توی اینستاگرام اول پست گذاشتم درباره‌ش، چون برا ریویو باید می‌ذاشتم ته‌نشین بشه. الان یه هفته‌ای گذشته تقریباً و می‌تونم درباره‌ش بنویسم. لولیتا اولین رویارویی من با ناباکوف بود. همیشه ناباکوف برام یه غول روسی بود مثل داستایوفسکی و تولستوی اینا. کسایی که باید بذارم بعد بیست و پنج سالگی کتاباشونو بخونم. یا همون‌طور که مرگ ایوان ایلیچ و قمارباز رو به‌عنوان کتاب‌های سبک‌ترشون خوندم، خنده در تاریکی ناباکوف رو هم می‌تونم الانا بخونم. اما لولیتا خیلی نظرمو تغییر داد.

نه اینکه کتاب راحتی باشه. کلی ارجاعات برون‌متنی داره که در نهایت زیبایی، توی داستان نشسته. طوری که فکر نمی‌کنی نویسنده داره خودنمایی می‌کنه. لبریزه، داستانش روانشناسانه و تابوشکنانه‌ست و از نظر زبان‌شناسی ناباکوف رو یه نابغه نشون می‌ده که به‌نظرم واقعاً هست. طول می‌کشه توی داستان جا بیفتین و یه غذای راحت نیست. مثل برنج باید صبر کنین دم بکشه :دی بعد براتون خیلی خوشمزه می‌شه. اگه اون ضمیمۀ توضیحی آخر کتاب نبود، من خیلی چیزاش رو نمی‌فهمیدم و دست مترجم درد نکنه که کم از نویسنده برای این کار عرق نریخته. گفتم عرق. نویسنده پای این کار عرق ریخته، زحمت کشیده، چند طول کشیده تا چاپش کنه. نسخۀ اولش نصف این مدت طول کشیده بنویسه، اما بعد مدام داشته صیقلش می‌داده. جالب اینکه یه مدت گذاشته بودتش کنار و نمی‌تونسته سمتش بره، و این خانمش بوده که تشویقش کرده ادامه بده و دنبالشو بگیره.

ناباکوف به یکی از تابوهای جامعۀ زمان خودش و حتی الان حمله می‌کنه، یه عقدۀ دیرینه رو بیرون می‌کشه، مثل یه روانکاو با اون برخورد و واکاویش می‌کنه و مثل یک نویسنده، داستانشو درمی‌آره. شخصیت‌پردازی هامبرت هامبرت قوی‌ترین شخصیت‌پردازی‌ای هست که به عمرم خوندم. اون‌قد کامله که فکر می‌کنین خود ناباکوفه. بُعدی نداره که بهش فکر نکرده باشه. داستان به‌شدت درونی پیش می‌ره و داستان‌های درونی، سخت‌خوانن و دیر آدمو می‌گیرن و کلی باید روی هر قسمت‌شون فکر کنی. لولیتا هم از این قاعده مستثنی نیست اما ارزشش رو داره. بهترین داستان درونی‌ای هم هست که تا حالا خوندم.

آدم به عقلش نمی‌رسه که چطوری. چطوری حاضر شده زندگیشو پای لولیتا بذاره. نمی‌دونی عشقه یا شهوت محض. اون‌قد اینا با هم آمیختن که خود شخصیت هم به خودش حمله می‌کنه. گاهی انگار دوتا هامبرت داریم، یه هامبرتی که داره هامبرت اصلی رو از بیرون نقد می‌کنه. این شاهکاره! توصیفات ریزریز و موبه‌مو و شاعرانه و رؤیاییش ملال‌آور نیست و تازه لذت‌بخش هم هست. هامبرت پای چیزی که تماماً ازش لذت می‌بره، زندگیشو می‌ذاره. اون‌قدر توی این آدم غرقه که عاشقش می‌شی، حتی اگر فکر کنی احساس بین‌شون عشق نیست.

من قسمت‌های آخر کتاب رو بی‌نهایت دوست داشتم. اونجایی که می‌ره پیش لولیتا(اسپویلر، اسپویلر. نخونین نخونین.) وقتی حامله‌ست و با شوهرشه. اونجایی که می‌خواد همه‌چی رو برگردونه، جدال و درگیری‌ای که با خودش داره، اون داغ‌ترین اشک‌هایی که روی صورتش روان می‌شه و مجبور می‌شه صورتش رو بپوشونه و جلوی لولیتا درهم نشکنه... این تیکه می‌خواستی بگیری هامبرت رو بغل کنی و باهاش گریه کنی. :))))) و بعدش هم اون تیکه‌ای رو دوست داشتم که می‌ره دخل اون یارویی رو می‌آره که اولین بار لولیتا رو اذیت کرده بود و زندگیشو خراب می‌کرد. هامبرت پخته‌ترین شخصیت‌پردازی‌ای هست که من خوندم و امیدوارم حالا حالاها چیزی رو دستش نزنه. تازه می‌خوام چندبار دیگه هم بخونمش بس که این رمان کامل بود. کامل.

