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

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

• 
  Rennie

  Like with any anthology, they’re not all standouts. I was particularly bugged by a few that did that ~twist~ of reimagining things from the perspective of another character (Charlotte Haze; Cheryl Strayed doing a Dear Sugar letter written by Lolita at age 80-something; groan) and I didn’t love that a couple were by writers who’d never actually read Lolita, were asked to contribute, read it and wrote a piece in the aftermath. Every other piece basically serves as a testament to why this is a book you should mull over for awhile. A few get a little overanalytical or I just didn’t quite agree with the argument or it hardly seems worth making (like you’ll never convince me Lana Del Rey and her shtick convey a message worth hearing).
  
  Complaints aside, the good in these was stellar. I loved that a common thread running through many, sometimes that the writers seemed to be working out themselves, was that this is a story of a too-common annihilation of a young girl by a too-common monster who hides in plain sight. I think that’s a truth many have trouble sitting with and is why people have such extreme negative reactions to the book. Some truths are really rough to know.
  
  The varying cultural perspectives are what really make this valuable: Bosnian writer Aleksandar Hemon looks at Nabokov’s ability to bend his non-native language to his own singular usage, showing others who feel torn between cultures how they can use language to do this too, Iraqi activist Zainab Salbi writes about how it’s legally ok for girls as young as nine to marry adult men in Iraq, there’s a lot of thoughtful, insightful analysis of both flawed movie versions and their places in Americana as well as what damage they’ve done, looks at Nabokov’s personality and quirks and how astonishing that a Russian author could write a book in English that captures so much that’s so particularly, distinctly American. Many writers share their own experiences of various iterations of abuse, often how they process it through the lens of other stories, like Lolita.
  
  The “afterlife” of the title is post #MeToo, by the way - according to Mary Gaitskill’s essay. So there’s a lot of examination of what this all means today, also post-Jeffrey Epstein, ideas around consent and triggers and everything else we’re discussing, and even the question of whether Lolita still deserves its high place in literary relevance today - Morgan Jerkins’ “Lolita, #MeToo, and Myself” ties so many of the concepts together brilliantly (and she studied Russian, HOW did I not know this, I must read everything of hers immediately).
  
  Of course it deserves its renown, and not to be cancelled (apparently the New York literati wanted to at one recent point, and the consensus seems to be that despite its initial publishing difficulties, it wouldn’t be published at all today) but there are a lot of complicated things going on here, and I think it’s taken us this long to finally understand some of the messages at the core of Lolita, of what monsters and the quite ordinary destruction of women looks like and how men can get away with so much if they’re white and handsome and funny and really, only killing another white guy is the line too far, even if he was a pedophile too. And Nabokov wrapped it all in language so stunning and incomparable and beautiful that it’s easy to get lost in the poetics of it, even when you reread it while older and it feels much more horrifying.
  
  This went longer than I intended and I’m still not sure I’ve said what I wanted to but this book made me feel a lot of things. Read these essays, they’re very good.
• 
  Eule Luftschloss

  trigger warning
  child rape, grooming, sexual assault, domestic violence, being drugged, kidnapping, mention of suicide, mention of genocide, trauma
  
  What is says on the tin: This collection of essays is about the novel Lolita by Nabakov.
  You don't need to have read this to understand this collection.
  
  This was a hard read. It's been years since I read Lolita, and I was surprised to see that I needed closure - which this book provided.
  We have a multitude of opinions on the topic, all kind of different voices. There is a black woman who ponders how white Lolita and the picture of nymphets is. One essay is all about how Lolita the novel makes itself felt in modern pop culture, especially in pop music. Britney Spears is mentioned multiple times, especially the video in the short catholic school uniform.
  
  The daughter of the publisher who dared take this project on tells us about the publishing process and the early reviews this book got. Multiple survivors of sexual assault tell what this book did to them.
  
  I liked the diversity of authors in this collection, though I did not agree with all that was being said. Especially when it comes to Lolita fashion, I want to say that the appeal to many women, some men and non binary people like me is exactly that's it not sexualised. There are strict rules about cleavage, and how long your skirts must be if you want to call yourself Lolita.
  I was surprised about the connection drawn, because if you talk to Lolitas - in the japanese fashion sense - they'll tell you they have nothing to do with Nabakov and that other term.
  
