Friday 20 June 2008

A Classic

Finished June 19
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, read by Jeremy Irons
This is one of the ones that everyone has heard about, but not a lot of people seem to have read. I finally decided to tackle it as I heard this audio version was very good.
Jeremy Irons does a wonderful job on bringing this novel to life.
The novel was so different than I expected it to be. So much sadder than I had thought. It also covered so much of America of that time period that really gave me a feel for the culture of the time.
It was sometimes hard to remember that this novel was set in the late 1940s and early 1950s, as there seems to be so much going on that I thought of as being more recent. I loved the descriptive passages, both of the geography and culture of the travels, and of Humbert's description of the people he interacted with, especially his descriptions of Lolita.
Lolita is knowing, yet naive; complicit, yet coerced; and this duality of her nature makes her even more interesting.
Some of the middle dragged a bit for me, so I was glad of the wonderful audio to keep me going with it. The end was worth it.

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