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Next Page is a newsletter written by senior correspondent and book critic Constance Grady. She covers books, publishing, gender, celebrity analysis, and theater. Read her latest work on our site. |
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Next Page is a newsletter written by senior correspondent and book critic Constance Grady. She covers books, publishing, gender, celebrity analysis, and theater. Read her latest work on our site. |
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Who’s reading Lolita right? |
The culture wars never stop coming for Lolita.
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When Lolita first appeared 70 years ago, in 1955, it was so controversial that no American publisher was willing to touch it. Today, Lolita is hailed as a classic, a masterpiece, one of the great novels of the English language.
Yet Lolita also comes with a sense that it is still, perhaps, too controversial to touch. A book about a man who kidnaps and repeatedly rapes his 12-year-old stepdaughter, all told in ravishing rainbow-streaked prose? “They’d never let you publish that now,” writer after writer has declared. In a development that seems almost too on the nose, it was recently reported that Jeffrey Epstein kept a prized first edition of the novel in his home, under glass.
“I love that book,” someone told me recently when he saw me rereading it. Then: “Am I still allowed to love that book?”
We certainly read Lolita very differently than we used to. For decades after its publication, readers both nodded to the horror at the center of the novel but also believed it was a little unsophisticated to dwell only on the assault. In pop culture, Lolita became synonymous with a teenaged seductress who deserves whatever she gets. Today, however, the received wisdom is that Lolita is not a romance but a horror story.
In the 70 years since its publication, Lolita — lovely, sensual Lolita; obscene, monstrous Lolita; bleak, tragic Lolita — has become a barometer of sorts for cultural change. Vladimir Nabokov’s novel is so multifaceted that it reflects the priorities of its readers back at us, showing us what we value and fear most at any given moment in time. We’re still arguing over Lolita today, and our debates mirror the contours of our current culture war: a horror at an abuser’s attempt to cover up their abuse; a terror that all that is pleasurable will be moralized into oblivion.
What kind of book could plausibly be experienced both as an erotic comic romp in the 1950s and a searing dismantling of rape culture on its 70th birthday? Only ever Lolita. |
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How did they ever publish Lolita? |
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Lolita was born a scandal.
Initially, Nabokov planned to publish the novel anonymously, with the only clue to his authorship the presence of a minor nonspeaking character whose name, Vivian Darkbloom, anagrammed to Vladimir Nabokov. But Lolita was so characteristic of Nabokov, with its dense wordplay, its butterfly motifs, its musical language, that Nabokov’s friends convinced him that everyone would know he wrote it anyway.
Four American publishers, likely fearing expensive obscenity lawsuits, turned down Lolita. Nabokov sent the manuscript off to Paris’s Olympia Press, which knew how to publish obscene novels, and there it became an underground cult object: the book too scandalous to be published in the US, the literary novel from the pornographic publisher.
Read the full story >> |
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Book recommendations to get lost in |
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Speaking of Nabokov: Gary Shtyengart’s new novel Vera, or Faith winks at Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor without getting nearly so disturbing (mild inappropriate crushes replace the incest). Vera also takes a page from Shtyengart’s 2010 dystopian novel Super Sad True Love Story, taking place in a near-future American dystopia. What tends to elevate Shtyengart’s dystopias over the rest of the crowded field is that he leaves the setting in the background, narrowing his emotional focus on a single central relationship. Here, the relationship is between precocious, inquisitive 10-year-old Vera and her boastful, grandiose, potentially traitorous father. Vera, who maintains a diary of “Things I Still Need to Know,” has a lot she feels she needs to learn about her dad.
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When Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes came out in 1925, Edith Wharton declared it the great American novel, and James Joyce professed himself a fan. It’s best remembered now as the basis of the sparkling 1953 Marilyn Monroe film, but the book, recently released in a new edition from Modern Library, has plenty to offer us on its own. It’s the diary of the titular blonde siren, Lorelai Lee, in which she recounts, faux-breathless, her relationships with various men and all the things they happen to have given to her out of the goodness of their hearts. Loos invites us to laugh at Lorelai’s naivete at first, but the great pleasure of this novel is watching Lorelai reveal exactly how in control of her powers she really is.
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I have finally read, very late, A Life’s Work, the motherhood memoir that made Rachel Cusk such a controversial sensation back in 2001, and truly WHAT A BOOK! Cusk writes so unsparingly about the violence of pregnancy and childbirth, about the deep complexity of her love for her daughter and the deadening trauma of all those isolated sleepless nights. It’s been said about A Life’s Work that it’s so harrowing that you should never hand it over to a pregnant woman. But that’s an accusation Cusk answers very early on in this book. It is the not-knowing about motherhood, she writes, that she finds most horrifying: it suggests that somehow, during labor, “some fundamental component of oneself is removed, so that afterwards although one looks and sounds more or less exactly as one did before, one is in fact a simulacrum.” Cusk makes it clear that motherhood removes nothing from her, but the additions it makes are too overwhelming to fit into her life as it used to be.
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📲 For more thoughts from Constance Grady, follow her on X, Threads, or BlueSky.
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