  If I sound like I am rambling, pardon me. I might come back later and write a new review, when I am not in a migraine episode.
  But I feel like this was a necessary read for me. It's so weird, to be so enchanted by the beautiful language and so repulsed by what is going on on the page.
  
  Last year, a friend of mine tried to read Lolita by Nabakov and had to quit. And if you, dear reader, are in the same position: You don't need to force yourself through a book just because it's considered a classic. You'll never be able to read all the classics in the world, anyway. If it's hurtful, just don't.
  Despite having planned to re-read this book one day, now that I read in English, I know that I probably won't. And that's okay.
  
  The arc was provided by the publisher.
• 
  saïd

  
  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.
• 
  Emily

  I truly enjoyed this exploration of how different writers have come to encounter Lolita - each essay offered new insight and perspective to the story. Lolita is a fascinating novel, but one that comes under a lot of scrutiny (and rightfully so, sometimes!) - however, it is important to look into the way that it has impacted our culture and other cultures, and this collection does a good job of that.
  
  Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group for the chance to read this book.
• 
  Robin

  Love it or hate it, Lolita is a book that stirs many perspectives. This anthology of nonfiction and fiction offers a variety of viewpoints on the book and the films, and is unputdownable.
• 
  Susan Tunis

  Since the start of the pandemic, I've lost count of how many virtual literary events I've attended. But the panel discussions I viewed online for this essay anthology really grabbed my attention. The contributors were an AMAZING list of authors! And they all seemed to be obsessed with the same book! A book--to my discredit--I'd never read.
  
  Step one: Read Lolita. Done! (Reviewed separately.) So, first, thank you for inspiring me to finally read a book that's been on my TBR for decades. It was a rich experience by any measure, but was made so much more substantive and enjoyable through sharing the experience with this incredible group of writers!
  
  Who are these contributors? Well, for a start, the project was the brainchild of, and edited by, the daughter of Lolita's original American publisher. And being the publisher of Lolita was not the same as being the publisher of other classic works. There was real risk involved, and there is drama surrounding the book's publication. There is history to be shared and explored, and Jenny Minton Quigley is the ultimate insider.
  
  There are quite a few contributors to the collection, some best known for fiction (Lauren Groff, Victor LaValle, Susan Choi, Laura Lippmann), some best known for non-fiction (Stacy Schiff, Tom Bissell, Cheryl Strayed, Dani Shapiro), and some known for both (Roxane Gay, Alexander Chee, Sloane Crosley). While all discussing the same book, the essays they wrote and the angles they took, were as diverse as the contributors themselves. And they were all so smart, well-written, and insightful! (Well, with one exception. Jill Kargman was vulgar and going for cheap laughs. Her contribution felt out of place.)
  
  Having waited so long to read Lolita, I got so much more from it for having read Lolita in the Afterlife alongside it. I am confident that I will be revisiting both books, perhaps reading them in reverse order next time. I'll also mention that various essays in this collection inspired me to read three more Lolita-adjacent titles this week! (The Real Lolita by essay contributor Sarah Weinman, a reread of The Bookshop by Penelope Fitgerald, and The Maximum Security Book Club by Mikita Brottman, where one of the titles read by the inmates is Lolita.) That's a lot of literary bang for the buck! Time SO well-spent!
• 
  Ayuko

  Lolita stirs conflicted emotions in me that I am almost resigned to articulate. I am ecstatic that my favorite authors have eloquently done it for the world. I particularly liked the essays by Lauren Groff, Morgan Jerkins, Christina Baker Cline. I also appreciated the story about the showgirl who introduced Lolita to Minton, the father of the book's editor, written by Sarah Weinman. Tom Bissell's look into the two movie adaptations is fascinating. The essay that struck me as the best of all was that of Mary Gaitskill. I had recently read Love in The Time of Cholera, which delves into various forms of love, some of which as loathsome as HH's obsession with Lolita, but they are all love in a broad sense. Gaitskill reminded me how we can be so smug about the sense of morality, and opened up my eyes to the complexity of human nature.
• 
  Erin

  I love Lolita unabashedly, but as a feminist, I have to reckon with that. What I especially appreciate about these essays is that it felt like we’re all starting from the same jumping-off point: the book is brilliant. But.
  
