You know, we quite happily – or more correctly, are prepared to, put ourselves inside the mind, or wear the skin of a murderer or a psychopath when reading a first-person narrative. How else can we get to understand the way these beings think and feel? But there is a real reluctance, aversion and repulsion to enter the wicked depths of a paedophile’s mind. For me, this is the hurdle I had to overcome to read Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. I am so glad I did. I have just read the crescendo ending of this piece of art - and I need to write.

A small snippet of Nabokov’s ability to paint a picture.

Mr Beardsley was a flabby, dough-faced, melancholy bachelor tapering upward to a pair of narrow, not quite level shoulders and a conical pear-head which had sleek black hair on one side and only a few plastered wisps on the other. But the lower part of his body was enormous, and he ambulated with a curious elephantine stealth by means of phenomenally stout legs

Terribly tragic, absurd and funny.

So, the writing is superb, it’s a classic for a reason. Nabokov goes into intricate detail when describing Humbert Humbert’s conniving, manipulative and controlling ways when trying to ensnare the unsuspecting, pubescent Dolores. But he doesn’t provide the same intricate, and in this case pornographic detail, when our villain is satisfying his own carnal compulsions. He goes very close, but to my mind, he does one of two things, he either (1) goes right up to the moment the poor girl is violated or (2) uses metaphor, double-entendre to indicate what happened. He doesn’t need to do more than that.

Make no mistake, HH is a horrible beast of a man. How’s that for a colossal slice of judgement of a man who may be born that way? But to examine that further – this reader arrived at this conclusion by assessing the consequences of HH's dark obsession. To be sure, he essentially turned Delores into a sex-slave. He also behaved in a deplorable way to Delores’ Mother – poor woman. Putting it bluntly. his every waking moment was devoted to how to get her and then how to have his way with her.

What a way to ruin a childhood. Destroy a life.

Nabokov’s depiction of Delores is spot-on, she’s flighty, moody, and has nasty turns, the usual stuff you may see with teenage girls (I had 4 of them). However, her occasional flirty behaviour – must be a consequence of her being sexualised so early. Why would a young girl turn that tap (faucet) on to a man in his thirties? I know young girls can mimic dance moves to music videos on TV, which are unashamedly sexual, and try and wear some of the revealing clothes of their favourite popstars, but that seems different to a 12-year-old girl being flirty – to a grown man.

Nabokov had me chuckling at some of the ways he describes some of HH’s thinking – for example when he wondered if, when talking to an amazingly annoying teacher, he should Marry Pratt and strangle her. I wouldn’t normally chuckle at that – but it was the way he wrote it and the way it ‘popped up’. I didn’t expect this slice of dark humour – that is often when funny is at it’s funniest.

There was also a laugh out loud moment (really) when HH was talking to, or being talked AT, by Pratt again – this annoying teacher managed to get Humbert’s name wrong at every turn. Her monologue to him contained the following variations of “Humbert” - ”Mr Humbird, Dr Humburg, Mr Humberson, Dr Hummer, Mr Hummerson” I howled. Humbert didn’t even flinch. I can truly identify with that as my surname is often misspelled as “Porter, Ponton or Poston” but once, hilariously, I received a letter at work addressed to a Mr Morj Porrydon. How the heck can that happen? I am now numb to punters getting my name wrong. HH was too – it didn’t even raise a mention when Pratt was babbling on.

So, it wasn’t all gruelling, the writing is outstanding and deserves to be appreciated, re-read and/or read slowly. I will DEFINITELY re-read this one, as there is more to be taken from this book for sure. There must also be a study guide I can get my sweaty hands on somewhere. What a privilege to have now recently read Gogol and Nabokov with a wicked splash of Highsmith in between – a very, very lucky bloke indeed.

I am happy to leave the world of Humbert Humbert for the moment – Lolita is an amazing story.

5-Stars

La prosa di Nabokov è incantevole. Senza dubbio, un artista della scrittura.

Because we’re supposed to empathize with a grown-ass man pedophile for having sex with r*ping a 12 year old girl and having a relationship with her all because she supposedly seduced him? This is disgusting and yet again, Idk why I’m shocked by the number of ppl fawning over this “great love affair.”

In the last week of January this year (2018), the International Theatre Festival of Kerala (ITFoK) was held in the city of Thrissur, where I reside. Of the many plays staged, a strikingly different one was the one presented by Kranti - by the teenage children of the sex workers of Mumbai's red light district. Called "Red Light Express", this "play without a script" was a jumble of narratives by the girls about their life; and they often broke the fourth wall and directly interacted with the audience.

