Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov

What goes on in the mind of a pedophile? How can this obsession be described? Nabokov imagined the thoughts, the feelings, of a man completely consumed by his addiction to a "nymphet" -- a 12 year old girl. To me, all fiction books can be judged by two criteria -- the quality of the story and the quality of the writing. This story was interesting in that it described the mind of a man with a particular insanity. The quality of the writing was outstanding for people who take delight in the use of words almost never used, mixed with the use of French. For me, I found the story to drag, and I found the book very easy to put aside; the story was too boring and the words too strange for me to enjoy. For years, I had postponed reading the book because I was too uneasy about the subject matter of the book. In retrospect, I found that I was simply bored too often by the book. By comparison, Gogol's short story, "The Diary of a Madman" is one of the most moving stories I have ever read. Gogol's writing is so mesmerizing that I sometimes found myself forgetting the story and simply marveling at the way he wrote.

Others, too, have noted the difficulties posed by the word play in the book, and find an annotated version of the book to be helpful.
"...the reader of Lolita attempts to arrive at some sense of its overall 'meaning,' while at the same time having to struggle...with the difficulties posed by the recondite materials and rich, elaborate verbal textures. The main purpose of this edition is to solve such local problems and to show how they contribute to the total design of the novel." --From the Preface by Alfred Appel, Jr.

The Annotated Lolita

Or, as stated in the Wikipedia article: "The novel's flamboyant style is characterized by word play, double entendres, multilingual puns, anagrams, and coinages such as 'nymphet', a word that has since had a life of its own and can be found in most dictionaries, and the lesser used 'faunlet'."

Lolita