  A must-read companion to the novel itself.
• 
  Stormie

  Worth a read, though some of the essays are considerably more astute than others.
• 
  Chris Oleson

  Impressively diverse essays, well-balanced and provoking. One of the liveiest thread posed the question: could Lolita be published today?
  
  I'm psyched to reread the novel for the first time in years.
• 
  deena

  some of the essays read as repetitive and obvious, but most of them didn't. lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. the child and girl destroyed.
  imo, even in our currently political climate, i think lolita would be published.
• 
  Debra

  Quite a few outstanding essays in this collection, and almost every one worth a read.
• 
  Jan Peregrine

  
  Some of you, especially those of color, will not have heard of Vladimir Nabakov's 1957 novel Lolita. It shocks me too. The book is one of the most conspicuously vile portraits of an unapologetic pedophile you'll ever read and it's totally his viewpoint. I read it a decade ago and it inspired me to write a two or three act play I posted in Writer's Corner on epinions.com long before the site shut down. After reading 2021's Lolita in the Afterlife, maybe two dozen essays by writers and professors about their experiences with Lolita, I've realized that I need to read Nabokov's novel again.
  
  This book tells the true story of how Lolita has been absorbed into American and foreign culture, how the book has influenced these writers as well, and why most of them believe that Lolita couldn't or shouldn't be published today, nor be read by girls.
  
  This is largely because the pedophile character calling himself Humbert Humbert repeatedly asserts that he's unique and special in obsessing over and sexually abusing a preteen girl, but the ugly truth is that he's entirely common and typical of the majority of older men, especially white men with a sense of privilege. HH represents these men extremely convincingly in a charming, humorous way that fascinates girl children who are seeking validation of their sexiness and the power it offers.
  
  Distressingly he novel has been for a long time promoted as one of the most unforgettable or convincing love stories you'll ever read.
  
  Yeah, right.
  
  A 37-year-old man who, when he becomes the girl's sole guardian, takes her on a lengthy road trip where he rapes her every night and morning. We get very little of her side of the story. All we know is that she cries herself to sleep when she believes he's asleep.
  
  It's true that in the very end, when he finds her again after she escaped his clutches, he sounds like he loves her and finally realizes that he ruined her life, but that doesn't mean its love.
  
  It may depend on how you define love.
  
  One female essayist, sexually abused when only five, defines love as an emotion that's very complicated with positive and negative feelings. This makes love more real and human. It's not that pedophilia should go unpunished, but that love is more than what we dream it to be. She asks us to think of something or someone we're obsessed about and how it puts you in a cage unable to free yourself. That's what happened with HH and the girl, even after she escaped him.
  
  This is just one example of how the essayists provoked a lot of thought and make me want to reread Lolita. They are men and women who read the book as a teen or young adult, then read it again for their essay with new eyes and understanding.
  
  I recognized a few names like Cheryl Strayed, Laura Lippincott, Ian Frazier, and Alexander Chee, but most I did not. They all absorbed me. One female from Iraq explained that such “pleasure” marriages between old men and preteen girls is legal. She hadn't been forced into marriage, but her grandmother had been.
  
  Little girls today will not be able to understand that HH is a really bad man. They may consider the girl lucky to have a fierce protector like him and imagine it love.
  
  Everybody else needs to read the book, preferably twice at different ages. Reading about how a man makes you voiceless and invisible, an object for pleasure, seems like a politically-charged book needed today. It's not a mere love story. No, but maybe it'll encourage you to love yourself more.
• 
  Katie/Doing Dewey

  I read this collection of essays about Lolita at the prompting of Rennie of What's Nonfiction and it was a great choice! As with most collections by multiple authors, some worked for me more than others, but there were a very few duds in this one. The editor did an incredible job selecting an array of essays that were diverse along many axes, yet all worked together. The authors are of different races, genders, sexualities, and nationalities. They bring perspectives from a variety of careers too - mostly authors, but also professors, activists, a fashion journalist, and more. The authors represent a great variety of experiences with Lolita. Some of the essay writers have loved Lolita forever; others struggled to get through the book. Several female authors read the book as teens. Hearing about their different responses to the book at that age was particularly fascinating.
  