At the beginning of the play, as an ice breaker, the actors called random members of the audience on to the stage and asked them to imagine themselves as 13-year-old sex workers. Many of them couldn't say anything. It's very easy to read about child prostitution in the newspaper or see it on TV: if it gets too distressing, one can turn the page or switch the channel. But when faced with the victims in the flesh, it would take a very stoic person to remain unmoved.

This play had me thinking, and as is the habit with me, looking for that inner demon. What interests men in nubile young girls (and boys)? One cannot just shrug it off as an aberration, as paedophilia seems to have been in existence ever since homo sapiens have been - and currently, in India, it is taking a frightening turn with children as young as eight months getting raped. Stricter laws are required, surely; but shouldn't we also try to find the monster within and lay it?

Difficult questions, with even more difficult answers, as looking inward is the most difficult thing. The mirror is the most feared enemy.

--------------------

All these questions were brought afresh to my mind as I was forced to inhabit one of the most twisted minds in world literature during the past four days - the mind of "Humbert Humbert", the paedophile protagonist of Vladimir Nabokov's controversial classic Lolita. As we go through 300+ pages of his twisted narrative, composed while in prison for murder, we are treated to scenes upon scenes of vile debauchery described in a roundabout way (which makes it actually more vulgar!) in cloyingly dense, almost unreadable prose. Hats off to Nabokov for keeping up this style while describing the continued debasement of 12-year-old Dolores Haze (dubbed "Lolita" by her molester) by the middle-aged Humbert over the period of a year while travelling across the United States, without losing the reader. That alone speaks for his mastery over the medium.

Humbert Humbert is interested in "nymphets" - a term he has coined for prepubescent girls who, according to him, is sexually receptive precociously. (As readers, we may cynically say that he considers any child who turns him on as a nymphet.) Humbert is entranced by Dolores, the self-willed daughter of his landlady, the widow Charlotte Haze. A fortuitous turn of events finds Charlotte falling for him in turn; and the blackguard marries the mother with the sole aim of possessing the daughter. However, things spin out of control when Charlotte discovers Humbert's true intent and subsequently dies in a freak accident.

Humbert then claims the guardianship of Dolores with the aim of drugging her every night and presumably raping her (he never mentions copulation in his confession). However, the girl surprises him by taking the initiative - it seems that she has been initiated into the facts of life at her summer camp! What follows is the "sex tour" across America which I mentioned above; which, however, ends in a totally unexpected and tragic conclusion.

--------------------

Humbert Humbert is an unreliable narrator; while we may be reasonably sure of the facts he mention in his narrative, the mental attitudes of he and his victim are highly suspect. Lolita is a trapped girl, a precocious child who overstepped a boundary and therefore is kept in virtual bondage by her stepfather. The terms of endearment Humbert uses for Lolita emphasise her role as his "pet" - a plaything, an object for his pleasure. This is not love, but something twisted masquerading as love.

This was a very difficult read (hence the three stars) but I bow down to Nabokov's supreme command over the written word. By allowing the reader to get into the psyche of a psychopath, and to stay there for the full length of the novel, the novelist forces him to introspect and see whether there is a Humbert hiding within his own mind. And the very good chance that there may be is a much-needed wake-up call in these troubled times.

The word/name Lolita always had a negative connotation for me. I became familiar with it at a relatively young age, when a famous villain in Bollywood used to say this name in a movie whenever he used to get horny on seeing a damsel (Aauu...Lalita *Lolita as I used to thought*), my Indian friends should know. And then I had an aunt I was not much fond of, whose name was Lalita and I used to call her Lolita. *unlovingly*

When I was in 6th or 7th standard, we had a Physical Education teacher (Pun fully intended), who according to the complaints by some girls and the rumors that were doing the rounds was accused of inappropriate behavior towards the girl students. And the complaints were True! He was later fired (scandalously) or resigned (quietly) much to the relief of many. How we all gossiped? Oh how cheeeeeap! Doesn’t he have mother or daughters at home? At that time we didn’t know that there is a bloody term for such swines. The categorization of things were quite simple; it used to be either Good or Bad and in case of Bad, the reaction mostly settled at, ”Oh let’s not talk about it”. Yes! Don’t talk about it! The charm of convenience. In this book however, Nabokov talked and how mercilessly he did.

It was few years later that I became aware of the existence of the book named Lolita written by a writer whose name I couldn’t pronounce then and already adjudged the book as DIRTY and never to be read...ever! I was not always a reader and never encouraged to be one till the age of 19 and even when I became one, I had the task of becoming a broad-minded reader from a narrow-minded one and I am solely responsible for this transition. Big Deal? No! not really, it’s just that this arrangement made me appreciate various forms of arts especially movies, music and books and then of course, Lolita became as a must-read, while I was exploring the sea of words around the world.

