Lolita

WHY DID VANITY FAIR SAY “The only convincing love story of our century.” ON THE BACK OF THIS EDITION… DID THEY READ THE BOOK????

Nymph. Nymphet. Nymphetiquette. Nymphology. Nymphism. I will never think of 12 year old girls the same way. There’s a stain on my brain. The power of this book is that it’s creepy and taboo, but the pedophilia and incest is so damn plausible. There’s a criminal, upsetting proclivity of the subject matter, but the whole thing is oiled with reason--SAY IT AINT SO. It’s deviant, queer, puerile, and yet ever so human, darkly human, perverted in the corner.

Lolita lingers in my mind, like an accidental glance at the mid-day sun. I believe this book will have a permanent effect on me. I’m thankful, but cautious. It’s a book that I experienced, not so much as read. There are 2 components to this book that radically affected me, the writing and the subject matter.

The Writing
I have never read another book written quite like Lolita. The writing has depth, layer upon layer, strata against strata, texture among texture. It’s a palimpsest of clues and anagrams and reference. The author has absolute command of the English and French and Latin language. And yet, among the $4 dollar words and bourgeoisie lit crit, Nabakov plays with the language. He invents words. He hyphenates them. He nymphorizes them. It’s a gamboling and frolicking story in the rarefied air of an unrestrained, unapologetic and unadulterated polyhistoric writer. It’s subtle and raw at the same time; it’s pure. Pure, like what happens in your neighborhood behind closed doors, just before an arrest. He incorporates a dry, brittle sense of humor--even a bit of sass. He taunts the reader to follow. He dares the reader to like and enjoy Humbert Humbert. He pokes you in the eye. He scandalizes you, but with a pen that is at once brutal and sensitive, but always careful. There are echoes of Joyce and Poe.

The story is a retrospective from...from...from where? What? Prison. Ostensibly. And yet, there hasn’t been a trial yet--no judgement. Nabakov tantalizes you, “ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” to pass judgement on Humbert Humbert yourself. Are you willing? Or will you just turn your head, wincing?

The writing is breathless, eloquent, exacting, alluring, inventive, sexy, pleading, conceited, lurid, savory, languid, and slyly self-deprecating. The author is flagrant, unapologetic, a dandy even. He whiffles the writing in so many little stylistic flourishes. He writes sentences and paragraphs in ways that I would never have guessed to try. It’s insanely periodic writing; I grab my head akimbo in pure awe of the sentences. I peeked at an annotated version for 20 pages at a local big-box book store. Wow, there’s so many levels to this writing, of so much I was ignorant. Did you know that under the shocking story of pedophilia, Nabakov is carrying on a paper chase with clues on almost every page? Yes, there’s a whole other plane of conversation hidden below the written words--grammatically, semantically, nymphatically. They’re buried in the french words, the double entendres, the onomatopoeia, the puns, the metonymy, the symbols, the rhyming, the nymphventions. Palimpsest “ladies and gentlemen.”

The Subject Matter
We all know Lolita is supposed to be shocking, revolting even, many people not able to finish it. Titillating, serious fiction about pedophilia is the clear edge of the literary envelope, something banned in many different communities, even today. At this particular time in our democracy, as one of the freest countries in the world, and the most progressive, we champion human rights and place a huge penalty on crimes against minors. In this spirit, we are supposed to decry and detest the subject matter in this book, and lambast the author. People are arrested and put on community rosters for crimes against minors. This 300+ page book chronicles a crime against a minor. Nabakov makes this an even more difficult sexual arrangement for his readers to contemplate, because the 12 year old is an eager, compliant and willing partner to the crime.

In Lolita the protagonist is a criminal and his actions unforgivable. BUT, if there was any method to his madness, it would have to be this:

Humans share a cephalization process in common with most vertebrates. We developed cerebral hemispheres several million years ago (progressing beyond our closest ancestors), and more recently than that, humans learned how to use the cerebral cortex to reason, judge, cognate, and intuit. But, hundreds of millions of years ago, way down the taxonomic branch, we shared with other vertebrates a common mesencephalon and rhombencephalon, the midbrain and hindbrain. Tucked up under our marvelous, modern cortex, the midbrain and hindbrain, called the brain stem, are comprised of the pons, cerebellum, and yes, the MEDULLA OBLONGATA! These are ancient, compact organs. They are the most ‘animal’ part of our brains. They are in control of the lower order mental functions, the basic mechanistic functions upon which everything else depends. You can lose part of your cortex and still function as a human. You cannot, however, lose any of your brain stem without losing basic animal function. The brain stem is innately integral to life.