داستان با لولیتا آغاز و با لولیتا تموم می‌شه. وای که چقد پیچیده بود. بسیار بسیار مشتاقم کارهای دیگۀ ناباکوف رو بخونم. همه‌شونو اصن.

لولیتا، چراغ زندگی من، آتش اندام جنسی من. گناه من، روح من. لو، لی، تا. نوک زبان در سفری سه گامی از کام دهان به سمت پایین می‌آید و در گام سومش به پشت دندان ضربه می‌زند: لو. لی. تا

هر وقت به لولیتا فکر می‌کنم یاد حرف ارهان پاموک می‌افتم که برای اینکه پایان داستانش را بنویسد چمدان سفرش را می‌بندد و کتاب لولیتا را هم با خودش برمی‌دارد...اوایل به این فکر می‌کردم چرا پاموک کتابی مثلِ "برادران کارامازوف" یا "سفر به انتهای شب" را انتخاب نمی‌کند تا اینکه فهمیدم تمایز لولیتا با دیگر کتابها جنبه غیراخلاقی بودن آن است...مردی بزرگسال عاشق دختربچه‌ای ‌می‌شود که همش 12 سالش است...و پاموک که در یک جامعه اخلاقی زندگی می‌کند شاید بیشتر از هرچیزی به این کتاب نیاز دارد. اشتباه برداشت نکنید لو،لی،تا ما را عاشق دختربچه ها نمی‌کند ولی ما را کمی آزادتر می‌کند تا با امیالمان روراست باشیم و یک نویسنده بیشتر از هرچیزی به صداقت با خودش احتیاج دارد و فرار از خودسانسوری...و یک چیز دیگر که همه‌ی نویسنده‌های جهان به آن نیاز دارند فرار از قوانین نوشته شده است...متاسفانه بعضی از نویسنده ها قوانین روانشناسی را وارد داستان کردند و کتاب‌های ادبی تبدیل شده به محصول و تبلیغی برای نظریات روانکاوی فروید و دیگران...بخاطر همین است که ناباکوف بشدت فروید و روانکاوی را در این کتاب به ریشخند می‌کشد تا نشان بدهد انسان چیزی فراتر از آن قوانین است و یک رمان‌نویس باید بیشتر به خود -یعنی وجود انسانی خودش- اعتماد کند تا نظرات دیگر عالی‌جنابان



سال‌ها و سال‌ها پیش

در قلمرو پادشاهی کنار دریا

دخترکی می‌زیست که شاید شنیده باشید نامش را:

«آنابل لی»

و این دخترک چیزی در سر نداشت

جز این‌که عاشق من باشد و معشوقم.

من کودکی بودم و او نیز کودکی

در آن قلمرو پادشاهی کنار دریا

اما با عشقی عاشق هم بودیم که بیش از عشق بود

من و نازنین آنابل لی

با عشقی که فرشته‌های بال‌دار بهشت

به من و او غبطه می‌خوردند.

و از این روی، مدت‌ها پیش،

در آن قلمرو پادشاهی کنار دریا،

از ابری بادی وزید و لرزاند

آنابل لی زیبای مرا؛

چون خویشاوندِ نجیب‌زاده‌ی او آمد

و او را از من ربود

تا در کاخی زندانی‌اش کند

در آن قلمرو پادشاهی کنار دریا

فرشته‌های بهشت که بسا کم‌تر از ما شاد بودند،

به من و او حسودی‌شان شد،

بله، سببش همین بود (همه‌ی مردان هم می‌دانند

در آن قلمرو پادشاهی کنار دریا)

آن بادی که از ابر شب وزید

لرزاند و میراند آنابل لی زیبای مرا.

اما عشق ما، بارها استوارتر بود

از عشقِ آن‌ها که بزرگ‌تر از ما بودند،

آن‌ها که داناتر از ما بودند

نه… حتا فرشته‌های بهشت برین

و دیوهای دوزخ زیرین

نمی‌توانند بگسلند روح مرا

از روحِ زیبا آنابل لی

چرا که ماه نمی‌تابد، مگر مرا ببرد به رویای او،

زیبا آنابل لی

و ستاره‌ها نمی‌دمند، مگر نشانم دهند چشم‌های روشنِ او،

زیبا آنابل لی

و چنین همه‌ شب‌هنگام، می‌چرخم رو به او

رو به عزیزم، دلبرم، عمرم، نازنینم

نازنین‌خفته‌درگورم، در کنار دریا

گوری در کنار خروشان‌دریا.