The brilliance of Nabokov would have been established in my mind had I read any other book by him, but Lolita, the seductress that she is, demanded to be read before any of those books and reading it is what I did.

This chef-d'oeuvre is glowing with perfection. Every word of this text is emitting a light of such splendor that for it being readable by someone, it had to dim a little by its despicable theme, Pedophilia. And that theme could be the sole reason why it is detest by many. Is it a fair reaction? Of course it is! Is the filth containing between words too much for one to handle? May be. Did Nabokov played a master stroke by pulling off one hilarious passage after another and making the reader laugh Hard while talking about Humbert's vicious intentions? That’s why he’s great, Right! These are some questions I asked myself on the surface, but there were many other questions waiting to be answered that had a more generic role with respect to this book.

Wikipedia describes this book as a Tragicomedy but I beg to differ. I didn’t feel any remorse or sympathy towards Humbert at the end when he realized his love for Dolores and how he was manipulated but it all seemed ‘fair enough’ to me. As far as Dolores is concerned, her character sketch, her playfulness, her awareness about her impact on Humbert and the fate she faced at the end was the perfect recipe to be consumed by readers to produce a pitiful belch at the most, because as must have noticed by many, the whole damn narration is from Humbert’s point of view and poor(?) Dolores was more or less left at the mercy of worthy/unworthy readers. But since Humbert himself confessed his intentions, his dilemmas, his happiness, his sadness, he might have believed himself as a victim of a tragedy and him being an anti-hero.

But whatever is the case, it was not easy being one of the members of the so-called Jury that Humbert addressed his readers as. There was a constant tug of war between various emotions that I experienced while reading the book. Following are some examples:

“I adore her so horribly.
No: “horribly” is the wrong word. The elation with which the vision of new delights filled me was not horrible but pathetic. I qualify it as pathetic. Pathetic because despite the insatiable fire of my venereal appetite, I intended, with the most fervent force and foresight, to protect the purity of that twelve-year-old child.” (Hmmmm)

Thrusting my fatherly fingers deep into Lo’s hair from behind, and then gently clasping them around the nape of her neck, I would lead my reluctant pet to our small home for a quick connection before dinner. ($%@#&!)

The most miserable of family lives was better than the parody of incest, in which they were involved. (Now you’re saying, but it’s too late.)

And the loving adjectives Humbert used for his misfortunate wife: Phocine, my brand-new large-as-life wife, etc. (Hahaha!)

I can’t say what was more unbearable, the irony of the whole thing, the magnificence of Nabokov’s prose or the study of one’s own character that could be one possible purpose behind writing this work of art. I really don't care about this interpretaion Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America. I was laughing while spitting expletives; I identified a potential murderer in me (Yes! If Humbert was real, I would have killed him), I questioned myself about the set of morals that govern our civilized world and consequently questioned my role in executing such morals in real life. What was good in my upbringing that I’ve become the person that I’m today and what was/is wrong in the upbringing of Humberts and Lolitas of the world that made them self-destructive? And lastly, what is the extent of dependence of one person on another that cultivates the deadly emotions like obsession, possessiveness and LOVE. I’m having a strong inclination towards studying Psychology.

Anyway, I recommend this book to those who LOVE to read, not like but love, else it won’t be easy to marvel at the wonder of this outstanding painting of words.

If Nabokov said that of all his books Lolita had left him with the most pleasurable afterglow, then it will left you with that afterglow too after reading it.

If Nabokov said that Lolita is his favorite and she was like the composition of a beautiful puzzle, then you would love to solve that puzzle.

If Nabokov said that he shall never regret Lolita, then being a reader one won’t ever regret reading it.

Okay book - twisted story. I was never 100% sure if I was supposed to feel sorry for the narrator of be disgusted with him. It made me wonder how much was just story and how much reflected the author's true feelings.

For a modern day Lolita tale, check out All the Ugly and Wonderful Things.

The closest I've come to a literary hangover is Lolita, the literary and cultural phenomenon by Vladimir Nabokov published in 1955 (in France) and in 1958 (in the U.S.). I finished knocking back the intoxicating novel on Christmas Eve, before midnight, the clamor of a party next door rattling my rafters. I hope that those party-goers are nursing nausea today, but I can relate to how they might feel. Lolita is a novel whose kaleidoscopic language and black wit are so mesmerizing they merit apostatizing to the nearest book lover, and whose outrageous focus on the soul of a 1940s pedophile is so reckless that the author left me nursing regrets for uncorking this classic.

"Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male" is the first person account of one of the most infamous nom de plumes in literature: "Humbert Humbert." The "forward" to this expose is penned by one John Ray, Jr., Ph.D, a moderately talented editor who's been contracted to prepare the document for publication by his cousin, the attorney representing Humbert, the author having died in custody on November 16, 1952 as his trial was to begin. The disclaimer exhaustively declares that names and locations have been changed, and primes the good reader for the dumpster dive they're about to be taken on:

I have no intention to glorify "H.H." No doubt, he is horrible, he is abject, he is a shining example of moral leprosy, a mixture of ferocity and jocularity that betrays supreme misery perhaps, but is not conductive to attractiveness. He is ponderously capricious. Many of his casual opinions on the people and scenery are ludicrous. A desperate honesty that throbs through his confession does not absolve him from his sins of diabolical cunning. He is abnormal. He is not a gentleman. But how magically his singing violin can conjure up a tendresse, a compassion for Lolita that makes us entranced with the book while abhorring its author!

Not before How the Grinch Stole Christmas has a narrator left zero ambiguity as to the character defects of a protagonist. Humbert Humbert begins with his childhood in Paris, where his Swiss father owned a luxury hotel on the French Riviera. His photogenic English mother felled by lightning during a picnic when he was three, H.H. is raised by his Aunt Sybil, who indulges in a brief affair with his father before portending her own natural, romantic demise when H.H. is sixteen. The boy describes his childhood and healthy and happy, surrounded by books, citrus, vacationers and his first obsession.

Humbert is thirteen when he befriends Annabel, a 12-year-old brunette of English and Dutch heritage. Annabel aspires to be a nurse "in some famished Asiatic country" while H.H. designs to become a famous spy. Their mutual ardor proves awkwardly anti-climactic and no adult relationships Humbert embarks on live up to it. He studies in Paris, publishing "torturous essays in obscure journals" and takes a job teaching English in a boys' school. Humbert's work takes him to various orphanages as well, where his gaze falls across certain unblemished pubescent girls between the ages of 9-14 which he classifies as "nymphets."

A normal man given a group photograph of school girls or Girl Scouts and asked to point out the comeliest one will not necessarily choose the nymphet among them. You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine (oh, how you have to cringe and hide!), in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs--the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limb, and other indices which despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate--the little deadly demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power.

After an unsuccessful four-year marriage to a Frenchwoman named Valeria, H.H. immigrates to New York, taking a job writing perfume ads. An expedition to the Arctic places an exotic stamp on his resume and Humbert dives into work completing a French language textbook for English speaking students. He settles in the quiet New England town of "Ramsdale" to complete his book. Searching for a room, he's referred to the home of Charlotte Haze, a widow Humbert's age whose lax intellect, crass manner and tasteless decorating ideas terrify him. Humbert disregards all of that in the garden, where he is introduced Mrs. Haze's 12-year-old daughter, Lolita.

Experiencing a sudden change of heart on a residency with "the Haze woman," H.H. avidly moves in, obsessed with the likeness her frail, honey-hued, chestnut haired demon child casts of his adolescent love Annabel. Conscious how polite society and the legal system regard his peculiar obsession for nymphets, Humbert keeps his hands to himself, pining for picnics with his Lolita in tow that are rained out, or evenings at home with his beloved lounging next to him. Dispatched to summer camp for two months, Lolita does not depart before running up the stairs and giving Humbert a passionate farewell kiss which delivers H.H. into private bliss.

The hollow of my hand was still ivory-full of Lolita--full of the feel of her pre-adolescently incurved back, that ivory-smooth, sliding sensation of her skin through the thin frock that I had worked up and down while I held her. I marched into her tumbled room, threw open the door of the closet and plunged into a heap of crumpled things that had touched her. There was particularly one pink texture, sleazy, torn, with a faintly acrid odor in the seam. I wrapped it in Humbert's huge engorged heart. A poignant chaos was welling within me--but I had to drop those things and hurriedly regain my composure, as I became aware of the maid's velvety voice calling me softly from the stairs.

While Mrs. Haze is delivering Lolita to camp, Humbert finds a letter she has left for him laying down a proposal: marry me or vacate the premises. Willing to do anything to remain in proximity of his love, Humbert accepts the arrangement, expressing his true feelings in a coded diary which documents his scheme to work himself into his stepdaughter's heart. The domineering Mrs. Haze thwarts the ambitions of her groom by announcing her intention to send the petulant beast to boarding school in the fall. Disaster strikes when she decodes his diary, but in every crisis lies an opportunity, and through the hand of fate, Humbert is soon promoted to legal guardianship of Lolita.

The thirteen-year-old's feelings toward her lover are clouded in Humbert's account. He withdraws Lolita from camp and squirrels her away on a year-long road trip across the States. She expresses no remorse for her mother and makes the first amorous move toward her guardian but requires a growing list of gifts in order to perform acts of love. In September 1948, Humbert and Lolita settle in the New England town of Beardsley, where she is enrolled in a girls' school and ultimately rebels against the controls placed on her by Humbert. His devotion remains constant, even after it is stolen by a fellow lover of nymphets: Humbert's bane, degenerate playwright Clare Quilty.