It’s from this midbrain we get reflex, instinct, coordinated movement, sex drive, fight-or-flight, and a whole range of metabolic regulation for all organs in the rest of the body. The impulses (the input, the direction, the priority) originating in these Mesozoic Era brain organs are powerful. The cerebral cortex would be remiss to block an impulse from this deep, ancient brain--even if it could stop the impulse in time. It’s difficult for our human cortex to constrain an electrical input from the animal brain stem. What comes from the stem is automatically life-sustaining, life-preserving, and high priority. The cortex usually plays catch-up to brain stem messaging.

But humans do it all the time. It’s called reason, judgement, cognition, and conscience. It’s called being civilized. It’s keeping in check our vertebrate impulses.

Enter Humbert Humbert. He suffers an atavistic urge to procreate with young nymphets. This is a social problem driven and turbocharged by the midbrain. He understands (his cortex understands) that the culture of the late 1940s and early 1950s find this taboo and perverse, definitely criminal. But our poor Humberto doesn’t care. He reasons with his midbrain, and pleads to us, "the jury." In the not too distant past within our own Western culture, and certainly in modern cultures of tribal peoples, 12 year old girls are ready to mate. Lolita has already menstruated and had sex with a boy her age. In many cultures of the world, Lolita would be given up as a wife in exchange for dowries of cattle, land, political favor. The whole story, then, brings this American taboo to a moral question. And its a question that you--modern citizen--find uncomfortable, like I do.

Even more disturbing, Nabakov makes Humby Humberty a caring, loving, protective paternal figure that wishes Lolita the best in life. There is no direct, lewd reference to the act of sex; nothing salacious; nothing pornographic. No, that would be too easy to damn Humbo to the devil. Instead, Nabakov explores the possibility that real love may exist betwain the tween.

I’m not too happy to report a phenomenon that happens to men of sexual capacity, always and forever. It’s an impulse from the midbrain, and it pushes through all that civilization-ing. It’s happened to all men (I know because it’s been a topic of conversation in many different social settings to which I was eye-witness). Take for example a young woman of 16 or 17 years. From afar I see a body in bikini, I see a tight, athletic form, I see a bronzed body wearing clothes much too revealing, and immediately the midbrain excites the male sex drive. Upon closer approach, I’m horrified to see that this nubile figure is much too young for me. Am I perverted? Criminal thoughts? I don’t think so. The midbrain wants to ensure successful mating, and for hundreds of millions of years, sexual mating, to be maximally effective, and to outlast environmental exigencies, was driven down to the earliest age that could conceive offspring. So that dastardly urge men experience around cheerleaders, or girls at the beach that look as healthy and trim as fresh gazelles--it’s not right dammit, and most of us keep it in check, but there it is and it’s nagging, and I wish it away. But no, I think it will remain and haunt me at times like it haunts all men--your men--your brothers and your fathers and your lovers. I look away in disgust of myself, call myself a ‘dirty old man,’ whatever it takes to recalibrate my thoughts. It happens occasionally--that oogling--but I keep it in check. But if you think society has civilized itself away from this midbrain urge, type into google the words: “list of sexual predators in my area.” You will see a Mesozoic characteristic come alive. {note to self, this paragraph may need to be reworded...a very good chance most people will misconstrue it...as if I was pardoning the midbrain urge...or worse, that I pardon Humbert Humbert...not the case at all}

So that’s why at the beginning I said this story was so damn plausible and upsetting and ‘oiled with reason,’ and darkly human. Pedophilia and incest has occurred, is occurring, and will always occur. That beast of a midbrain!

A very important read for 20th century literature.