✧ ↝ 2.5 stars


i don’t have anything to say that hasn’t already been said about Lolita, but i ultimately found this more tedious and tiring than shocking or beautiful, as it is described by many.


this book is absolutely not a love story of any kind, just to get that out of the way, and the fact that it is described as one makes me doubt that those people even read the book.

however. one thing that the author of Lolita is praised for is their ability to write so well that it makes people sympathize with a pedophile and abuser. personally, i can see what people mean by that, as Lolita is written in a way that distracts the reader from what is actually going on with gorgeous writing, beautifully written monologues about ‘love’, and what i found to be rather random anecdotes told by the narrator too often for my taste. i think that making something so ugly sound so beautiful at times takes true talent, so i do think that the author succeeded in that area.

however, for me, knowing the premise of the story, i was disgusted by the narrator from the beginning, and that did not allow the pretty writing to make me feel as if i was reading something other than what i was reading, and therefore i did not appreciate the writing as much as i could’ve if it was, say, not written about pedophilia but something else entirely.

take the monologues and quotes about love, for example, that i did not appreciate in this book as much as i could’ve if they had actually been written about love and not something so horridly disgusting. ultimately, i could not separate the gorgeous writing from what it was written about, so it was rather lost on me. flowery quotes about love that are supposed to make me feel something will not make me feel what i am supposed to feel from them when they are referring to something so entirely undeserved of that beauty and therefore the feelings that said flowery quote would normally evoke in me.


regardless of how effective i personally found the distractions in Lolita, i frankly found it boring.

i did not understand many of the references that the narrator made to things in his time, and while i understand the intent of the author in including all of those references and details, it was wholly lost on me.

my other issue was the frequency of those details that i could not understand; it seemed as if the narrator could write about those things forever.


additionally, i almost felt as if nothing happened throughout.

for me, at least, it was easy to get the gist of Lolita from the description and just knowing about it, its premise, and the general controversy surrounding it. it feels like one of those books that can be known and understood without necessarily having to read it yourself, and that it is possibly not worth reading it yourself.


still, i am glad that i read it if not for anything other than just to say that i have, and to now be able to form my own opinions on it. i will also likely reread it later in life to see if my perspectives will have changed.


the last thing i want to mention, and the only reason i am mentioning it now is because i forgot to mention it before, is that i do think that the author greatly succeeded with writing an unreliable narrator. i also think that the story we were told would have been extremely different if it was being told by Dolores.

Two readers diverged in a book - one took the road of horror and disgust, and the other took the road of literary admiration - and those readers were me!

Underneath the five shining stars awarded to the masterpiece for its technical and narrative brilliance, you can see the one gloomy star awarded to the pain it caused me to be inside the head of a rapist specialising in prepubescent girls.

How do you review a book like Lolita? Do you recommend it to friends and family after spending hours and hours with acute nausea, reading of repeated casual rape and mind control from the perspective of the manipulative perpetrator?

We are talking about a main character who imagines a time when his 13-year-old victim won't be attractive to him for daily rape anymore due to showing first signs of a grown-up female body. We are talking about a narrator who loses himself in ideas how he can solve the dilemma by having a girl child with his victim, who can then move into the role of Lolita Two at the age of eight or nine, only to be replaced by Lolita Three for the pleasure of her (Grand)Dad when the second generation of nymphet has grown too old to please. Is that acceptable, even if it comes across as a literary masterpiece?

I would have said no before I read it. There is a reason why I waited so long. Now I have forced myself from page to page, acknowledged the mastery with which the narrator leads us from rape to comedy and back again, and I have had to put in all the effort I could master not to confuse the author with the main monster of a character.

What happens when you read Lolita is quite unique. Identifying strongly with the voice that tells the story is not an option, and at the same time, it is compelling and convincing in a way that moves Humbert into close vicinity with Raskolnikov, with the caveat that Raskolnikov is a purist and an angel in comparison.

Why is Lolita so hard to digest, to rate, to judge? Because we know there are men like Humbert out there, and they have the charm required to control their environment in exactly the way he did. The only difference between the news we read each night and the plot told on the pages of Lolita is the angle of our perception. We are inside the head of Jeffrey Epstein, and it is not a pleasant place to be.

In a long diatribe of victim-blaming, Humbert tells us in his unreliably reliable way that his acts are both natural and monstrous, conscious and forced upon him by a girl who, in his mind, triggers his behaviour. If she weren't so attractive, he wouldn't have to rape her daily over the course of two years, right?

He even suffers from being with her and describes in all detail how annoyingly dull and moody she can be. But the nonstop availability of her body of course makes up for some of the frustrations.