My letterbox in the entrance hall belonged to the type that allows one to glimpse something of its contents through a glassed slit. Several times already, a trick of harlequin light that fell through the glass upon an alien handwriting had twisted it into a semblance of Lolita's script causing me almost to collapse as I leant against an adjacent urn, almost my own. Whenever that happened--whenever her lovely, loopy, childish scrawl was horribly transformed into the dull hand of one of my few correspondents--I used to recollect, with anguished amusement, the times in my trustful, pre-dolorian past when I would be misled by a jewel-bright window opposite wherein my lurking eye, the ever alert periscope of my shameful vice, would make out from afar a half-naked nymphet stilled in the act of combing her Alice-in-Wonderland hair.

The riches of Lolita are how jeweled and darkly witty the language is. English was Vladimir Nabokov's first language, but he grew up surrounded by Russian speakers, and the boundaries he pushes simply through written English are boozy. The act of reading this novel is like tasting wine for the first time after fulfilling but nonetheless common experiences with milk or soda. I can attribute this creativity of expression to a few ESL speakers I've met, such as a co-worker who wanted to say "scapegoat" but what rolled off his tongue was "escaping goat." Open the novel up to almost any page and paragraphs like this lie waiting:

Let us go on with this curious tale. When called upon to enjoy my promotion from lodger to lover, did I experience only bitterness and distaste? No. Mr. Humbert confesses to a certain titillation of his vanity, to some faint tenderness, even to a pattern of remorse daintly running along the steel of his conspiratorial dagger. Never had I thought that the rather ridiculous, though rather handsome Mrs. Haze, with her blind faith in the wisdom of her church and book club, her mannerisms of elocution, her harsh, cold, contemptuous attitude toward an adorable, downy-armed child of twelve, could turn into such a touching, helpless creature as soon as I laid my hands upon her which happened on the threshold of Lolita's room wither she tremlously backed repeating "no, no, please no."

There is no getting around how degenerate the obsession of "Humbert Humbert" is or how his behavior falls into the category of what is known today as a sexual predator, a creeper. Lolita is a work of fiction and no one was harmed in the writing of it, but it is not a novel for everybody. I even grew weary and a bit nauseous of being confined to Humbert's thoughts and often wondered how Lolita felt about their relationship. Latter chapters of the book began to glaze over my eyelids, but after a break, I went back to soak in the luster of Nabokov's language. There is no such thing as a safe space for artists to work and Lolita is bold, reckless, socially imprudent, hilarious and great.

Lolita has been adapted to screen twice. In 1962, filmmaker Stanley Kubrick unleashed a controversial (for its time) film starring James Mason as Humbert Humbert, Peter Sellers as Clare Quilty, Shelley Winters as Charlotte Haze and Trivial Pursuit question Sue Lyon as the title character. Chaste even by the standards of the late '60s, Kubrick's swinging adaptation of Nabokov's text ran into censorship issues.



Director Adrian Lyne cashed in the poker chips he'd won with 9 1/2 Weeks, Fatal Attraction and Indecent Proposal to independently finance a new adaptation, starring Jeremy Irons as Humbert, Frank Langella as Quilty, Melanie Griffith as Mrs. Haze and Dominique Swain as Lolita. Visually arresting, Lyne's erotic version was shunned by U.S. distributors in 1997 due to its cost and subject matter.

Putting this on pause at 37% because I need something a little more upbeat and my library loan is about to expire. So, blessing the patrons that are waiting on me and will go back to this very soon!


So, I've kinda gone about this backwards but after reading My Dark Vanessa it prompted me to want to read Lolita which I'm sure is where some inspiration for the former came from.

I'm a huge classics reader so I'm surprised this one slipped past me over the years. Looking forward to starting it over the weekend.

⊹₊┈ㆍ┈ㆍ┈ㆍ✿ㆍ┈ㆍ┈ㆍ┈₊⊹
“It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.”

“And the rest is rust and stardust.”

Second read:
Fantastic book! Rereading this and allowing myself the time to revisit this story made all the difference.