New words: incondite, contretemps, swain, alembic, tombal, purblind, dulcet, treacle, edusively, viatic, selenian

*Ranked as one of the Top 100 Fiction of the 20th Century*
I’m not quite sure how to put this in words. Hell, I’m not sure what I intend to say, so this is going to be ugly. If you want to sit in on this exercise be my guest, you’ve probably got more important things to do, such as organizing your cassette tapes and LPs before shoving them in a box destined for the attic, believe me, your time will be better spent, especially when you take that stroll down memory lane and consider how killer it would be to rock out to Depeche Mode and A-Ha all afternoon (it’s possible you’re one of those badasses with some Dead Kennedys on cassette, more power to you, feel free to tear off your shirt and bathe with a 40oz of Big Bear). You might want to clean your bong while you’re at it; you never know how immersed you’ll get in the hazy recollections of your exploits during the New Wave or burgeoning Hardcore era and might prefer a soundtrack to complement your deranged thoughts.

tAs for Lolita, maybe this tangential bullshit will help get my point across… I’ve recently taken a keen interest in watching “Deadliest Catch”, but as soon as the show concludes I wonder “What have I walked away with, after investing 50 minutes and 4 rum & cokes to the accompaniment of these awe-inspiring images of man battling the elements to strike bepincered gold?” Not much, appears to be the answer; it’s just a bunch of crabs, crabs, crabs, and master-baiting, the simple ingredients of all my friendships and relationships. Sure, it’s awesome to watch sea-faring maniacs risk life and limb to haul in the nasty creatures that pay their bills, but there’s nothing else to it, just dudes getting stoked over a huge haul of crabs, or lamenting some element of the life they’ve chosen. Then you get to thinking how these dudes’ wives manage without them at sea for 20+ days at a time; obviously they are in the crab-catching business as well. And the real kick in the ass is that I don’t even eat crab, hell, I’ve never even tried a dish that incorporates any crab. When I consider the ridiculousness of it all, it seems pretty disheartening. This sort of pointless introspection is probably how Des Esseintes got his start, so I’ll leave it at that before it becomes habit-forming.

tI can’t say that my opinion of Lolita is much different. It’s just Humbert Humbert endlessly rhapsodizing about nymphettes, most substantially, his nymphette, Lolita. And that’s it; I’ve probably never read anything so one-dimensional in my life. I’m sure the upper echelons of literary critics found myriad reasons beyond my primitive sensibilities for including this in the Top 100 works of 20th century fiction, I just don’t happen to see it. One of these qualifiers might be this absurd statement on the back cover, ‘Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America’. Now, when we consider the social climate at the time of publication, with book-banning and obscenity trials recently being all the rage, and you know that in order to somehow foist upon the public a tale concerning a grown man’s obsession and fornication with a 12 year old girl the defenders of this thinly-veiled smut have to somehow show that there is something above and beyond mere prurient interest hidden between the covers of the book, so statements like the one above are thrown out there to mind-f#ck all. I don’t even know what the hell that statement on the cover is supposed to mean, but ‘postwar America’ were powerful buzzwords at the time, and truly, what else could you possibly use as a thematic defense for this book, seeing as the book has nothing to offer except the ridiculous tale of a weathered old pervert ogling young girls on the hopscotch courts, finding one that epitomizes his unacceptable desires, and eventually having his way with her before attempting to completely control her young body and mind during a trek that can only be considered kidnapping on the grandest scale. Let’s not forget that when his precious nymphette is purloined by an unknown fiend, he goes off to ambush the guy and shoot his ass; this is not the behavior of the ‘hypercivilized’; my own rather sloppy upbringing declares that anyone with a shred of civility offers his adversary a duel rather than attack him unawares, Humbert is a lowly coward of the worst disposition. The ‘hypercivilized’ don’t go around bagging 85 pound kids sporting skinned knees from spills at the roller-rink, real men fish for those awesome and voluptuous Amazonians, the women who proudly stand 5’10” or more and have generous curves that modern fabrics fruitlessly struggle to contain from spilling forth in all their fully-developed glory. Our man Humbert has no such redeeming qualities; he’s a scoundrel of the lowest and basest rank. Let’s not forget that he weeps, and when I conjure a mental image of the elusive ‘hypercivilized European’, weeping like a bitch and throwing a tantrum doesn’t enter the picture.

tWhile the frauds who compiled the Top 100 Fiction list and I might diverge in our estimations of Lolita, I will agree with our man John Updike when he states “Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically.” There is no denying that the book is phenomenally written, but the repetition of nymphette-this and nymphette-that simply overwhelmed me; I was left with an indelible image of Nabokov sitting there alternately referencing his thesaurus and a collection of kiddie porn for inspiration while hammering this out. I’d have enjoyed this book a thousand times more had it been about turtles, or walnuts, or my mother's first communion, hell, anything else. Nymphettes suck: there is a reason I don’t go trolling for trim at the nearest bus station, who the hell wants to put up with the behavior of a pubescent trollop?

tThere isn’t a whole hell of a lot that I know, but I do know this; if my choices were either read Lolita again or spend a day crabbing in the arctic, I’d better be prepared to get some frostbite on my beanbag.

