LOLITA (319 pp.)—Vladimir Nabokov —Putnam ($5).
Early during World War II, one of the most remarkable writers ever to emigrate to the U.S. arrived in New York from France. Vladimir Nabokov was a stateless Russian. Unlike Oscar Wilde, who earlier at the same port said he had nothing to declare but his genius, Nabokov declared a set of boxing gloves. Two customs inspectors each donned a pair, sparred a friendly round and chalked everything O.K. But it was Nabokov who really won that round, for he smuggled into the country a greater and more scandalous talent than Wilde's.
Nabokov's intellectual luggage included fragments of a book that later, published in Paris in 1955, became a must item of the contraband spice trade in which Henry Miller's Tropics have bulked large. Now. after several years of subterranean fame, Lolita has finally found a U.S. publisher. Following Nabokov's earlier excellent, offbeat novels (including Pnin, TIME, March 18, 1957), Lolita should give his name its true dimensions and expose a wider U.S. public to his special gift—which is to deal with life as if it were a thing created by a mad poet on a spring night.
Lolita is a major work of fiction; it is also a shocking book. Prefaced by a fictitious academic fathead who presents it as a message to "parents, social workers, [and] educators," the book describes the transcontinental debauch of a twelve-year-old girl by a middle-aged monomaniac. As it turns out, the narrator is writing his apologia from a prison cell (he is to be tried for murder). As far as erotic detail is concerned, the book tells little that has not been dealt with in a lot of bestselling fiction; but where the sexy bestsellers talk about the sordid or tragic facts of life in staccato sociology, couch jargon or four-letter words, Lolita is the more shocking because it is both intensely lyrical and wildly funny. It is (in many of its pages) a Medusa's head with trick paper snakes, and its punning comedy as well as its dark poetics will disappoint the smut hounds—a solemn breed.
Kingdom by the Sea. The novel's European narrator calls himself Humbert Humbert and the doubletalk name sets the note of self-mockery that runs—laughter questioning the validity even of despair—throughout the book. Humbert's ignominious, fatal obsession is for little girls in the 9-14 bracket—not ordinary little girls but a special kind he calls "nymphets." As Humbert explains it in a passage that is typical of his style: "You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame aglow in your subtle spine (oh, how you have to cringe and hide!), in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs—the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limb, and other indices which despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate—the deadly little demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power."