Reviews

I have read a lot about Lolita over the years. I was first drawn to the story when I caught the latter half of the Adrienne Lyon’s film, I think I was around 19 at the time, and was shocked at how the relationship between Dolores and Humbert was portrayed as a love story. I followed it up with the Kubrick version which was worse, and then sat down to read the novel. I found it a very difficult read - both for it’s subject matter and the language (I’m a simple girl and the style just wasn’t for me) but nevertheless the story has stayed with me.

This collection of essays was good to read, but by the end I felt it got to repetitive and I felt some authors used their chapters to talk too much about their own work, it felt a little gratuitous. There were some standouts like the deeply personal connection outlined by an author abused by her “uncle”. Other chapters felt a little unnecessary particularly the multiple people who had not read the book until they had been asked to contribute to this anthology.

Overall, the best bits for me were learning about the history of its publication, and if these bits resonated with you I would highly recommend the limited podcast series by Jamie Loftus - Lolita Podcast.

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3.0

Lolita is a masterpiece of a book. Reading more than 400 pages of essays about it sounded like a great time—and it was. Like essentially any essay collection, Lolita in the Afterlife (the "afterlife" is the post-#MeToo world, c/o Mary Gaitskill) had its ups and its downs. The variety of perspective is what most intrigued me, with authors from various different cultural backgrounds discussing the relevance the novel had on their own experiences, and how they process those experiences through the lenses of other stories—such as the eponymous novel.