Author: Vladimir Nabokov Genre: Horror Pages/Length: 336 pages
★★★☆☆ 3 stars
Book Summary: A grown man, who refers to himself as Humbert Humbert, talks about the “love of his life” who is a twelve year old girl named Lolita.
Book Review: This book was incredibly disturbing yet somehow beautifully written. In fact, this might be the best written book I’ve ever read. It was very hard to get through and changed my perspective on men and the dynamic between dads and daughters. It was disgusting and there was not a real plot, which made the book a little boring. The paragraphs were also very long and stretched out. But I can’t get over how incredibly written it was and how the author is able to manipulate the reader into thinking that his thoughts weren’t so wrong.
Quotes: “Why then this horror that I cannot shake off? Did I deprive her of her flower? Sensitive gentlewomen of the jury, I was not even her first lover.” “I felt the writhing of desire again, so monstrous was my appetite for that miserable nymphet.” “The fog was like a wet blanket and the sand was gritty and clammy and Lo was all gooseflesh and grit and for the first time in my life I had as little desire for her as a manatee.” “Her bicycle manner, I mean her to approach it, the hip movement in mounting, the grace and so on, afforded me supreme pleasure.” “I held her by her knobby wrist and she kept turning and twisting it this way and that surreptitiously trying to find a weak point so as to wrench herself free at a favorable moment, but I held her quite hard and in fact rather badly for which I hope my heart may not, and one or twice she jerked her arms so violently that I feared her wrist may snap.”
Spoilers: There aren’t really spoilers for this book except for Lolita’s death. It was sad that she died in childbirth, it meant she never really got to live a life.
