Lolita

Poet and pervert Humbert Humbert becomes obsessed by twelve-year-old Lolita and seeks to possess her first carnally and then artistically out of love 'to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets'. Is he in love or insane? A silver-tongued poet or a pervert? A tortured soul or a monster? Or is he all of these?|Poet and pervert Humbert Humbert becomes obsessed by twelve-year-old Lolita and seeks to possess her first carnally and then artistically out of love 'to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets'. Is he in love or insane? A silver-tongued p...|Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) born in St Petersburg exiled in Cambridge Berlin and Paris became the greatest Russian writer of the first half of the twentieth century. Fleeing to the US with his family in 1940 he then became the greatest writer in English of the second half of the century and even 'God's own novelist' (William Deresiewicz). He lived in Europe from 1959 onwards and died in Montreux Switzerland. All his major works - novels stories an autobiography poems plays lectures essays and reviews - are published in Penguin Modern Classics.|He did us all an honour by electing to use and transform our language.|Nabokov can move you to laughter in the way that masters can - to laughter that is near to tears.|There's no funnier monster in modern literature than poor doomed Humbert Humbert.