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The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated
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The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated description
In 1954 Vladimir Nabokov asked one American publisher to consider "a firebomb that I have just finished putting together." The explosive device: Lolita, his morality play about a middle-aged European's obsession with a 12-year-old American girl. Two years later, the New York Times called it "great art." Other reviewers staked a higher moral ground (the editor of the London Sunday Express declaring it "the filthiest book I've ever read"). Since then, the sinuous novel has never ceased to astound. Even Nabokov was astonished by its place in the popular imagination. One biographer writes that "he was quite shocked when a little girl of eight or nine came to his door for candy on Halloween, dressed up by her parents as Lolita." And when it came time to casting the film, Nabokov declared, "Let them find a dwarfess!" The character Lolita's power now exists almost separately from the endlessly inventive novel. If only it were read as often as it is alluded to. Alfred Appel Jr., editor of the annotated edition, has appended some 900 notes, an exhaustive, good-humored introduction, and a recent preface in which he admits that the "reader familiar with Lolita can approach the apparatus as a separate unit, but the perspicacious student who keeps turning back and forth from text to Notes risks vertigo." No matter. The notes range from translations to the anatomical to the complex textual. Appel is also happy to point out the Great Punster's supposedly unintended word play: he defends the phrase "Beaver Eaters" as "a portmanteau of 'Beefeaters' (the yeoman of the British royal guard) and their beaver hats." |
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The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥
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Approaching Perfection; Incredible Annotations
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First: Nabokov is a fierce talent; he writes, transcending language, with the whole literary tradition a pun's breath away. Greatest stylist of modern times, etc. Lolita needs no introduction: if you are here, you know.
The Annotated Lolita (2nd edition) also defies easy description. It is incredibly rare for two things to come together so marvelously: 1) A work of Lolita's breadth and caliber, 2) A detailed, scholarly, and inveterately prudent *analysis* of authorial mechanics.
Appel's volume achieves all of this. You may read Lolita for the first time here, no problem - there is ample pencil-space, an astute introduction (perhaps borrowing excessively from Nabokov's Pale Fire, but no matter), and clearly-marked endnotes. The endnotes, often 3-5 per page, track virtually all of Nabokov's direct allusions and much of his miscellaneous and obscure game-playing. There is no attempt to interpret "meaning" for the reader; nothing didactic or obtusely academic (indeed, Nabokov would balk too!). It is, however, a fully comprehensive look at Lolita, which is to say the footnotes from page 1 will assume a full knowledge of the entire plot arc. First-time readers who value plot vagaries may want to save the annotations for a second-reading, although I do not recommend it. Lolita has a wonderful plot, but it is a portrait - telegraphed by the incomparable Humbert Humbert, the narrator-as-censored-artist. For most (if not all), the footnotes *make* the novel.
Many of the endnotes are short identifications of references and allusions, but a delightfully large number are paragraphs and even pages long, including comments from Nabokov himself. Indeed, Appel published this "revised and updated" edition after consulting Nabokov himself on his first-edition comments - a rare, rare treat. These astute, authorized, all-encompassing glimpses into a book like Nabokov simply don't happen very often. The Annotated Lolita is a rare treat, and a re-readers *dream. Indulge and enjoy!
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