Barrie Karp: "the greatest novel of rapture in modern fiction"? oh, literary, intellectual rapture. But that's not what the ad means or what people thought or think still after all this time. http://theculturetrip.com/north-america/articles/the-12-most-famous-banned-books-of-all-time/?utm_source=emails&utm_medium=featured&utm_campaign=260415northamericaliterature ..."many who come to Lolita expecting to be horrified or titillated will find themselves disappointed"

L. Hochard: But along with experiencing "literary, intellectual rapture" the readers are horrified and titillated. Is it not hypocritical to deny it? is it not an essential part of the experience of reading Lolita? didn't Nabokov want the reader to be horrified because they have allowed themselves to be titillated?

Jansy Mello:  A good point but  I wonder if those questionings aren’t mostly applicable to those male readers who might be attracted by the cover and advertising blurbs?

Besides, what about the novel’s strange inroads into the sufferings of women like Charlotte Haze, or to the kind of environment that can be altered almost instantaneously when a child loses his or her parents, being tumbled from a routine of school, picnics and parties surrounded by friends and neighbors onto a totally different social situation *? (Lolita’s destiny is also a kind of exile) This and dozens of other points that overflow from HH’s self-centered reports…

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*Just a sample, from the end of one chapter and the totality of another (part I, ch.32 and 33).
"Why can't I call my mother if I want to?"
"Because," I answered, "your mother is dead."
33

In the gay town of Lepingville I bought her four books of comics, a box of candy, a box of sanitary pads, two cokes, a manicure set, a travel clock with a luminous dial, a ring with a real topaz, a tennis racket, roller skates with white high shoes, field glasses, a portable radio set, chewing gum, a transparent raincoat, sunglasses, some more garments — swooners, shorts, all kinds of summer frocks. At the hotel we had separate rooms, but in the middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, and we made it up very gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.