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The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated By Vladimir NabokovAlfred Appel Jr. ( Vintage )
Release Date: 1991-04-23
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List Price: $19.95
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Product Description
The annotated text of this modern classic. It assiduously illuminates the extravagant wordplay and the frequent literary allusions, parodies, and cross-references. Edited with a preface, introduction and notes by Alfred Appel, Jr.
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Amazon.com Review
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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 Complete control of the english language ( brettestout )
For someone who natively speaks english and studies Russian, it is astounding to think someone could write so eloquently, so densely, and so poetically in a tongue that was not their own. The annotations are virtually vital to decode the layers of references and aphorisms seeded into this remarkable masterwork of fiction.
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 Duelling opinions ( egrove25 )
Whether you like 'Lolita' depends on whether Nabokov is successful in sucking you into his fractured world of longing for something impossible, persuading yourself you have it while knowing you don't. I really don't think Nabokov intends any value judgments about his characters, any moral conclusions, let alone any comparisons between old Europe and young America. I'm not sure he even feels particularly strongly about the evils of pedophilia (see the sanctimonious ending to the foreword by the book's fictional 'editor'). I think he plays with the situation and the psychology of Humbert Humbert in his lush, literary, inimitable way. For my own part, I can get sucked in, or find myself standing outside. And from there the view is disgusting, as a reviewer - who is highly positive nonetheless - has written on the online magazine Slate. One of Nabokov's many ways to this very point is starkly anatomical. HH describes Lolita as a small-framed 12 year old, 'hip girth, twenty-nine inches...weight, seventy-eight pounds', useful information in the context - HH is buying some clothes to please her. HH describes himself elsewhere as a large and virile fellow, equipped with 'a foot of engorged brawn'. One of Alfred Appel's annotations will underline the problem by drawing your attention - and this is easily missed because it is mentioned only once and Lolita appears under a kind of alias - to Lolita's death four or five years later in childbirth. Not common in the 1950s in the USA. So HH's misuse of Lolita injures and ultimately kills her?
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 Stick with the unannotated edition ( madfam1 )
Appel's annotations are simply insufferable. It's pathetic and depressing to read his sniveling Kinbote impression--is he completely unaware that he represents exactly what Nabokov was mocking in Pale Fire? Even trying to use his annotations as merely a reference to help translate the French in the book will leave you quivering with rage, as Appel submits you to his Stanford ENG 300 course, draws absurd and positively indefensible parallels (some of which that he even admits--with the appropriate quotation from a letter as evidence--Nabokov expressly disavowed), reveals the entire narrative by page 70, and, in a meta-textual burlesque (which, ever self-aware and oh-so-meta, Appel audaciously compares to the effect created by Pale Fire) completely robs your reading experience of the chance to form its own impression of the work.
Under no circumstances buy this drivel. Nasha Vladishka deserves better.
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The essence of perfect writing ( devilsgoatee )
absolutely beautiful writing. Reading the words Nabokov writes is like fine dining, you can almost taste the words they are so rich and poetic. I do recommend the annotated version unless you are Nobokov. It is just so rich with hidden meaning, symbols, and references to myriad things that it is just impossible to get the full story without it. I wish there was a six star rating!
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What is pornography? ( watson_crick )
Having read Lolita over thirty-five years ago, my fondest memories pertain to the comments made by Nabokov in his afterward. Those who would comment on the pornographic nature of the work either ignored this part or misunderstood it.
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