I just read Lolita. What amazing language!

Pnin: 5

Lolita: 4

Pale Fire: 4.8

Not to be read back to back to back. The further I get, the more I think Nabokov 1955-1962 was a pretentious a-hole, and the less I get to really focus on the works. I'm glad I read Pnin first. Fantastic. Lolita's good, but not Pnin quality. Again, the verdict is not out on Pale Fire. Although I'm glad it has not yet turned into a TOTAL [a-hole:] regurgitation of the first two.

DON'T RECOMMEND. After reading the to about page 70, I put down the book and vowed never to return to it. The narrator of the book is a pedophile and his perverted thoughts about young girls are more than I can handle. I stopped reading because I was defintely not becoming a better person by continuing the book. His psyche was quite disturbing.

you know??? for the first time,, im really scared about fedophille like H'H have,, but with this great book, i can enjoyed what they want, and what they do...
good explained for H'H..

I borrowed this from the library to read Lolita. The playfulness of the language delighted me, and I enjoyed H.H.'s unreliable voice as narrator, but in the end, I was left cold by the novel.

just lolita.

i respect this book for it's beautiful language and ability to break through the perverse nature of the theme. Nabokov is an incredible writer and I enjoyed all the imagery. It's been awhile since I've read non-fiction literature though, so it was refreshing.

Lolita may be my favorite book ever, definitely top 5. Creepy as he is, Humbert's character, arrogant and crazy, is just great. The way Nabokov has him rationalize behaviors is wonderfully written.

Pnin was the least impressive of the three, however, it was a good read.

Pale Fire was the most difficult to read but the story structure is magnificent and I am not really in to poetry. The notes are great.

OMG! My God but Mr. Humbert is a filthy, frightening perv. This book should be required reading for ALL parents of girls! What an eloquent representation of a sick bastard completely drowning in his pedophilic obsessions. Christ!

"Zadie Smith said this was her favorite book. Understandably so. Nabokov describes the most sympathetic misplaced Russian protagonist; I frequently found myself sputtering alliteratively along with the narrator: ""Poor, poor Pnin!"" Few oddballs in literature garner as much fondness from readers as Pnin; Quixote and Raskolnikov come to mind, but both were violent in their delusions. Pnin is just depressing, in a wacky sort of way. Plus, Nabokov and Smith share the same interjecting style; every once in a while third person switches to first, as the busybody narrator feels compelled to color a few extra details from his perspective. A delightful, though dense, character study."

I have read Lolita, and placed this edition on both my to read and to reread shelves because I wish to read the other two novels, and wish to reread Lolita.

In today's anything-goes sexually explicit era -- which is also the era of Amber Alerts and church pedophilia -- could anyone write a mainstream literary novel like Lolita? Not sure.

Still, Nabokov's nymphet has long rested securely in the literary canon,the result of its limpid gorgeous prose and the creation of Lolita herself, a character of such vividness and individuality, whose combination of innocence and calculation transcends that of merely being the unbearable object of Humbert Humbert's obsessions.

For me, Lolita moves from brilliance to greatness precisely because Humbert -- a familiar variation on the European intellectual both entranced and repelled by America -- recognizes his own monstrousness, understands fully that he is destroying Lolita's childhood, and Lolita herself, even as he remains helpless in his obsessive love for her. And by the end, in their memorable final encounter, I think love is the proper term for his feelings toward the married pregnant Lolita, who is emphatically no longer a nymphet.

Nabokov would sneer, but I can't help thinking that, on one submerged level, Lolita is indeed a parable of Nabokov's simultaneous love and distain for the intoxicating, crude, smug, vulgar, and seductive American society that he experienced in the late 1940s and 1950s.

Pnin is a far lighter weight enterprise, almost more a series of sketches of the hapless Russian academic Timofy Pnin, than a novel. But the end, however, it does deepen from comedy to, if not tragedy, to a profounder sadness about the past and present of Pnin's life.

(And as someone working on a story/novel about painters and painting, it contains a tour de force description of an artist contemplating the complexity of reflections and perspectives in the hood and headlights of a highly polished car.)

Pale Fire was a slog -- a book easier to admire than enjoy. The brilliant minute descriptions are all here -- Nabokov has to be one of the great visual writers of all time -- but the artifice becomes difficult to penetrate to reach the core of the story. First we have the forward, then the 999 lines of heroic couplets by the fictional John Shade, ostensibly centered around the tragic death of his daughter, and finally the academic commentary by Professor Charles Kinbote.

Kinbote, no surprise, turns out to be someone else entirely, just as the commentary becomes the tale of the King of the vaguely East European country of Zembla and his escape from the hands of revolutionaries ... a theme hard to discern in the poem itself. Very very clever and inward turning, like a tiny house of mirrors. But hard to grasp and care for its characters.

And then, at the end, in the last several paragraphs, it's as if Nabokov puts the pedal to the metal. With masterful ease, he uncorks a moving coda that dispassionately ties together the novel's characters with the flow of history in a manner that I associate with the greatest of Russian writers like Tolstoy and Chekhov.