  Topics varied widely as well. Some essays imagined the perspective of other characters. Others analyzed the movies based on the book. Many discussed their own reactions to reading Lolita. Many others covered how Nabokov wrote, and how the story came into being. Most interesting to me, though, were the essays arguing about the ethics of reading this story and the reaction Nabokov intended the reader to have. There were incredibly convincing essays that completely disagreed with each other on these last topics. That's enough to make me want to revisit Lolita and to keep me thinking about this collection for some time to come.
  This review was originally posted on Doing Dewey
• 
  Leylamaría

  [4.5 stars]
  
  “[Véra Nabokov] alone emphasized Lolita’s fate from the start. Over and over she stressed her “complete loneliness in the whole world.” She had not a single surviving relative! Reviewers searched for morals, for justifications, for explanations. What they inevitably failed to notice, Véra chided, was “the tender description of the child’s helplessness, her pathetic dependence on monstrous Humbert Humbert, and her heartrending courage all along.” They forget that “the horrid little brat” Lolita was essentially very good indeed. Despite the vile abuse, she would go on to make a decent life for herself.
  Readers, too, regularly missed the point. Like Humbert, they ignored the powerlessness, her pain, the stolen childhood, the lost potential. Lolita was not a symbol. She was a defenseless child. The subversive book was said to strike one of the last remaining nerves of the twentieth century. No less transgressive, shockingly more familiar, it strikes different ones in the early twenty-first. Véra complained of Lolita: “She cries every night, and the critics are deaf to her sobs.” We hear her loud and clear today, when—like Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina, whose stories, too, were to be read, as Nabokov instructed in Lectures on Literature, with “tears and shivers”—she finally stands at the center of the story that bears her name.”
  
  —
  
  Some of these essays were infuriating, if not outright concerning—but the vast majority of them were insightful. And beautiful. And comforting, too. With Dolly on my mind more than ever, as she usually is, this collection was, above all, quite comforting.
• 
  Ria Gibbison

  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.
• 
  Tova Cranford

  I read Lolita for the first and only time in my mid twenties. Like most, the experience stuck with me. However, it's not the sort of thing I've ever brought up in conversations about books because for me, there is so much out there more interesting to talk about than a story about a "sympathetic" pedophile. And yet, how it made me feel has. Always. Stuck. With me. So, when I became aware of this book I couldn't help myself (or didn't want to). I really wanted to know what other people out there thought about this book. Did it align with any of my thoughts?
  
  Some of the essays did. Others did not, as to be expected. The two big themes that stuck out to me the most are oppositional in my mind. One intrigues me, the other makes me aggressively roll my eyes.
  
  I'm intrigued by the perspective that argues Lolita is a mirror for the reader, showing the ways in which we overlook, explain away, romanticize, allow men to exert their need for power and control over children and young girls.
  
  I'm eternally annoyed by the argument that we must always separate the art from artist. I've never been a fan of that argument in any context. Those who approach their essay in this book this way, to me, are clearly seeing some aspect of themselves as a  writer in the criticisms levied against Lolita the book & Nabokov the writer. It feels defensive and haughty and I remain unmoved by the argument that it is somehow less intellectual to attach morality to works of fiction.
  
