On the Staying Power of a Literary Classic: A Review of Lolita in the Afterlife: On Beauty, Risk, and Reckoning with the Most Indelible and Shocking Novel of the Twentieth Century (2021)

Abstract

This article is a review of the collection of essays Lolita in the Afterlife, which examines to what extent recent public discussions of consent and power (such as the #MeToo movement) have impacted the reception of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita. The authors of the essays tend to record their emotional responses and draw on personal experiences to analyze their growing reluctance to inhabit Humbert’s point of view. The volume gives space for differing opinions, which inevitably creates an interesting dialog between contributors. Regrettably, there is very little dialog with prior Nabokov scholarship, and the analyses seem to retread some of the ground already covered by earlier critics. Yet, if the volume is aimed at the general reading audience rather than Nabokov experts and if its main goal is to document the staying power of the novel (and this seems to be the case), it is certainly successful.