I hated this novel and had difficulties finishing it. At the same time, I bow my head to Nabokov for being able to write inside the head of Humbert. I stopped reading violence voyeurism in the shape of "crime fiction" a long time ago, and the reason was double: I couldn't bear the cheap lure of the unspeakable sexual crime against children sold to me in the basest prose imaginable. Lolita is crime fiction well ... or rather ... superbly written. Therefore, the jury is out. Won't be back anytime soon either.

Lost on that road that forced the reader to split into two different minds...

“It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.”

This is another of those books that have been on my tbr shelf for a few years-say two or three. A very close friend read it and told me she loved it. I have since been planning on reading it and now I thought well let's go on this adventure/misadventure...whatever it turns out to be!

The cover of the book showing a young girl always repelled me for unknown reasons. I used to think may be it is a one time rape scene elaborated in detail in this entire book.

Starting this book put me in an entirely different dimension and state of mind. For about 50 pages, I had no idea what the hell was going on. Around 100 pages, I started having a slight grip over it. At 200, I started liking it and during the last few chapters, I fell for it!

“I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.”

This book is about Humbert Humbert(a pervert), his obsession with nymphets, his pathetic lusty love and its dull, repulsive story roaming around LO-LI-TA, which again is not the real name, of course!

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. 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 is extremely difficult and controversial book that requires quite an amount of time and work to get through it and energy to understand it. This book and author are not just anyone's cup of tea. I had to take this book slowly and steadily. But since it is an exceptional book, it requires you to be of a specific mentality to be read and be understood. You have to get into the essence of this book with some effort. Only then does it give you the pleasure it promises!

“You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.”

A lot of things irritated me about this book.
Like the vast use of French...it disturbed my line of thought and interrupted the imaginative procedures I go through while trying to grasp the story.

“I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.”

And the use of sometimes un-understandably long sentences, in the middle of which I forgot what it was from where the thought actually started.
And then again, the parenthesis and the heavy material put in between them...confused me again and again.

I had to stop myself from giving up on it a lot of times. I can't even believe I have completed it but for a lot of reasons I enjoyed it because it was a new experience and a different book. For, of course it is a disgusting book but the wide array of psychological analysis you get to make through it is what kept me hooked, be it by an extremely thin thread, but hooked that I was! Although the subject matter was not of my taste.

“if a violin string could ache, i would be that string.”

At some places, the author so successfully paints a clear picture of the happenings that you fall for it and then he gets up and takes leave from his aisle from where you have to take the wheel and steer it in the right direction, which direction obviously you have no idea is right or wrong!

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

I liked the book without even knowing why I liked it when I disliked it at so many points! It is like having a hangover you knew would occur and then having a confused mind at why did we had it in first place but still liking it somehow!

Overall my rating is something between 3.5 and 4
(this is a very confused rating for an extremely confused narrative)

“We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.”

Last but not the least, a genuine question!
Is it a classic??? (wink, wink)

“And the rest is rust and stardust.”

Reader as Juror / The Cunning Art of Distraction
"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta."

Nabokov has fun with our (mostly Americans') predilection to making snap moral decisions. I'll say right off, I made a moral decision several years ago not to read this, if at all, until my 2 daughters were well past Dolly's age during most of the novel--13/14 years old. They turned 17 in March. Only now am I capable of setting aside heavy prejudices against pedophiles to read a book I've often heard described as masterful. On tries to read this 4 & 2 years ago, I could only envision a monster.



Ironically, Nabokov's Humbert Humbert addresses the readers as jurors. A juror in the U.S. is generally automatically disqualified if her undue prejudice against an accused is so strong that she believes it impossible to set it aside to render a fair, impartial decision at the trial's conclusion.

I'd say I'm in what I think is likely 99.9% of adult first-time readers who go into reading Lolita, an iconic term now, believing Humbert Humbert is disgusting and that the acts he committed against a 13-year-old are despicable and should be punished with a long prison sentence. Yet, most of us can set aside that bias temporarily to hear him out given the novel's famed author and implied assurances by those who read before us that this is worthy (great) literature and not smut.

Me, I was floored by several things that reaffirm my opinion of Nabokov as a genius at incredibly descriptive writing, wordplay and literary devices, and as a maestro at divining human nature:

First, after admitting what he did, HH never asks you to forgive him for his sins (that I can recall) and he does not argue that what he did was acceptable. Had he done either of these things, I'd guess about half of the 99.9% would have tuned him out and/or given up on the book.

Second, in addressing the readers as a jury, he provides a hint, maybe even subconsciously, that you are to maintain an open mind until he has told the story in full.

Third, he tells you his history to give you a context: he realized his love for nymphets when young with the tragic death of his childhood love, Annabel Leigh; another perhaps subliminal cue that partially excuses his conduct without asking you to excuse it.

Fourth, Nabokov made HH so charming, used such gorgeous language and enchanting descriptions that made this seem like a fairy tale, you almost forget he's describing his being on the lam with a 14-year-old.

