Lolita (en anglais) [Anglais] [Broché]

Despite its lascivious reputation, the pleasures of Lolita are as much intellectual as erogenous. It is a love story with the power to raise both chuckles and eyebrows. Humbert Humbert is a European intellectual adrift in America, haunted by memories of a lost adolescent love. When he meets his ideal nymphet in the shape of 12-year-old Dolores Haze, he constructs an elaborate plot to seduce her, but first he must get rid of her mother. In spite of his diabolical wit, reality proves to be more slippery than Humbert's feverish fantasies, and Lolita refuses to conform to his image of the perfect lover.

Playfully perverse in form as well as content, riddled with puns and literary allusions, Nabokov's 1955 novel is a hymn to the Russian-born author's delight in his adopted language. Indeed, readers who want to probe all of its allusive nooks and crannies will need to consult the annotated edition. Lolita is undoubtedly, brazenly erotic, but the eroticism springs less from the "frail honey-hued shoulders ... the silky supple bare back" of little Lo than it does from the wantonly gorgeous prose that Humbert uses to recount his forbidden passion:

She was musical and apple-sweet ... Lola the bobby-soxer, devouring her immemorial fruit, singing through its juice ... and every movement she made, every shuffle and ripple, helped me to conceal and to improve the secret system of tactile correspondence between beast and beauty--between my gagged, bursting beast and the beauty of her dimpled body in its innocent cotton frock.

Much has been made of Lolita as metaphor, perhaps because the love affair at its heart is so troubling. Humbert represents the formal, educated Old World of Europe, while Lolita is America: ripening, beautiful, but not too bright and a little vulgar. Nabokov delights in exploring the intercourse between these cultures, and the passages where Humbert describes the suburbs and strip malls and motels of postwar America are filled with both attraction and repulsion, "those restaurants where the holy spirit of Huncan Dines had descended upon the cute paper napkins and cottage-cheese-crested salads." Yet however tempting the novel's symbolism may be, its chief delight--and power--lies in the character of Humbert Humbert. He, at least as he tells it, is no seedy skulker, no twisted destroyer of innocence. Instead, Nabokov's celebrated mouthpiece is erudite and witty, even at his most depraved. Humbert can't help it--linguistic jouissance is as important to him as the satisfaction of his arrested libido. --Simon Leake

This unabridged edition of Nabokov's classic story about a middle-aged, expatriate European man's obsessive love for a 12-year-old girl?which is being released to coincide with director Adrian Lyne's new film version?is a beautifully produced recording that pushes the boundaries of the audio medium. While Lolita continues to raise the hackles of would-be censors even today, most listeners will marvel at the restraint and playful humor with which Nabokov limns his tale. Narrator Jeremy Irons, who plays Humbert Humbert in Lyne's film, is an uncompromising audiobook reader whose performances on cassette are as laudatory as his Academy AwardR-winning work on the silver screen. This landmark release is highly recommended for all library collections.?Mark Annichiarico, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

Language is essential to Lolita, and Mr. Irons captures Humbert's voice perfectly. In the Random House audiobook, he reads the novel (11 1/2 hours long) with a sensitivity to the language that conveys all of Nabokov's humor, passion and lyricism. (The audiobook is one of the movie's great side benefits.) --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

As the controversy over the new film release of Lolita keeps it confined to art theaters in big cities, the audiobook delivers--in wide release--an uncensored and unabridged production of Nabokov's literary classic. Jeremy Irons, who plays the darkly seductive Humbert Humbert in both the film and the audiobook, commands the text with the grand sense of character and palpable eroticism it requires. It's not easy to make a protagonist out of a pedophile. The combination of Nabokov's prose and Irons's performance carries listeners out of a seat of judgment into Humbert's pure admiration for and desire to possess that archetypical fire-energy of a young girl. This horrifyingly beautiful story of wild obsession truly comes alive in this audiobook production. R.A.P. An AudioFile Earphones Award winner. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