  Overall, this collection of essays did engage me and I am glad I read the book. I would recommend it if you have grappled with your experience of reading Lolita. And now that I'm thinking about it directly, I'd actually especially recommend it if you read Lolita and didn't at all grapple with your takeaway from it.
• 
  Erin Astin

  Overall, I thought this was a very solid collection of essays concerning Nabokov’s ‘Lolita’ and its enduring legacy and importance in light of the #metoo movement. Some essays are stronger than others, and many discussed overlapping themes, but, overall, I found the voices refreshingly honest and the authors’ perspectives led me to find an even deeper appreciation for this incredible novel.
• 
  Cherie Ng

  As I have mentioned before I only read Lolita to read literary criticism on Lolita. And unfortunately this particularly compilation of critical essays did not deliver as I expected they would. Don’t get me wrong, it was by no means bad—but I was expecting it to be extraordinary. I was promised a diversity of opinion but in the end most writers’ arguments boiled down to the following: 1) Humbert Humbert was a disgusting pedophile 2) Nabokov was a literary genius 3) We can’t force ‘pubic morality’ onto great works of literature. There were fluctuating beliefs on whether Lolita essentially ‘groomed’ a younger generation of girls into over-sexualising themselves, and it’s widespread cultural impact.
  
  it took ages to find this book. Correction: it took ages for the poor employees at the bookstore to dig it out of storage, and as I was running late to dinner with a couple of girlfriends I left them my number. At 9:30 pm I returned to the bookstore half an hour before its closing to lay claim to my prize (only in Hong Kong do bookstore close at 10:00 pm). All in all, it was a fairly decent book, albeit one I needn’t have put so much effort into acquiring. On the bright side, I now know the entire beginning passage of Lolita off by heart thanks to the number of times it was cited throughout.
• 
  Patrick Braue

  This is a vibrant, varied, and inspired collection of essays, experimental poetry, and (in some ways) fan fiction that serves as a great companion piece to the infamous novel by Vladimir Nabokov. Even if I didn’t agree with some of the opinions in this collection, my eyes were glued to the page and I couldn’t stop reading and absorbing and learning. Another thing I love is that most (not all) of these pieces are written by women and the ones that aren’t are written by queer men (again most not all) which gives the perspective of this novel an even more interesting perspective because most criticism around the novel is dominated by men, mainly potential Humbert Humbert sympathizers (Ew). Would def recommend this to fans of literary analysis and thought provoking examinations of classic lit! Also for those who love (conflictingly) the novel that inspired this collection.
• 
  Sydney

  ★★★½ | An important reading companion to Lolita. Read it if only for Morgan Jerkins' "Lolita, #MeToo, and Myself."
  
  Other personal favorites include Kate Elizabeth Russell's "Maison Nymphette" and Roxane Gay's "Ugly Beautiful."
• 
  Donna Beiderman

  I have read Lolita a couple of times. Once in college and now as a wire and a mother. I was very intrigued when I saw this title. Although I’m not a huge fan of the book I did enjoy others perspectives on Lolita. I found the book interesting and thought provoking. Thank you to NetGalley for sending me an ARC for my honest review.
  
  This review will be posted on my Goodreads.
  
  Goodreads
  
  https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1...
  
  #LolitaintheAfterlife #NetGalley #bookstagram #booklover #bookworm #booknerds #booksofinstagram #booklife #bookofthemonth #bookbub #bookclub #bookclubs #bookclubbook #ilovereading #bookaholic #bookaddict #bookadvisor #betweenthechapters  #goodreadsgiveaway #goodreads #100bookchallenge
  #BOTM
  
  
• 
  Sarah

  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 stand outs. 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 were still talking about Lolita.
• 
  Cassie-la

  In this anthology collected and edited by Jenny Minton Quigley, daughter of the publisher who brought the novel to American audiences, 30 authors explore the always controversial Lolita, discussing everything from the various ways in which we now view the classic novel during the #MeToo era, to deep dives into why it has remained an enduring read, its inability to be adapted for film and even various writer's personal connections to the text.
• 
  Crystal

  I read around Lolita because it's a novel one is expected to have read if you have an English degree but I majored in Creative Writing - Poetry so...
  
  I really, really dread it. I was glad to read this anthology of literary/film criticism, history, short stories, etc. focused on Lolita and its legacy.
• 
  Bella

  A fantastic collection of essays. Many were meaningful and broadened my perspective of Vladimir Nabokov’s most infamous work. Only two or three of the essays I didn’t enjoy or connect with. This was really well done and I recommend it to a person who wants to find a deeper understanding of the classic.