First read:
Even though I enjoyed finally reading this book and getting to know the story of Lolita, I was kind of disappointed in the way this story was executed. The main idea is very interesting: A pedophile who for several years has a sexual relationship with a very young girl. This is kind of a forbidden subject to talk about, and that's exactly what made me interested in reading this book.
However, I didn't really care for the way this was written. The writing style becomes very heavy because it's written in an impressionistic way with almost no dialogue. We are inside Humbert's head all the time and he had a tendency to explain himself in very long and detailed terms. Yes, the writing was quite beautiful at places, but beautiful writing alone doesn't make a great story.
The fact that we were inside Humbert's head equally frustrated me at times. He kept explaining himself to the reader and trying to make us understand his actions; however, none of his explanations made me understand any of his desires and I grew gradually frustrated with his rationalisations.
I did like the fact, though, that he sometimes hints at the future. He makes us know that this will end badly and that made me want to read on in order to know HOW things would end for him and Lolita. I quite liked how everything wrapped up in the end, but I'm not sure I liked the actual ending.
So all in all, this was an interesting, however heavy read that did leave me frustrated at times, but it also fascinated me to be inside the head of a pedophile.

Back when it was published in 1955, the story of Lolita convulsed its readers and revealed a completely new portray of a paedophile's life. The character of Humbert Humbert has become a well-known and much-interpreted part of 20th century literature, and ever since its publication, Nabokov's novel has been banned for certain periods of time in France, England, Argentina, New Zealand and South Africa due to its difficult contents. Focusing on the life of highly intelligent and incalculable Humbert Humbert and his delusional sexual fascination with Dolores "Lolita" Haze, aged 12 at the beginning of this novel, Nabokov will take you on a journey you will not forget about.

Even in spite of all the controversy surrounding its contents, Lolita has turned into one of the most influencial books from the last century, often referred to as a book everyone has to read once in their lifetime. Apparently, according to various internet sources, Nabokov was so disgusted by the character of Humbert himself that he almost burned the manuscript - which is understandable, as the nature of our protagonist's thoughts and deeds are difficult to understand and sometimes even painful to think about.

First, let's take a look at Jeremy Irons as Humbert Humbert from the 1997 movie adaption:



This is the man I have imagined Humbert to look like throughout the entire course of the novel. Because even though Humbert is a paedophile on the inside, he appears to be a friendly, charming and interesting man on the outside. Humbert is a man whose lies people easily fall for, whose intricate net of self-invented stories it is difficult to elude without having the ability to look inside his head, as Vladimir Nabokov allowed us to. As disgusting and repulsive as Humbert's deeds were, they were always confided inside his soul. He is a man who visits prostitutes and imagines them to be 13 or 14 years old in order to gain sexual pleasure from his visit, a man who tricks people into not realizing the real nature of his character, a man who marries Charlotte Haze only in order to be close to her daughter Lolita who he feels sexually attracted to. Humbert is a man who tricks even himself into thinking that no matter how severe the crime he committed, its performance has been inevitable as a result of his personality.

Humbert pleads with the reader to understand his feelings of guilt and remorse, yet he never truly considers the possibility of accepting responsibility for the sickness of his behaviour. Nabokov masterfully explores the themes embedded in this novel, using word plays, elements of humor and beautiful descriptions to pull the reader into the story. Nabokov's prose is likely going to surprise you with its beauty, juxtaposing the ugliness of Humbert's character. Moreover, the author loves to play with language, sometimes even makes up new words; you will frequently see the narrator drifting off into the usage of French vocabulary. My French was good enough to understand the meaning of those parts, yet I can imagine how distracting and confusing they might be for a reader without knowledge of the French language.

Ultimately, Humbert doesn't only seduce Lolita, he also seduces the reader with his words and thoughts. And yet, can the book really be described as a story about a guilty perpetrator and an innocent victim? In 1958, American writer Dorothy Parker wrote a review for this book, calling Lolita "a dreadful little creature, selfish, hard, vulgar, and foul-tempered" - and nobody could judge her for this characterization. Even now, after having finished the book and thought about it for more than a month, I don't know what to make of Lolita's character. I can only encourage everyone to read this novel and create an own image of Lolita, a girl who perhaps couldn't even tell you who she is herself.

Interestingly, Nabokov wrote the novel while on butterfly-collection trips in the western United States, mirroring the cross-country journey of Lolita and Humbert which took place in the novel. Nabokov succeeded in painting an intriguing and stunning picture of the American 40's and early 50's, turning his novel not only into the journey through a human being's mind, but also into an epic trip across the United States. It should also be noted that Nabokov himself disagreed with all the different editions featuring a young girl on the cover as those images cause the general idea of Lolita being an erotica novel. Maybe I should be glad about owning a simple hardcover edition with a purely plain-coloured binding.

The book made me extremely uncomfortable during parts of the story, but it has been written to do so. I don't believe any reader could be comfortable during the lecture of this novel, and thus I will recommend it only to people who are completely convinced of reading about the troubled and controversial life of Humbert Humbert. But if you can appreciate complex and intelligent stories, layered writing and beautiful prose, you should give it a chance to find out for yourself what this novel is actually about.