Warning: contains spoilers for The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, L'âge de raison and this book

I remember seeing an interview with Nabokov, where he was asked what long-term effect he thought Lolita had had. I suppose the interviewer was looking for some comment on the liberalization of censorship laws, or something like that. Nabokov didn't want to play - as you can see in Look at the Harlequins, he was pretty tired of these questions. So he said well, as far as he could make out, there had only been one effect. Mothers of young girls named Dolores no longer affectionately called them Lolita.

I loved this reply for its magnificent unhelpfulness. In a very narrow sense, Nabokov was surely right. I challenge anyone to prove, beyond any reasonable doubt, that Lolita has had any effect over and above the one he named. And in principle I also approve of Nabokov's attitude towards critics, and the way he loved teasing them. Pale Fire is another long joke at the critics' expense (how many other books are there where most of the action takes place in the footnotes?), and, like John Shade, he burned his rough drafts to make sure that posterity had as little material as possible to work with.

But, if one wants to go against Nabokov's stated wishes and indulge in a small amount of speculation, it does seem to me that Lolita has had a substantial effect in terms of popularizing the narrative technique where a character is initially presented in sympathetic terms, and then gradually revealed as a monster. Two examples that immediately spring to mind are Martin Amis and Ruth Rendell. In Lolita, Nabokov cunningly introduces Humbert as a rather engaging personality, and fabricates all sorts of extenuating circumstances. To start off with, there's the tragic story of his childhood romance with poor Annabel Leigh. Then Lo is far from innocent, and, as Humbert points out, she seduces him. But the fact remains that, whatever excuses you may come up with, it's just wrong for an adult male to have sex with a twelve year old girl. After a while Humbert, and the reader, is forced to admit that he has turned her into a whore who fellates him for small change, and then cries herself to sleep every night. You feel disgusted with yourself for ever being dumb enough to fall for this slick con artist.

Hopefully, the controversial opinions I've just expressed won't result in some overzealous Iranian cleric putting a fatwa on me - one of the first things the Ayatollah Khomeini did on gaining power was to lower the age of consent to 9, on the grounds that the Prophet's youngest wife was that age when she married him. You see how dangerous this speculative analysis can be?
____________________________________

While making dinner (turkey fajitas), I thought about the question Paul raised, whether we can believe what Humbert is telling us. I was wondering what evidence I could present to support my point of view, which is that he only distorts the truth and omits things, rather than simply lying outright.

I would say that my basic argument is that Humbert isn't really writing for us, he's writing for himself, so any lies he tells are going to be the kind of lies one tells to oneself, rather than those one tells to other people. It's true that people do sometimes plain flat-out lie to themselves. But Humbert is a smart, educated guy who thinks a lot, and he doesn't seem delusional; I find it plausible that he is more telling the story his way, and working hard to find an interpretation that makes his actions pardonable. But this involves greater and greater distortion of the facts, and in the end there are things he can no longer explain away. It hits so hard because he's previously done a good job of making the reader identify with him; the reader almost feels that he has been lying to himself.

I came up with a couple more books to which I'd had similar reactions. One is Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, where it turns out that the murderer is the person narrating the story. I remember a friend saying that nothing had ever creeped him out quite as badly: he felt for a second that he, himself, was the murderer! Less obviously, there's Sartre's L'âge de raison. Mathieu doesn't seem like such a bad guy, even though he's a bit of a dope, and nothing he does really comes across as particularly evil. Yet, somewhere near the end, you're forced to admit that he is in fact a person who will steal a substantial amount of money from a friend in order to pay for his mistress's abortion. You wonder why you previously felt sympathetic.

