Lolita in the Afterlife: On Beauty, Risk, and Reckoning with the Most Indelible and Shocking Novel of the Twentieth Century

This collection of essays explores Lolita’s scandalous reception in the late ‘50’s as “pornography,” and its possibly even more explosive impact today in the shadow of pedophilic priests, Weinstein, Epstein and their ilk, and #MeToo.What does it mean that we hear Lolita’s voice only through her attacker - who introduces himself as a “white widowed male” on page 1? And what does it mean that Lolita’s mediated and barely audible voice was created by another white man, the author? What should we make of the lyric beauty of Nabokov's prose through the fictional pen of Humbert Humbert confessing to the serial rape of a child over a period of years? The editor (and book publisher’s daughter) Jenny Minton Quigley argues that “‘Art is often at its best when it’s offensive.’” She also writes that her father pursued Nabokov because he thought he could sell Lolita*, and “that had never been of interest to literati at the gates. But it should be.” [*Sell the book, not the girl - FB doesn't allow me to underline. But the ambiguity is also significant.]Indeed. Yet how interesting is the literari’s discomfort with considering the commercial power of Lolita in loving or hating the book. Many of the same people, over many of the same decades, have also averted their eyes from the conduct of their beloved unconfessed H.H.-wannabe film director (who was recently the subject of an HBO limited series). What is the interplay between great art and great evil, when structural and commercial power are also thrown in the mix?There’s a poster on my wall with a quote variously attributed to Bertold Brecht and Malinowski, that reads, “Art is not a mirror held up to the world, but a hammer with which to shape it.” I would argue that Lolita - the character, the book and the 60-year phenomenon - is both a hammer and a mirror. A cracked mirror of Erised, reflecting an image of the Dorian Gray variety: the older it gets, the uglier and more powerful.

Highly readable essays covering multiple complex controversies about Nabokov’s masterpiece, including the films.

From Jenny Minton Quigley's introduction to the myriad excellent essays, this collection is a compelling read. I highly recommend it to anyone who has read Lolita. Perhaps my favorite piece (so far!) is the letter written by Cheryl Strayed, which finally gives voice to the voiceless Dolores. The pieces range from personal narratives to careful analysis to reimaginings. The essays have so many different perspectives, reflecting the challenging and layered composition of the novel. Thank you for putting this excellent book together!