Last, he never becomes graphic in his descriptions of the sexual acts, which leads to a counterintuitive conclusion, albeit on the surface as we read the novel, that his relationship with Dolly was more about things like control, his sickness and his idea of love than about sex.

This masterpiece is as if Nabokov has performed a lengthy magic trick, full of distractions from its objective, and a linguistic dexterity that make the reader empathize with a confessed pedophile and forget all about the damning facts that Humbert Humbert stole this child's innocence, violated her body and soul, and did untold damage to her psyche.

I'm no literary historian, but I'd hazard a guess that there were probably several books written after the trailblazing Lolita that were not heard from after publication, or were deemed smut. Not that many self-righteous organizations didn't blast this novel as pornographic lechery. Only someone like Nabokov could have pulled off this literary mysticism. Since reading this, I've studied some of the literary devices he used and I'm astounded at the wizardry.

I wonder now how many of the novel's negative reviews are based on the reader's prejudices described above. I'd suggest to a reader on the fence of reading this book, that you ask yourself if your prejudice is so strong against a man who admits numerous statutory rapes of a 13/14-year-old girl that you think it impossible for you to set it aside to read with a fair and open mind. If so, then I recommend you come back in a few years. That's what I did and I'm glad I could, at last, read this classic.

I suspect I’ll get some backlash for this review, but so be it. Merely expressing my opinion about a book (or books) and in no way defending pedophilia…or any other philia for that matter, so here goes.

At its core, Lolita is about obsession. Yes, I know there’s the whole pedophilia issue (which technically, clinically in this case is hebephilia and ephebophilia depending on what part of the story you happen to be in), but that’s merely the context for the portrayal of the obsession. We all have obsessions of one sort or another. Most of us are able to control, or at least hide, those obsessions. Some of us are either incapable or unwilling to control or hide them and choose to act on them instead. That pursuit of an obsession (in this case a particular girl) is what Lolita is about. There are other books along the same lines that deal with obsessions and their devastating effects on the lives of the obsessed and those around them. Books dealing with sexual obsessions include n  The End of Alicen, n  Innocentsn, and n  Death in Venicen…although Death in Venice doesn't lead to sexual contact, if I remember correctly. n  Perfume: The Story of a Murderern deals with an olfactory obsession that leads to some very gruesome scenes. In Innocents, the young target of the sexually obsessed adult is also obsessed, but in her case it’s with the need to control the situation and the emotional reaction of the adult. Pretty much anything by de Sade is about obsessions of one sort or another, but he's a whole other discourse. The point is that these and other books about obsession have to have a focus for the obsession. If they don't, they’re Psychology textbooks rather than novels.

Of the books I’ve read so far that deal with obsession, Lolita is by far the best. Nabokov leads us on a journey through the heart and soul and mind of Humbert as his obsession for Dolores takes complete control of his life, destroying it and the lives of at least three others, and he does it in some of the most captivating and mesmerizing language ever written. That language sometimes brings the reader to the brink of understanding how Humbert’s obsession leads him to do the things he does. The brilliance of Nabokov’s writing is that he can bring us to that brink and still refuse us the final step into that understanding. In the end, his lesson for us is that unchecked obsession always destroys. I’ve often wondered since reading Lolita how much of that lesson was learned from personal experience.

Holy crap on a cracker!! I can’t even get anywhere in this book! I can’t stand the writing style and half of it makes no damn sense!! Although, I did understand some of the crap in the jerks mind! I’m not even bothering to skim finish!

I am down for taking out the ped’s though! Nasty bastards!



Mel

Nabokov really makes me sick. What was English, his 2nd language? He wrote great novels in Russian and English. Fluent in French. Created new words with Shakespearian aptitude. Games with puns and grand allusions even an avid reader has to stop and ponder, or seek help, to fully understand. Most can’t write a second-rate novel in their first language. This guy wrote first-rate novels in his second language. Let's not even get into the lepidopterology.

Yet no writer, no matter how talented, can write a perfect novel. Lolita is as close to perfect as anything gets; but some of the tongue-in-cheek style is a bit too silly, some almost scoff-worthy. “Perfectly perfect.” Nobody needs that.

Overall Vlad’s prose is polished and tasteful, rivaling the unknown Edgar Saltus and the ubiquitously known Charles Dickens. Add to this the playfulness of Oscar Wilde, and the writing comes out the only way it should: ecstatic, enthusiastic, provocative, riveting. Take this for example: “A cluster of stars palely glowed above us, between the silhouettes of long thin leaves; that vibrant sky seemed as naked as she was under her light frock.”

The plot seems to be a stumbling block for some. As most are aware, it involves the premeditated manipulation and (statutory?) rape of a twelve year old girl by a middle-aged man—pedophilia. Certainly an atrocious thing. But this is not for gratuitous shock. Let us recall all the great novels in which bad things do not happen…The polyglot polymath is telling us something about desire, and not only the taboo kind. There is a kind of selfishness and recklessness involved in unfettered passion.