A final thought I had while preparing dinner. One of the very scariest things about Lolita is that Humbert, in a real sense, loves Lo. However, this results in him raping her and turning her into a child prostitute. A couple of years ago, I watched the movie Mysterious Skin, which takes the same theme even further: it's one of the most disquieting films I've ever seen. Has anyone else come across it? Would be interested to get reactions.

Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.

Opening a book is a unique conversation with another, the chance to enter and occupy the headspace of a writer, a character, a voice screaming out into the void. We see life—our own world or fantastic realities that function as elaborate metaphors for our own—through another’s eyes, walk a mile in another’s skin as Atticus Finch would say, and learn that despite the differences between individuals, we are all part of the same chorus of humanity. There has been much research into showing that reading assists the building of empathy in children, and many fine publications such as articles inThe Guardian or a similar one in Scientific American. Reading is a fresh perspective that helps us to shape our own. Lolita, a masterpiece by Vladimir Nabokov, takes us into the mind, heart and soul of a man none of us wish to become, yet Humbert Humbert’s voice is as important to the human comedy as is anyone else’s voice. Nabokov is a master of literary games and jokes, and Lolita is a work of art that often evokes knee-jerk reactions even just by mention of the title, which is precisely what Nabokov loves Nabokov has a fascination with literary games, detail and jokes, and Lolita is a gorgeously complex work that touches on taboo subjects to force our reaction and is loaded with allusions and important details and clues that invite us to play his game and learn. Vanity Fair called Lolita ‘The only convincing love story of our century,’ yet is it the relationship between Hubert and Dolores that is the love story (and tomes could be written debating the topic), or the love of literature? Lolita is a love story to language that soars through the stratosphere with some of the finest attention to detail in prose and plotting to seduce the reader into Humbert’s literary vision of events as justification of the horrors that transpire.

I’ve no ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions - Nabokov*

Nabokov is a supreme maestro of language. Few authors since Joyce have such acute attention to the supreme specifications of each word choice to build the maximum potential of a sentence. ‘I only have words to play with’ insists Humbert, and Nabokov uses words like playthings with the very best of them. Each noun, verb and adjective are precisely picked to elevate the tone of a scene through connotative commentary as well as attention to poetic flow, puns and general atmosphere. Even the names are exquisitely invented, from Lolita chosen for ‘the necessary note of archness and caress’ and the last name Haze being a pun on the German word hase, meaning rabbit, which is suggestive of her as prey. There is also the music of the name Humbert Humbert:

n  the double rumble is, I think, very nasty and suggestive. It is a hateful name for a hateful person. It is also a kingly name, and I needed a royal vibration for Humbert the Fierce and Humbert the Humble.n

The double rumble also exists with couples like John and Jean or Leslie and Louise to denote a cohesion of two individuals into a cumulative force of The Couple.

Nabokov often rejects any interpretation of his work, insisting that it is just sheer creative force with nothing undermining the themes and symbols, a mere game of words being projected onto the page. While this may be a shirking of any Freudian (which he so detested) or deconstructionist interpretation, it is comforting to know that an author would pay such attention to words to build the perfect game board for the reader to immerse themselves in. America comes alive in his words and descriptions as Humbert and his charge travel the nation seeking any excuse for a sightseeing adventure. Even in the author's afterword Nabokov rejects the notion that Lolita is a commentary on America, or an examination of ‘young America debauching Old Europe or vice versa. As intention is often overshadowed by interpretation, the reader may find much to discuss in the matter, but what is most important is to see Nabokov constructing a linguistic America through the observations and experiences of Humbert as he travels. ‘It had taken me some forty years to invent Russia and Western Europe, said Nabokov in an interview discussing the creation of the novel, ‘and now I was faced with a similar task, with a lesser amount of time at my disposal.’ Nabokov set about inventing America in prose in Lolita, drawing on his travels and hotel stays with his wife on a butterfly hunting quest through the states to color the world of Humbert and create a true-to-life game board for his literary puzzles.

You can always count on a murder for a fancy prose style.