Alright, I’ll say it along with many others: Lolita is one of my favorite books. That is somewhat hard to get out of one’s throat, what with the central character of the book being a pedophile and all. But it turns out that I’m not alone; in fact, there is quite a band of like-minded readers. Jenny Minton Quigley has brought thirty of them together to make this book, Lolita in the Afterlife. An unusual title, I might say, what with “afterlife” commonly meaning “life after death” and there seems to have been no death here. Lolita seems not to have died in the way that the words of countless volumes seem to sputter out soon after publication, never to see the light of day again. By contrast Lolita has now passed its sixtieth birthday (66 if we grant it the Olympia Press birthing of 1955) and shows no sign of failing health. Perhaps its health is not quite as robust as, say, The Catcher in the Rye (Amazon reports that Catcher has been given 18,296 ratings while Lolita lags behind with a still not inconsiderable 4,676). Furthermore, Quigley tells us that Lolita rated number 4 in a 1998 ranking of best English language novels of the century by the editorial board of The Modern Library—James Joyce being kind of unbeatable at numbers 1 and 3, and The Great Gatsby holding the 2 spot. But lists are lists: NPR did another one where Joyce again gets top billing followed by Gatsby and then Catcher at 3 with Lolita all the way down at number 8. By any accounting, though, it is still a much-read book.As the rating game turns out to be rather capricious, I’ll put it aside and turn to the real substance of Quigley’s new book. I’m not quite sure what I expected to find within. In any event, this is not a set of papers as might be heard at a symposium at a meeting of the Modern Language Association—dry and theoretical, in the vein of the latest post-postmodern French inspired philosophical mumbo-jumbo; or perhaps I thought I might find rants inspired by the political rhetoric of Cancel Culture and the #MeToo movement. Thus, it was refreshing to find such premonitions quite wide of the mark. Instead, what I found were a set of thoughtful though brief memoirs, most of which might be sub-titled “Lolita and Me.” Most of the contributors had encountered Lolita as high school readers, or in college at the latest. One contributor asserts that he hadn’t read it until receiving the invitation to contribute to this volume, but then confesses that he had read the first five or so chapters innumerable times over many years, but for various reasons related to his own life experiences couldn’t bring himself to continue through the rest of it.A variety of contributors acknowledge and address the tension created in Lolita between the exquisite style of Nabokov’s gifts as a writer and the frankly sordid conduct of his character Humbert Humbert throughout the story. Rosanne Gay addresses this concern directly: “I don’t always know what I should think about the beauty with which some writers render the worst of human nature. No novel gives me greater pause than Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, a book I love and hate in equal measure.” If there is a commonplace among all the contributions to Afterlife, it is this tension between the beauty of Nabokov’s language and the ugliness of HH’s sexual exploitation of poor Delores Haze. Again and again, contributors describe the changes that have occurred in their understanding of the novel as they have returned to it after many years. The paradox of the story is found in the tension between tone and content, between style and substance: beautiful language employed to tell the sordid story of sexual perversion, of a pedophiliac, a mature man erotically obsessed with a little girl. As one contributor puts it, “Nabokov portrays the subject as filtered through the prism of art to exploit neither readers nor victims of the crime, but the aesthetic possibilities of the material.” This is the dilemma the book poses to all its readers: how does one navigate through the water lilies that float atop the sewage of this tragic story.The essays of this volume include many personal stories of sexual exploitation by older men in their youth—thankfully not many identifiable as 12-year-olds, as was the case of Delores Haze, but teenagers, before their age of majority. At least one of them eventually brought a criminal complaint to the authorities, and one gathers that her pedophilic paramour is now in prison. Further essays in the collection explore “a fashion industry obsessed with nubile femininity,” and popular songs churned out by the Britney-Katy-Nicki cohort of youth oriented tunesmiths. The paradox is a generation of young girls where popular culture revels in the sexploitation of their puberty.While reading this book it was impossible not to think of the current manifestations of the Humbert Humbert disorder. Jeffrey Epstein comes to mind immediately: even the private plane he used to ferry teen girls to his private island in the Virgin Islands was dubbed the “Lolita Express.” Epstein’s life, like Humbert’s story, ended in a sort of murder, but it was Epstein who took his own life rather than that of a Clare Quilty analog. Such stories continue to surface. Within recent days a Florida Congressman has been alleged to have had sex with at least one under-age young woman, and we can jump back as far as 1977 to Roman Polanski’s rape of Samantha Geimer who was not seventeen but thirteen at the time, only a year older than Lolita when Humbert Humbert began his nightly assaults on Delores Haze. And clearly, Nabokov knew the story of Frank Lasalle’s year long kidnapping and serial rape of an eleven-year-old girl in 1948 because he acknowledges it in the last pages of Lolita. But the assailants of Sally Horner, Elizabeth Smart, Polly Klaas, and no doubt many others had no Nabokovs to tell their tales, and Nabokov’s sometimes spellbinding language should not lead us to believe that what he did is a beautiful thing. This challenge seems to be an overriding theme throughout many of the essays in Afterlife. One poignant reminder of this void in the text is “Lolita’s inner life is ignored by Humbert, and seems to be ignored by Nabokov. But her voicelessness becomes a glimmering, heartbreaking absence at the center of the novel. The book is ultimately not (or not just) a portrait of a monster, but a portrait of a girl’s annihilation” (Dederer). Expressed in many different voices, that plea emerges as the theme of this compelling collection.

Thank you so much, NetGalley for early access to this book!I enjoyed this book so much, it was an extremely diverse and interesting look at Lolita. While some essays aren't as great as others and feel like they're often repeating points already made, there are others that are complete standouts. My favorites were Cheryl Strayed’s creative take on Dolores’ point of view and Kate Elizabeth Russell’s look back at the Lolita online community on her youth.It’s amazing how much effect this book still has, and I think this collection will start the much-needed conversation about why we're still talking about Lolita.