“I am like one of those inflated pale spiders you see in old gardens. Sitting in the middle of a luminous web and giving little jerks to this or that strand. My web is spread all over the house as I listen from my chair where I sit like a wily wizard.”

That admission comes directly from the pen of one of the most infamous, unreliable narrators of all time as he puts his memories to paper. I’d say it goes a long way in describing Vladimir Nabokov himself, as well. No, I’m not calling Nabokov a pedophile or any such perversion of character, but his manipulation of the reader in this text is very much like that same calculating spider. It's ingenious, really.

I skirted around this novel for years due to my extreme aversion to the subject matter, certain that I would be outraged, nauseous, and ready to throttle any male that even gave my daughter a second glance. But what happened here was not even close to what I anticipated. I felt wooden, unaffected. I went about reading this with a sort of clinical detachment. I can only begin to guess that the behavior of people in the past couple of years has led me to view such debauchery as this as something entirely commonplace. What more do I really expect at this point? I’m no longer surprised by most persons. They often act beyond comprehension, so why wouldn’t a middle aged man take advantage of a pubescent female, whisk her around the country, and scar her for life? Of course, I knew in the back of my mind that this was purely fictional, but entirely possible. Maybe my reaction was my own coping mechanism for handling the reading of this masterpiece.

“You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine (oh, how you have to cringe and hide!), in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs – the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limb, and other indices which despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate – the little deadly demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power.”

Nabokov adeptly puts the reader directly into the head of the depraved Humbert Humbert (HH). And this guy, like any other narcissist or sociopath, finds a number of ways to justify his behavior. The story is told entirely from his point of view, making the reader nearly complicit in his actions. We are even asked to bear with him as he explains his side of things. But I don’t think Nabokov was truly aiming for this. I don’t think we are meant to feel sorry for him, to understand him. I could be entirely wrong, but I felt the whole time that he was trying to show the reader just how twisted a mind could become in its search for justification and absolution. We can even snicker at HH if we want. Nabokov would in fact be delighted if we did so, wouldn’t he?! This is not really a laugh out loud kind of thing, but the irony is there in plain view. Especially when we are later confronted with another character who is made to seem even more despicable than our humble HH. Surely, HH is a simple, gutless wonder compared to this wackadoodle?!

“Please, reader: no matter your exasperation with the tender-hearted, morbidly sensitive, infinitely circumspect hero of my book, do not skip these essential pages! Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let’s even smile a little.”

I should point out that Lolita is my first foray into Nabokov’s work (it won't be my last!). There are plenty of scholarly reviews out there that can do a much better job than I of explaining the brilliance of his narrative style and clever use of literary devices. It was evident from the start that all of those who sing praises to his skill are quite right. However, my lack of emotion while reading this book really stunned me. I surprised myself a whole lot more than HH managed to anger me. So, I’m left wondering if I am indeed one of Nabokov’s victims ensnared in that web after all?!

“The beastly and beautiful merged at one point, and it is that borderline I would like to fix, and I feel I fail to do so utterly. Why?”

July 22, 2023

Faced with the blank page and the self-imposed task of writing a review that will properly convey my awe at Nabokov’s accomplishment, I can imagine his mocking smile at my presumptuous attempt to cram in a few sentences the numerous layers of a book that’s a real piece of work. But I just reread it, this time in its annotated edition, and I’ll dare try, knowing that, although I couldn’t possibly add anything new to everything that has already been said, my two cents will, at least, pay yet another enchanted reader’s respect to the Master.

‘Enchanted’ is an appropriate word, not only because the author freely uses it, but because it also evokes the fairy-tale aspect of the story. A fairy tale doesn’t exist in any other reality except its own, and that’s how this book asks to be approached. It’s a universe all on its own, and if we choose to participate in its ‘reality’, we should do it on its own terms. Like any storyteller, Nabokov asks us to suspend moral judgement and reality-check (we didn’t question our childhood’s dragons and fairies, did we?) and trust his vision in guiding us through dark mazes to the bright exit of a profoundly humane ending.

Although the author insists in his Afterword that he has “no moral in tow”, “Lolita” is an amoral story with a moral finale - if we agree that the conscious expansion of one’s privately constructed universe to include other beings as real and autonomous entities (and not just props to a solo play) is, indeed, an act of morality.

As the author-approved annotator of this edition remarks, As Lolita turns from a girl into a woman, so Humbert Humbert’s lust becomes love. His sense of a “safely solipsized” Lolita is replaced by his awareness that she was his “own creation” with “no will, no consciousness – indeed no life of her own”, that he did not know her, and that their sexual intimacy only isolated him more completely from the helpless girl. These “metamorphoses” enable H.H to transform a “crime” into a redeeming work of art and the reader watches the chrysalis come to life.