A few things regarding plot:

A sophisticated, hyper-educated, European deviant comes to America after his divorce.

He rents a room in the home of a single mother and her daughter; he falls in love with the daughter (she reminds him of his prepubescent first love), marries the mother, and the mother dies. Because we can tell this fellow is a trickster, are we to believe the death of the mother is caused by such an unlikely accident? An accident which happens at such a convenient time and is such a fortuitous event for our anti-hero?

According to our not-to-be-relied-upon narrator, who goes by the alias Humbert Humbert, the twelve year old girl, Lo, genuinely likes him, at least in the beginning. She even initiates their first kiss at the outset of their cross country trip. When she learns of her mother’s death, after a brief episode of grief, the step-father/daughter love affair heats up.

Much is clouded by the alcoholic Humbert’s suspect memory and his sometimes mendacious tendencies. But by the end of the book we see what has transpired, perhaps having to revisit the foreword for some clarification. Still we must assume what we’ve read is a veiled story, worse than H.H.'s version.

One of the masterstrokes of the novel is that through all the descriptions of lust and sex, all the lubricious asides, nary a vulgar word is found. All the while, even an astute reader may miss some of the allusions; some of the wordplay may fly overhead.

There is a part fairly early on when the sad, reclusive, passive and restrained life of a pedophile living among us is described. It is meant to make us feel pity. We almost pity poor Humbert, but we know he isn't trustworthy, and worse, he's a sexual predator. It tests the limits of empathy. Can one pity a rapist? It is of course quite easy to pity Lolita.

Things become more depressing halfway through. Lolita has truly been kidnapped by now. H.H. does whatever he must to coerce the child into "strenuous intercourse", convince her to stay. Threats. Bribes. It is serial rape. It is sick. He berates the girl for her lack of interest in anything besides soda, movies, magazines, and ice cream. Her tastes are not refined enough for the scholar. “Then I picked up her book. It was some trash for young people.”

His nymphet is becoming too human for him. But we also can see he loves her. In his sick, dissolute way, Humbert loves Lolita; at least he is convinced of this.

He is quick to tell us how he feels about women closer to his own age. He calls one such woman: “A full-blown fleshy handsome woman of the repulsive type to which I was particularly attractive…” Are we to believe the narrator is as good looking as he says—so accustomed to the attention of women? More vagaries from our unstable storyteller.

In the course of the inventive and invigorating prose, the crisscrossing of America by our two main characters, a reader may momentarily forget what sordid things occur at whatever motor lodge or cabin the pair winds up staying in on any given night. But Nabokov is not going to let us off the hook. We are occasionally tossed heartbreaking details, like this one:

“…her sobs in the night—every night, every night—the moment I feigned sleep.”

The book is also somewhat of a commentary on America in the 1950s. It is not too explicit, but it seems that certain aspects or types of locations were targeted. H.H. says of one locale, though he could be speaking of many, “a ball-playing, bible-reading, grain-handling town.”

Lolita’s feelings for Humbert are complicated. She is obviously a victim. But she has feelings for him, as a lover and a father-figure. At times she hates him—when his rules do not allow her to go on dates and do as she pleases. Still, she feels real tenderness for him, tenderness not truly revealed until late in the tale.

I’ll say nothing about one shadowy figure, an important character. Nabokov has made finding out the role of this person part of the game of reading the novel.

Lolita can make one laugh and cry; it is both inspiring and dispiriting. The writing is beautiful, ugly the subject matter. But Nabokov wasn’t only playing around with one of the most taboo topics; even in jest he manages to tell us something about ourselves.

Lolita reminds us that we do not choose to what or whom we are attracted. “A man can do as he wills, but not will as he wills," a philosopher once said. Humans hold themselves in high regard, much too high: individually and as a species. We do not control our feelings, our deepest cravings. We can prevent ourselves from acting on them, but we cannot stop their existence.

So many who speak of Lolita must belabor the fact that Lolita is a victim, and Humbert is a terrible human. That what H.H. does to Dolores is horrible. Yes. That this goes without saying goes without saying. Yet in this very review I find myself, several times, reiterating that Humbert is bad, that I certainly don’t condone this type of thing. We are compelled.

Only recently has our society improved its view of homosexuality, treating it for the most part as a normal variant of human sexuality. Most of us recognize that we do not decide upon on sexual orientations. However, this is not acknowledged regarding paraphilia in general: pedophilia especially.

This is true even outside of the taboo. Desire is not directed by freewill. How many stories are about a character choosing the wrong lover? “The heart wants what the heart wants,” is often the refrain.

