I would like to agree with 'The Independent', whose favorable review is written on the cover - 'A masterpiece. One of the greatest works of our age.'
No review can do this book justice, as I am beginning to see. The ruminations of 'Humbert Humbert', becoming more and more deranged as the pages fly by, is a chilling echo to the spiralling madness of the main character.
I couldn't put this book down, and it is shameful to realize how most people would not touch this book with a ten foot pole, due to them getting the wrong notion of this book encouraging paedophilia. Read and make up your own minds.
TL;DR - read it, if you haven't already. If you have, then you already know how haunting it is. ( )

UPDATE 9/2017: I hated this book when I read it years ago. I want to re-read it, having read "Reading Lolita in Tehran" more recently, and finding this article: http://hazlitt.net/longreads/real-lolita and seeing Lauren Bush's comments on goodreads! I think perhaps I was not in the right mindset to appreciate it when I read it before. ( )

A classic first published in 1955 - What a shocking read! I guess I never really knew the story of “Lolita”. Lolita is the name given to the perfect imagery of a 12-year-old pubescent girl right before she reaches womanhood, conjured up by a pedophiliac, Humbert Humbert, who admits in the book he is only attracted to young 12-year olds. It was in 1947, he was 36 or 37 years old, when he spotted the little 12-year-old nymphet, Dorothy Haze…his Lolita.

This story is told in the voice of Humbert Humbert while rotting in a prison cell, not for child rape, mind you, but for the murder of someone, which no one really gave a crap about, who ruined his little love affair. He claims his obsession began over an incomplete childhood romance (p. 169). For years, he would sit at parks watching these little girls and getting off on imagining unmentionable sexual acts. You are now inside the mind of a pedophiliac, and half the time I wondered if this was really only just a novel.

When Humbert Humbert decides to get-away to little fictitious, small-town Ramsdale, in Pennsylvania, it is here, he sees and falls obsessively “in love” with his little nymph, Dorothy. His only thoughts were manipulative ways to win her over to him. He went so far as to marry her widowed mother, Charlotte, so that he could be father to little Dorothy and touch her, have her sit on his lap and kiss her hair and forehead. Then, in the midst of his plotting on ways to get rid of Charlotte, she is suddenly run over by a car and killed, freeing up Humbert’s maniacal plans.

The plot really thickens from here. Dorothy is very impressionable at age 12 and actually does have a crush on the good-looking boarder-turned-father, and she actually kisses him first. He’s in. And for the next two years of their carefree sexual wondering interludes, of what he perceived as romantic love, she began to perceive as bondage, and mentally became disgusted with him. He was paranoid of being found out and created fear in her that if found out they would take her and put her up with the state and he would go to prison. He limited her life to activities away from him. He questioned her every move and followed her everywhere. They traveled across the U.S. and back on so-called “vacations”. He tried to buy her love with material things, filling her suitcase with the latest magazines, clothes, shoes, anything she wanted to stay happy with him. As time went on, he became more jealous and possessive of her and her time. But, at age 15, she had enough and began to plan her get-away.

The day came when the opportunity was there with help from another male lover, and she slipped out. Humbert fell apart. He went on a drinking binge and spent the next three years looking for her, checking into over 300 hotels, trying to get a hint of her and her new lovers trail. Nothing! Then, one day, now age 17, she writes him because she is married and pregnant and they need money. Humbert cleans himself up and finds her living in the slums and still dreaming of herself “becoming a big shot and retiring around 2020 A.D…” (p. 279). [Now, how cool is coincident? Here, it is year 2020, sixty-five years after this book was published in 1955, and it is the first book of the year that I chose to read.] Anyway, Humbert does give her money and at the same time tells her that the car is just 25 feet out that door. She could go with him and they could live happily ever after, or she can stay there in the slums with her unsure future. She chose the slums over him ever touching her again. He left with only one thing on his mind, that was to kill the one guy he believed ruined his love fest, the one who helped her out of her bondage and into the arms of her husband now.
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MORE ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
This was the author’s debut American novel, which they have found was actually based on the true story of the 11-year-old Sally Horner kidnapping story. Newspaper clippings were found amongst Vladimir Nabokov’s belongings, so he was following the story. All of his other novels were written in Russia. He had a hard time getting this novel published. He knew there were three taboo things to write about: 1) A successful Negro-White marriage with a long line of children and grandchildren; 2) an Atheist who lives a happy and wonderful life and dies peacefully in his sleep at 107 years old; and 3) this novel….about pedophilia’s. The first four publishers refused to publish for different reasons: it was boring and he couldn’t finish the manuscript, one said it was offensive to Americans, one said it was offensive to Russians because Humbert Humbert, the character, was a foreigner in America, and one refused because he thought they would both end up in jail afterwards. Although, he finally did get it published in Paris, it was originally banned from France (1956-1959), England (1955-1959) Argentina (1959) and New Zealand (1960). Because of this censorship, American publishers decided they needed to publish it.

Here’s a link where you can read the New York Times 1958 review of “Lolita” where they say the novel is dull, dull, dull: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/02/lifetimes/nab-r-books...

And here is where you can read a little about the connections between this novel and the real Sally Horner kidnapping story in 1948:
https://medium.com/@editors_91459/the-real-story-that-inspired-lolita-is-somehow...

I gave the book an average 3-star rating because at times, it was very, very hard to understand the author's writing. I had to read very slowly. But, the story itself was well written. I definitely felt I was inside this guys sick head. And I did do a little research on the author just to find out more about him, and to see if maybe he did actually go to prison or something...lol
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Book-to-movie:
(1) 1962 – James Mason as Humbert Humbert, and Shelley Winters as Dorothy Haze “Lolita”
(2) 1997 – Jeremy Irons as Humbert Humbert, and Dominique Swain as Dorothy Haze “Lolita”, and Melanie Griffith as Charlotte Haze (“Lolita’s mother).
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“It's little wonder that Nabokov's 1955 novel about middle-aged Humbert Humbert's sexual relationship with adolescent Dolores, whom he calls Lolita, has raised some eyebrows. It's been banned as "obscene" in several countries, including France, England, and Argentina, from its release until 1959, and in New Zealand until 1960.”

https://www.thoughtco.com/most-banned-classic-novels-738741 ( )

Surpasses all the hype. ( )

Nabokov's prose reads like poetry. Even in the slow parts of the story, he never lost my attention.
An intense, obsessive, and deluded account of a predator's capture and abuse of his prey. A fascinating look into a pedophile's modus operandi. ( )