Incidentally, that butterfly on the cover is no coincidence. After 200 pages of A. Appel’s analysis, I think that it’s the only appropriate cover for this book – all those featuring adolescent girls, lips, thighs and heart-shaped glassed eyes are just commercial tricks. But, ok, a book has to sell, and the general public’s worst assumptions and conventions are more effectively challenged by voyeurism than the promise of intellectual bliss…

Same as the beautiful insect traverses the distance between nymph and butterfly, so does H.H. and the book itself traverses the distance separating love from lovemaking, private mirage from a reality large enough to make room for another one, that of the loved person.
Metamorphosis and Solipsism are key words in this novel. The attempt to transcend solipsism is one of Nabokov’s major themes. If, like me, you aren’t sure what the term means, here’s a quick definition.

“Lolita” is a tragedy bristling with comedy. It’s parody and satire.
Here’s an example: after Lolita abandons him, H.H. hires an imbecilic private detective to help him find her. The worthless information he brings back provide a non-solution that parodies the reader’s need for a solution that either literature or life will ever reveal, in the largest sense. Still, as much as Nabokov satirizes said need, he also recognizes it as an author’s own. His story, and any story, is ultimately no more than an attempt to impose some kind of order and pattern on the absurdity and unpredictability of life. Why, he turns even that into a character; his name is McFate!

Dr Appel says: If the artist does indeed embody in himself and formulate in his work the fears and needs and desires of the race, then a “story” about his mastery of form, his triumph in art is but a heightened emblem of all of our own efforts to confront, order and structure the chaos of life, and to endure, if not master, the demons within and around us.

“Lolita” is a game.
A game between author and reader. Author and his characters. Between the characters themselves, and their readers’ expectations and quest for meaning. Between the author and his fellow writers, both those he admired and respected and those he couldn’t stomach. The gusto of Humbert’s narration, his punning language, his abundant delight in digressions, parodies and games, all attest to a comic vision that overrides the sadness and terror of everyday life.

When I first read the book, some years ago, I went away not only enchanted (that word again!) by the outrageously beautiful prose but also content that I had extracted the underlying meaning. “Lolita” was about trauma. About the way H.H. tried to heal the wound left by the sudden death of his childhood love. About the loss of youth’s promise and how he can only find that promise in nymphets in general, and in the girl named Lolita (the girl he ‘imprisoned’ like a butterfly caught in the net), in particular. So obvious, I thought. Right from the first page H.H. wonders: “Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child.”
Now here’s how the notes of the annotator shattered my conclusion to pieces: in note no 6 (that early!) it is stated that H.H.’s “point of fact” mocks the “scientific” certitude of psychiatrists who have turned intensely private myths and symbols – in short, fictions – into hard fact. The H.H. who is the subject of a case study immediately undercuts the persuasiveness of his own specific “trauma” by projecting it in fragments of another man’s verse (Edgar Alan Poe’s “Annabel Lee”).
So much for winning Nabokov at his own game…

Nevertheless, it was a welcome defeat; it only whetted my appetite for the riches in store in this second reading. Now that I’ve seen the full scope of the book I cannot unsee it however much it is (sadly) once more attacked, in this neo-conservative day and age of ours. It was hard work going back and forth to an abundance of explanations and references, but not only do I not regret it, I’m thankful to Alfred Appel for his painstaking analysis that revealed a whole new novel to me. It is only appropriate to close this amateur write up with his words:

A first reading of “Lolita” rarely affords a limpid, multiform view, and for many reasons, the initially disarming and distractive quality of its ostensible subject being foremost. But the uniquely exhilarating experience of rereading it on its own terms derives from the discovery of a whole new book in place of the old, and the recognition that its habit of metamorphosis has happily described the course of one’s own perceptions.

P.S. Dr. Appel urges the reader to find the Yale Spoken Arts LP 902 and listen to Nabokov’s bravura reading of chapter 35. To my surprise and delight the recording exists on Spotify! It was indeed a unique experience to go through the chapter while listening to the author’s voice reading it with gusto.
https://open.spotify.com/album/691e77...



May 29, 2023

Eight years after my first reading of 'Lolita' I'm keeping a promise to myself and return to the gorgeous text. This time I'll go through it equipped with the notes of Alfred Appel, Professor of English and American Culture. A Nabokovian scholar who was himself a student of the Grand Master at Cornell.

My appreciation during that first reading was instictive rather than informed; this time I aim for the "aesthetic bliss" Nabokov proposes as the sole approach to Literature.
Literature of his caliber, I should add...

There are gentle souls who would pronounce 'Lolita' meaningless because it does not teach them anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction, and, despite John Ray's assertion, 'Lolita' has no moral in tow. For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.

Vladimir Nabokov: On a Book Entitled Lolita