterer Männer zu Kindfrauen und nicht das einzige Mal verwendete er den Stil des "unzuverlässigen Erzählers" um zu verdecken und zu kaschieren, was ihn im Innersten wirklich bewegte.

Súper mal impreso, y muy caro el costo por una mala impresión.

I'd tried on several occasions to read 'Lolita' before, but gave up because the language was too complex and the references too obscure. This edition solved many of those problems and was particularly useful on Kindle. The annotations section of the book was almost as long as the book itself, so was more than thorough for the laypersons needs, translating the French and explaining obscure literary references. On Kindle, all the links to the references are highlighted, so you just need to tap them to be taken directly to the reference section, meaning no awkward flicking back and forth. The book itself is so beautifully written that the controversial subject matter should not put the reader off and whilst some may be offended purely by the topic, the book is more relevant for its poetic charm and writing style than the plot itself.