I have to tread carefully. I have to speak in a whisper. Oh you,veteran crime reporter, you grave old usher, you once popularpoliceman, now in solitary confinement after gracing that schoolcrossing for years, you wretched emeritus read to by a boy! It wouldnever do, would it, to have you fellows fall madly in love with myLolita! had I been a painter, had the management of The EnchantedHunters lost its mind one summer day and commissioned me toredecorate their dining room with murals of my own making, this iswhat I might have thought up, let me list some fragments:There would have been a lake. There would have been an arborin flame-flower. There would have been nature studiesa tigerpursuing a bird of paradise, a choking snake sheathing whole theflayed trunk of a shoat. There would have been a sultan, his faceexpressing great agony (belied, as it were, by his molding caress),helping a callypygean slave child to climb a column of onyx. Therewould have been those luminous globules of gonadal glow that travelup the opalescent sides of juke boxes. There would have been allkinds of camp activities on the part of the intermediate group,Canoeing, Coranting, Combing Curls in the lakeside sun. Therewould have been poplars, apples, a suburban Sunday. There wouldhave been a fire opal dissolving within a ripple-ringed pool, a lastthrob, a last dab of color, stinging red, smearing pink, a sigh, awincing child.
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Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
RomanceDescriptionLolita is a 1955 novel written by Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov. The novel is notable for its controversial subject: the protagonist and unreliable narrator, a middle-aged literature professor under the pseudonym Humbert Humb...