Book 8 -- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
 
The Irish Independent Lifetime Reads collection of 20 modern classics continues tomorrow with Book 8, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov.
 
Written with sumptuous grace, Lolita explores forbidden territory with a mixture of passionate seriousness and sly irony, says Colm Tóibín, who calls the book a masterpiece.
 
Humbert Humbert is a 40-year-old college professor with an obsession for 'nymphets' -- demon-girls poised on the brink of worldly experience. A European intellectual adrift in a post-war America of trashy malls and motels, he is haunted by memories of a young love long ago. When he meets his ideal nymphet in the shape of 12-year-old Dolores Haze, his heart soars, his passion throbs and his life starts speeding towards destruction.
 
"She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet 10 in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita ... " he says.
 
Rapturous, blackly comic and written in a prose that sings and scorches, Lolita is the book that scandalised a generation, and seduces every new one. It has been been made into two acclaimed films, the first starring James Mason and the second Jeremy Irons.
 
Vladimir Nabokov was born in St Petersburg but his family fled to Germany in 1919 during the Bolshevik revolution. He studied literature at Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris before moving to the US in 1940, where he pursued a brilliant literary and teaching career.