While the scintillating cacophony of words are the invention of Nabokov’s, they are also of and through the character of Humbert Humbert. The aforementioned affection towards naming is part of Humbert’s method of pseudonyms that both protect the ‘real’ in-novel people but also nudge towards Humbert’s own literary bent This is a character that quotes and alludes to an erudite array of fiction in order to seek an authorial immortality of his own by putting his deeds to paper in eloquent fashion, both his immortality and that of his relationship with Dolores: ‘and this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.’ One is left to question the validity of truth—truth of the assertion of the novel as a realistic portrayal of the Novel’s reality—as expressed by its narrator. Humbert is unquestionably an unreliable narrator, much like many of Poe’s narrators such as in The Cask of Amontillado through which every undergrad writes their first essay on unreliable narration.

In a kingdom by the sea.

The allusions to Poe’s work is highly critical to the understanding of Lolita. As Humbert would wish it to be understood, Humbert’s nymphomania stems from a romance pruned by death with Annabel Leigh during his youthful years. The two star-crossed pre-teens shared a summer fling before her untimely death, leaving Humbert’s sexual attraction stunted to those of similar budding maturity. The name and the constant references to a kingdom by the sea allude to the poem Annabel Lee by Edgar Allan Poe, an author who married his 13 year old cousin. In fact, Humbert repeatedly reminds readers that romance with young girls is rampant in literature, such as Dante and his nine-year-old Beatrice or Lewis Carroll’s (another author frequently alluded to in the text) fixation with young girls, and that many cultures historically saw no qualms with union between man and pre-teen girls. Humbert is attempting to justify his actions by seeking sanctuary in history. However, his history of amourous occasions with Annabel Leigh should be called into question for validity as the aptly named Annabel may only exist in Humbert’s literary vision of how things ‘should be’. Funny how Ms Leigh is only captured in a photograph where she is blurred and indistinguishable, a photograph that Humbert is unable to produce. Perhaps she is merely a justification, a romanticised fantasy befitting of her name.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

It must be questioned then as to what we can believe from Humbert. Lolita is a name given to Dolores by Humbert alone, her mother preferring the diminutive ‘Lo’ (ponderously parallel to ‘Hum’). We understand Dolores only through the filter of Humbert and rarely do we even see her dialogue other than summarized by him. He insists that she was the one to seduce and sexualize him, but we are not present for the scene. Perhaps the seductive Lolita only exists in the mind of Humbert to accommodate his rationality and distract us, and himself, from the grisly truth of his statutory rape¹. It would be interesting on a re-read to note every time Humbert refers to his step-daughter as Dolores, Lo, Dolly, or Lolita, as she seems to be Lolita only in the sexual moments. While Humbert insists upon his love for Lolita, often to win the heart of the reader by asserting genuine love, his love lands solely upon physical elements. She is repeatedly eyed over for her physical and sexual traits, but never for her personality or intellectual qualities (the latter of which he tends to condescend). The Webster’s Dictionary defines ‘lolita’ as a precociously seductive girl, though a more accurate definition would be a precociously sexual girl as affected by rape. Nabokov teases the knee-jerk reaction in the reader, and while many refuse to read the novel due to it’s taboo sexuality, it is equally disquieting how many thrive on it.²

If, as Nabokov insists, the novel is not about the intermingling of Europe and America, perhaps the generational gap is the true investigation. While Humbert and his Lolita may have a relationship, there is an emotional gap of maturation that is evident even to Humbert. He sees in her stories an assertion of maturity that seems comical to adults, and her experimentation with sexuality reeks of juvenility to him, yet he pounces upon it like a lion lurking in the tall weeds. Humbert is highly vain and egotistical, constantly reminding the reader of his good looks. He even tells the reader that he looks similar to a music icon of whom which Dolores has a crush, a Dolores that falls victim to believing every magazine and commercial advertisement that falls her way. While Humbert is much older, he reflects the youth culture of intellectual and physical attraction and uses this to his advantage.

[W]e are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader’s mind.