Obviously, no decent person condones what fictional Humbert Humbert or what any real life pedophile or pederast might do to children to satisfy inappropriate, unhealthy, unacceptable, and unwholesome desires. The disorder could partly be caused by certain brain structures, and abuse early on is thought to spur it. Most studies point to genetics as the primary factor. Strangely, pedophiles are usually left handed. They live among us, some never acting on their immoral urges, others impelled by their affliction to cause harm to themselves and others. Their existence, and society’s unmitigated hatred for them, is a strike against the idea of god and creation, an indictment of humanity itself.

This is the fourth Nabokov work I've read in as many weeks, and what I’d really like to do in this review is compare the four books in terms of narrators, literary references, mirror effects, word games, etc - and avoid entirely commenting on the issue of underage sex slaves.

But I can't do that. Not when the core of the book concerns the main character's obsession with girl children of twelve years of age. Not when he is so particular in his categorising of those girl children that he begins to sound horribly like a lepidopterist. The 'nymphets' he searches out have to fit the classification he has drawn up: there are precise measurements listed; there are exact skin tones and hair colours described: honey, peach for the skin, russet for the hair; there is a focus on the exact shape of their wing-like shoulder-blades and the exact texture of the fine down on their limbs; there is even a description of the way they must move. He is so rigid in his selection process that only very few meet his requirements, and when he finally succeeds in capturing one, he pins her triumphantly to his bedsheets. Hmm.

There was clearly no way to avoid referring to all of that.

I know, of course, that I'm dealing with an author who likes layers. For that reason, I was wide awake while reading Lolita, all senses on alert. The previous Nabokov books had taught me to look out for the meanings that lie beneath the surface, but as I read through the first half of this book, my awareness of the captive orphan theme overrode the sense of pleasure I experienced in the turns of phrase, the literary treasure hunts, the wordplay and the games that the author likes to play with the reader. Speaking of games, the scene I found the most disturbing was one in which Nabokov cleverly allowed his narrator, Humbert Humbert, to draw me deeply into his mindset. The scene takes place in the early pages when the narrator describes visiting an apartment in Paris where a young girl is offered to him by a procuress. The girl is sitting on a bed, holding a bald-headed doll, but since the girl is older and more developed than the type of 'nymphet' Humbert is looking for, he tries to leave, and a tussle with the procuress ensues. Then, a door at the end of the room was opened, and two men who had been dining in the kitchen joined in the squabble. They were misshapen, bare-necked, very swarthy, and one of them wore dark glasses. A small boy and a begrimed, bow-legged toddler lurked behind them. With the insolent logic of a nightmare, the enraged procuress, indicating the man in glasses, said he had served in the police, 'lui', so I had better do as I was told. I went up to Marie—for that was her stellar name—who by now had quietly transferred her heavy haunches to a stool by the kitchen table and resumed her interrupted soup while the toddler picked up the doll. With a surge of pity dramatising my idiotic gesture, I thrust a banknote into her indifferent hand. She surrendered my gift to the ex-detective, whereupon I was suffered to leave.

That brief peep into the misery of one family’s life stayed with me; it somehow seemed more horribly real than all of the rest of the book. And it was because of the details in the description, the bow-legged toddler reclaiming her precious doll, the reprieved girl stoically resuming her supper, that I was more moved by that scene than by anything that came afterwards. Nabokov had engineered the situation so that I was somehow sharing in Humbert's distorted sympathy and simultaneous revulsion for those people; the details he thought important to record were details that overwhelmed me with their hopelessness. As I read on, I was aware of Nabokov arranging things to both entertain and discomfit me by turns, and he succeeded - the updates provide the history of my alternating state of attraction and repulsion up to about the half way mark.

Once beyond that point, I began to understand and better appreciate what Nabokov was up to, or at the very least, I understood that he was up to something artistically and lexically interesting, and that his text was not about morality or immorality, that it was outside such terrain just as Proust’s La Prisonnière, also about an imprisoned orphan, lies beyond it. In the end notes, Nabokov disowns the ethical justification that his fictional editor 'John Ray' seeks to convey in the foreword, a message of vigilance to parents, social workers and educators. Instead, he tells us that 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. In so far as I understand Nabokov's statement, it conforms to what I believe to have been Proust’s motivation also: a constant searching after the aesthetic quality of experience so that everything in life, however unsavoury, becomes grist to the art-mill.

Returning to the imprisoned Albertine theme, there are more parallels than the simple fact that she and Dolores Haze are captives. Proust and Nabokov give their 'captive' characters a serious preoccupation with clothes, and allow their narrators to take great pleasure in choosing elaborate garments for their 'darling' captives. Both narrators are exasperated by the lack of culture their darlings insist on presenting, and try to interest them in books and music and art without much success. In the meantime the darlings dally with other partners behind their besotted captors' backs, the darlings being far cleverer than their captors, so that the notion of captive and captor is reversed in the end.

