The Voyage Out Book Group’s Reader’s Guide to Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov

Vintage

317 pages

9582701048

 Region:

The “Great American Novel”

Other Books From Region:

Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping

Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born sometime around April 23, 1899 in St. Petersburg, Russia. The oldest of five, he grew up wealthy, moving between St. Petersburg, and an estate fifty miles to the south in the countryside. He enjoyed tennis and soccer, and chasing and collecting butterflies.

Nabokov’s Russian adolescence was under the rule of Nicholas II. The Nabokovs were at piece with the czar’s regime, though Nabokov’s father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, was a famous and controversial liberal politician. He was imprisoned in 1908 for ninety days for his involvement in a political manifesto.

Meanwhile, Nabokov’s mother, Elena Ivanova, raised the three boys and two girls in aristocratic fashion, using…

The Voyage Out Book Group’s Reader’s Guide to The Feast of the Goat                  by Mario Vargas Llosa

 Book Information:

 The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa (Translated by Edith Grossman)

Picador

416 pages

0312420277

The Literature of Latin America

 Other Books From Region:

Roberto Bolano’s By Night in Chile

Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch

The Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, whose deeply political work vividly examines the perils of power and corruption in Latin America, won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature. Upon announcing the award, the Swedish Academy praised Mr. Vargas Llosa “for his cartography of the structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt and defeat.”

Mr. Vargas Llosa, 74, is one of the most celebrated writers of the Spanish-speaking world, an anti-totalitarian intellectual whose work covers the range of human experience, whether it is ideology or eros. He is…