If Lolita is a joke, then the reader is the butt of it. As Dolores is seduced by Humbert, so is the reader by his charismatic ways. We are drawn into his world. into his justifications, enamored by his prose and then held in sick bondage to his will. We know that his story is a manifestation, yet we cannot escape it, practically don’t want to escape it as a sort of perverted Stockholm Syndrome. We are even made implicit in his crimes. ‘I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't,’ he tells us, bringing us into his first sexual experience with Lolita to make us a part of it. If we condemn him, then we must condemn ourselves since we complicit with the act. We are bonded to him and unable to escape by the time we realize he has wooed us with his words as he has wooed Dolores with his looks and intellect. We, the reader, are his judge and jury as he sits in prison with a fatal heart condition (he slips so far into his literary reenactment of his crimes that he writes himself to be literally dying of a broken heart), and he seduces us to both pardon him of his crimes and immortalize both himself and his love-lust for Lolita through our eternal reading and remembrance of him. Everything we read has been tweaked to literary perfection to accommodate his fantasy in our minds. Even Dolly's socks become a metaphor through his retelling. When she is his pure nymphet, her socks are pulled up and pure white. Yet as she fades in his eyes, her socks are always described as rumpled and soiled. Socks are a permeating motif of the novel that is both a indication of Humbert's literary assertions and a thermometer of his passion and opinion of his step-daughter.

Nabokov was obsessed with detail. In teaching he insisted upon maps of Dublin or Samsa’s apartment to understand Joyce and Kafka respectively. He made students visualize a train car to understand Anna Karenina. This is the sort of book to rub in the faces of anyone who insists that a blue chair can be a simple blue chair and not a symbol. Those sort of writers, if they are published, are not remembered because we have writers like Nabokov where every blessed word is another beautiful piece to the puzzle. Nabokov invented his literary America to give a map for his character’s to race across, and filled their travels with allusions, names made of anagrams, puns, jokes, and moral investigations. We cannot help but be seduced by Humbert become a further victim in his fantasy of Lolita drawn from the sensuality stolen between the legs of Dolores. While Humbert is a clear villain in a comedy of moral errors³ we realize that his illness is just one facet of him. We must remember when we condemn someone that there are many other facets of their personality and lives that aren’t that unlike our own. This is Nabokov’s joke on us all. ‘The rest is rust and stardust.’

100/100

I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t’aimais, je t’aimais! And there were times when I knew how you felt, and it was hell to know it, my little one. Lolita girl, brave Dolly Schiller.

*All quotes from the author, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the interviews and essays of Nabokov collected in Strong Opinions. Furthermore, biographical information on Nabokov is lifted from Speak, Memory.

¹ Later in the novel Humbert drops his guard and recalls the sexual relationship between Hum and Lo as her left with hollow, sad eyes.

n  I recall certain moments, let us call them icebergs in paradise, when after having had my fill of her –after fabulous, insane exertions that left me limp and azure-barred–I would gather her in my arms with, at last, a mute moan of human tenderness (her skin glistening in the neon light coming from the paved court through the slits in the blind, her soot-black lashes matted, her grave gray eyes more vacant than ever–for all the world a little patient still in the confusion of a drug after a major operation)–and the tenderness would deepen to shame and despair, and I would lull and rock my lone light Lolita in my marble arms, and moan in her warm hair, and caress her at random and mutely ask her blessing, and at the peak of this human agonized selfless tendernessn

There is a sense of remorse for his actions that sprout through his narrative in the later portion of the novel and ask us to rethink our earlier perceptions. This account of intercourse reveals one that is not as one of willful harmony but aggressive assertion of dominance over a passive partner.

² Perhaps more people thrive on the Humbert justification than we’d like to admit, or at least have learned how to capitalize on it. The New Republic once ran a fascinating article highly worth reading that addresses the ‘lolita culture’ in today’s world of pop icons like Brittany Spears posing with a teddy bear in the nude (we acknowledge that she is not underaged but invokes the image of a young girl) or Katy Perry singing about copulation in a living room blanket fort like a child. Also of interest in the article is the town of Lolita, Texas where officials considered changing the town name to distance themselves from the novel.

³ This novel is essentially a comedy, and is quite funny when you let your guard down. However, it is also a tragedy. Martin Amis provides a wonderful introduction that points out that the tragedy is not Humbert’s fate, which he deserves, or his murder of Quilty. Nobody seems to pass judgement on his murder, enacted in a sick yet hilariously slapstick scene. The true tragedy is Dolores in her role as Lolita. ‘He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.’

when i first read this book, i hated every second of it.

while i pride myself on being a reader who can distinguish between narrator and author (a media literacy skill that, much like common sense, the concept of a secret, and outhouses, seems to be going extinct with modernity), i could not bear this read.

