In the summer of 1958, a twelve-year-old girl took the world by storm—Lolita was published in the United States. This child, so fresh and alive, yet so pitiable in her abuse at the hands of the novel's narrator, engendered outrage and sympathy alike, and has continued to do so ever since.
humorous, and insightful, Readings is a collection of classic essays and reviews by Michael Dirda, book critic of the Washington Post and winner of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. From a first reading of Beckett and Faulkner at the feet of an inspirational high-school English teacher to a meeting of the P. G. Wodehouse Society, from an obsession with Nabokov's Lolita to the discovery of the Japanese epic The Tale of Genji, these essays chronicle a lifetime of literary enjoyment.
Poet and pervert, Humbert becomes obsessed by twelve-year-old Lolita and sees to possess her, first carnally and then artistically, out of love, "to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets". This seduction is one of many dimensions in Nabocov's dizzying masterpiece, which is suffused with a savage humour and rich, elaborate verbal textures.
Nabokov's Lolita was originally published in 1955 and immediately became embroiled in its own censorship battles. The story is admittedly, purposefully, a shocking one: Humbert Humbert, an emigré academic, has a thing for young girls. Nymphets, he calls them, prepubescent girls who betray some precocious awareness of their own sensuality. Upon accepting a position at a new college, Humbert rents a room in town and falls madly, passionately, horrifyingly in love with his landlady's 12-year-old daughter, Dolores Haze, the Lolita of the novel's title. Read by Jeremy Irons
