The Annotated Lolita

✍ Scribed by Nabokov, Vladimir; Appel Jr., Alfred

• Publisher: Vintage
• Year: 1955
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 527 KB
• Edition: First Vintage International Edition (1991)
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

{ Sept 2020 - epub revisions. Verified ebook for complete book description, cover, table of contents, content separation, and epub format error checking. }

Paperback, 457 pages
Published 1955
First Vintage International Edition (1991)
Editor: Alfred Appel
First Vintage Books Edition (April 1991)
National Book Award Finalist for Fiction (1959)
Modern Library 100 Best Novels (1900-1998)
Callil-Toibin 200 best novels in English (1950-1999)
Guardian/McCrum 100 best English novels
McCaffery 100 Greatest English Fiction
Radcliffe's 100 Best English Novels
Revised and Updated
The Annotated Lolita is the definitive annotated text of the modern classic, written by one of the most punning and allusive writers in English since James Joyce. It assiduously glosses Lolita's extravagant wordplay and its frequent literary allusions, parodies, and cross references.
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!"
Review
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."
"...the reader of Lolita attempts to arrive at some sense of its overall 'meaning,' while at the same time having to struggle...with the difficulties posed by the recondite materials and rich, elaborate verbal textures. The main purpose of this edition is to solve such local problems and to show how they contribute to the total design of the novel."--From the Preface by Alfred Appel, Jr.
"Fascinatingly detailed."--Edmund Morris, The New York Times Book Review