when i first read it, i thought that was a bad thing. i dismissed this book as unnecessary and deplorable. i said it had no real goal other than a “look what I can do” school playground-esque literary showoffiness because i needed to read this over weeks, and review it over months, because i found it so very hard to think about.

now it seems obvious to me that therein lies its value.

many people will tell you to read lolita because its prose is stunning, and truly it is. but the real magic of it is in how very much you will find yourself in the mind of evil — and you will not find it charming. you aren't supposed to. you will suffer and struggle to propel yourself through this read.

and that is an immense feat. to write a book that transports like that.

on top of being one of the most beautifully written books i’ve ever read, if not one of the most beautifully written books in existence, this vanquished me. i can read gore, violence, smut without blinking an eye. i steer clear of horror of all genres because it's never scary, and it's always boring. but this book rattled me. and that made me angry and dismissive.

but the truth is that if this book were a fantasy, full of magic and mystery, set somewhere whimsical and lovely, and managed to root me in it like this book did, i would give it five stars. it'd be my favorite forever.

the fact that this book did the same, but did it with wickedness, with the hair-standing-on-end awareness that there is true horror in this world, is not a detraction from it.

it's incredible.

bottom line: sorry about what i said before.

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pre-review

i hated everything about reading this other than the prose, which was without exception the most beautiful i've ever encountered.

not sure how to go about rating or reviewing that.

but review to come, i suppose

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currently-reading update

me attempting to read this book, take 2

I recently got into an argument with a friend about Lolita. I contend that it's one of the most beautiful books ever written, and that it's twice as amazing because Nabakov wrote it in English (which is his second or third language).

She contended that it was about a child molestor and was inexcusable.

I argued that it was more about chronicling a slightly off-kilter man's descent into wretched madness and total loathsomeness. A portrait of a child molestor, not necessarily a sanctioning of one.

She held that whatever it was, it was still about a child molestor, and disgusting.

To me, this is the same argument that Huck Finn is a racist book because it depicts racism. I don't think that portraying something is the same as condoning it.

Plus, the way Nabakov manipulates language is chillingly beautiful. Chilling. So what if half of those chills come from the creep factor of Lolita being a kid? You find yourself seduced by his words and his worldview...and then you remember that he's talking about a kid, and you feel a little queasy.

Hey, if it makes you feel, it's art, right?

When Humbert Humbert, ( his parents had little imagination) was thirteen he fell in love with Annabel, a girl of the same age. Living in a posh hotel on the French Riviera owned by his widowed father, during the 1920's, idyllic but life is not. After some smooching not enough for the boy, she moves away with her family and soon expires on a Greek isle, trouble is Humbert never forgets or recovers from this. The clock ticks forward yet still remembering the dreams, nightmares in fact, continue, every female is compared to his long lost love, and they fall by the wayside...Attending universities receiving good grades, meeting many attractive women and making love to quite a few who like the very handsome man, but there is an emptiness deep inside him, he cannot love anyone but himself and even that is not always a firm notion, shrinks don't help. Finally marrying a seemingly nice young woman ( but people hide their faults) a Polish doctor's daughter, Valeria, Humbert does not have strong feeling for and she lacks the same thing, it has all the making of a disaster, and is...Monsieur Humbert becomes a scholarly writer with a bad heart, his first volume about French Literature is widely praised. The marriage dissolves, no surprise there and Humbert who has a small independent income, which he needs with his mental problems, is in and out of psychiatric asylums his whole life. World War Two begins the writer flees to America, subsequently goes on an Arctic research expedition in Canada that is not really explained to the scientists, rumors state it has something to do with national security. The frozen Humbert thaws out in a tiny town in New England, in the summer, Ramsdale a typical village where nothing ever happens, with polite but rather remote citizens keeping to themselves they're wary of strangers, renting a room from a widow Charlotte Haze. The house old and tired nothing special, except for the 12 year- old nymphet Lolita, the daughter of Mrs. Haze. The old urges... his damaged heart flutters, the pedophile must have her but how, the mother is watching the child... has a bad relation with this Mrs. Haze, but there must be a way to change the situation... Later Charlotte says she loves Humbert in an unexpected letter, he marries her to be close to her daughter, the delighted stepfather now has access...A very disturbing novel creepy is the word to describe it, not for everyone, but this has become a masterpiece in literature, not quite respectable , still it cannot be ignored...