Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial 1955 best seller, which introduced a shocked America to the dark psychology of a pedophile, sustains and even justifies Vanessa’s initial acceptance of Strane’s inappropriate attention as both acceptable and even romantic. Strane, as part of his apparently innocent efforts to mentor Vanessa as a promising writer, gifts her with his own annotated copy of the novel, which she treasures like a talisman. The novel opens Vanessa to the tonic impact of sex but through its account of a relationship between a seedy if articulate university professor and the adolescent daughter of his second wife. Like many early readers of Nabokov’s novel, Vanessa, at 15, does not appreciate Nabokov’s subtle formal structure of the novel that makes ironic the notion that the tawdry sexual relationship between a middle-aged man and a prepubescent teen is somehow heroic, even tragic.

Strawberry and Cream Pajamas