Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov(1955)
Extract
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.
A man sits in a prison cell composing a confession so beautiful it threatens to make the reader complicit, and that is precisely the danger Vladimir Nabokov designed. Published in 1955 after five American publishers refused it, the novel gives its monster, Humbert Humbert, the most gorgeous prose in twentieth-century fiction and dares the reader to resist its seductions. Beneath the wordplay lies the story of a stolen childhood, a girl whose voice is smothered by her captor's rhetoric. Nabokov, who mastered three languages and loved lepidoptera and chess problems, built the novel as a trap: the more you admire the prose, the more you must reckon with what it conceals. It is a study in the power of art to enchant and deceive.
If you loved this
Nabokov gives another unreliable narrator the keys to the kingdom, but this one builds a country instead of stealing a childhood.
Flaubert pioneered the trick Humbert perfects: gorgeous prose concealing a moral void.
Mann's Aschenbach dresses the same obsession in classical allusions, but Venice does what the law won't.