"The only convincing love story of our century." --Vanity Fair

"Lolita blazes with a perversity of a most original kind. For Mr. Nabokov has distilled from his shocking material hundred-proof intellectual farce . . . Lolita seems an assertion of the power of the comic spirit to wrest delight and truth from the most outlandish materials. It is one of the funniest serious novels I have ever read; and the vision of its abominable hero, who never deludes or excuses himself, brings into grotesque relief the cant, the vulgarity, and the hypocritical conventions that pervade the human comedy." --Atlantic Monthly

"Intensely lyrical and wildly funny." --Time

"The conjunction of a sense of humor with a sense of horror [results in] satire of a very special kind, in which vice or folly is regarded not so much with scorn as with profound dismay and a measure of tragic sympathy . . . The reciprocal flow of irony gives to both the characters and their surroundings the peculiar intensity of significance that attends the highest art." --The New Yorker

"Lolita is an authentic work of art which compels our immediate response and serious reflection--a revealing and indispensable comedy of horrors." --San Francisco Chronicle


From the Hardcover edition.

The hilarious and tragic story of Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged Russian man who feels passion only for young the "nymphet" Dolores Haze, whom he renames Lolita.

The most controversial classic novel of the 20th century, Lolita tells the story of Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged man who is aroused to erotic desire only by nine- to fourteen-year-old "nymphettes."

Critics are just beginning to hail Jeremy Irons' performance for Random House AudioBooks...

"a road trip to hell in a luxury sedan."
--Salon Magazine

"In his reading Irons recreates the clarity, precision, and lilt of every glorious sentence."
--The Washington Post

"Nabokov said Lolita was the record of his love affair with the English language; Irons makes it a menage a trois."
-- Vogue

"[Irons's] efforts have placed this superb audio on my life list, to be saved for repeated listening."
--Boston Globe

" . . . most praiseworthy of all the audio efforts I've heard . . ."
-- Men's Journal

"Irons' inspired reading is not to be missed."
-- Chicago Tribune

"...a beautifully produced recording that pushes the boundaries of the audio medium.
. . . hands down the best audio production of the year."
-- Library Journal

"Irons reads with wickedly understated malevolence, preserving Humbert's foolish patrician airs. The artfulness of the telling is delightful, with all its stilted false humility. For those who have never read the book, or read it long ago, the subject matter of a man in love with a child will come across as a fresh shock indeed."
-- Publishers Weekly

"an extraordinary reading, almost haunting."
--The San Diego Union Tribune

" . . . extrordinary - more than extraordinary."
--BookPage --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

"The only convincing love story of our century." --Vanity Fair

"Lolita blazes with a perversity of a most original kind. For Mr. Nabokov has distilled from his shocking material hundred-proof intellectual farce . . . Lolita seems an assertion of the power of the comic spirit to wrest delight and truth from the most outlandish materials. It is one of the funniest serious novels I have ever read; and the vision of its abominable hero, who never deludes or excuses himself, brings into grotesque relief the cant, the vulgarity, and the hypocritical conventions that pervade the human comedy." --Atlantic Monthly

"Intensely lyrical and wildly funny." --Time

"The conjunction of a sense of humor with a sense of horror [results in] satire of a very special kind, in which vice or folly is regarded not so much with scorn as with profound dismay and a measure of tragic sympathy . . . The reciprocal flow of irony gives to both the characters and their surroundings the peculiar intensity of significance that attends the highest art." --The New Yorker

"Lolita is an authentic work of art which compels our immediate response and serious reflection--a revealing and indispensable comedy of horrors." --San Francisco Chronicle --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition Relié .

Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg on April 23, 1899. He studied at Trinity College in Cambridge from 1919 to 1923, after his family fled Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution. He spent the next seventeen years after graduating from Trinity living first in Berlin, then Paris, writing primarily in Russian under the pseudonym Sirin. In 1940 he returned to the United States where he taught literature at Wellesley, Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard. Lolita's monumental success allowed him to give up teaching and devote himself fully to his writing. In 1961 he moved to Montreaux, Switzerland, where he would die in 1977.