Title:: [[Lolita]] Authors:: [[Vladimir Nabokov]] Tags:: #fiction Read:: [[2025-05-31]] Instagram :: https://www.instagram.com/p/DKVeVT-OmMl/ ## Editions - Edition:: [[Library of America]], 1996 - Original Copyright:: 1955 - Pages:: 300 ## Purchase * Bookshop.org:: https://bookshop.org/a/94437/9781883011192 ## Annotations Everyone knows what Lolita is about. The name itself is such an implication you can’t even search for it on Instagram (go see what comes up). What I didn’t expect was how deftly Nabokov creates tension between the awfulness of the story and its darkly funny narration. The writing style, the sentences, the asides — it’s all brilliant, and necessarily so. It would be otherwise unbearable.  I appreciated the space for interpretation and speculation that’s born out of Humbert’s wildly unreliable narration. FWIW, my reading of it was that most of the story is a fiction, defensive or fantasy, maybe even both.  Afterwards, I went back and read what Neige Sinno wrote about Lolita in Sad Tiger. This strikes me as true and insightful: “The taboo in our culture is not rape itself, which is commonplace everywhere, it is talking about it, thinking about it, analyzing it.” Nabokov’s unreliable narration, the speculation and uncertainty of its facts and motives, forces the reader to grapple with a topic everyone wants to be clear.