Lolita (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

The novel’s middle-aged, Central European narrator, Humbert, traces his sexual obsession for girls between the ages of nine and fourteen to an instance of interrupted coitus he suffered when, at 13, he and a certain Annabel Leigh had the beginnings of their first affair forever aborted by her early death. (The allusions to Poe’s poem and life are among a multitude of literary references in Nabokov’s novel.) After a low-comedy marriage to a “life-sized woman” in Paris ends absurdly, Humbert emigrates to the United States, settling in a small New England town in the late...

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