While we're on the subject of Proust (and non-Proust fans might want to skip the next two paragraphs), Dolores reminded me not only of his famous Albertine but also of Gilberte Swann as we meet her in the last section of Du côté de chez Swann, when she is about twelve. In the afterword of Lolita, Nabokov provides the opening paragraph of a story that is his original of Lolita. It was called The Enchanter, and he wrote it in 1939 more than fifteen years before he wrote Lolita. There is a girl described on roller skates in the Tuileries gardens in Paris who sounds exactly like Gilberte: A violet-clad girl of twelve (he never erred), was treading rapidly and firmly on skates that did not roll but crunched on the gravel as she raised and lowered them with little Japanese steps and approached his bench through the variable luck of the sunlight…. The description goes on and the resemblance to Gilberte as Proust's narrator first described her becomes clearer.

There are other parallels with Proust I could point out, especially with regard to how both he and Nabokov describe colour and landscape. This passage highlights the similarity - I almost said parody: Beyond the tilled plain, beyond the toy roofs, there would be a slow suffusion of inutile loveliness, a low sun in a platinum haze with a warm, peeled-peach tinge pervading the upper edge of a two-dimensional, dove-grey cloud fusing with the distant amorous mist. There might be a line of spaced trees silhouetted against the horizon, and hot still noons above a wilderness of clover, and Claude Lorrain clouds inscribed remotely into misty azure with only their cumulus part conspicuous against the neutral swoon of the background. Or again, it might be a stern El Greco horizon, pregnant with inky rain, and a passing glimpse of some mummy-necked farmer, and all around alternating strips of quick-silverish water and harsh green corn, the whole arrangement opening like a fan, somewhere in Kansas.
The 'somewhere in Kansas' reads like a joke at the end.

As well as displaying his art credentials, Nabokov leads the reader on a blistering literary paper chase referencing many characters and literary works. I'm encouraged to indulge myself in the same way (self-indulgence is not foreign to Lolita), and recall here all the literary characters who came to mind while I was reading about Dolores Haze. Two of Raymond Queneau's characters remind me of her: Sally Mara from Les œuvres complètes de Sally Mara, and the twelve year-old Annette from Un rude hiver, a perky little person who seduces the apparently helpless and harmless narrator! I also thought of Gerty McDowell from Ulysses, although she is older admittedly. Nabokov makes several reverential references to Ulysses so it's possible she is an inspiration. Issy from Finnegans Wake he doesn't mention, but I think she resembles Dolores Haze too. Alice Lidell comes to mind as well, and she is mentioned once or twice. I also thought of Jonathan Swift's Stella - she was very young when they first met, in fact he was her tutor. And of course Dante's Beatrice - the girl Dante claimed to have loved since he first saw her aged nine. Nabokov mentions Beatrice a couple of times, but his main inspiration is Poe's Annabel Lee: Humbert talks frequently of the Annabel whom he loved long ago in a kingdom by the sea, parodying Poe without the slightest blush.

There is a lot of parody and even some outright farce in Lolita. Nabokov sometimes doesn't bother inventing names, resorting instead to some hilarious excuses for names: Humbert mentions a Mrs Opposite (the woman who lived opposite), a Miss Pratt (who lived up to her name), a Mr Trapp (who was a detective), and lots more. He plays similar games with place names and it's fun figuring out the clues embedded in the names.

The most farcical character is Clare Quilty, a kind of mirror image of the main character, Humbert (and Humbert comes from 'ombre' meaning shadow or shade in French, while Clare is pronounced similarly to 'claire', which means light or clear).
The idea of characters having a mirror image was a theme I noticed in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and was present in Pale Fire too, with Charles Kinbote mirroring John Shade, and in Pnin where the narrator is a kind of enhanced mirror image of the unfortunate Pnin.
The mirror idea recalls a chess board too, another common metaphor in Nabokov's books, so it's not surprising that Lolita can be seen as a giant chess game where the United States of America is the actual board. Quilty and Humbert chase each other across the board and back again in an attempt by each to steal the other's Queen. The end of Lolita can be described as a perfect stalemate: nobody wins but nobody loses.
My experience of the book was similar: I wasn't always super happy while reading it but nevertheless, I opened my fifth Nabokov as soon as I finished..

before reading Lolita, it appears I have made a little fun of the author the last time I've passed through Montreux. Didn't notice the name of the statue at the time, but it sure looked familiar on his wiki page:


I finished the damn book about a month ago, yet I still feel cranky. I know I should give it the masterpiece treatment it deserves, yet I also would like to take Nabokov down a peg for his afterword where he plays the misinterpreted genius card and looks down his nose at the critics and at the reading public alike. I feel the only challenge to his amazing talent comes from his equally massive ego:

I presume there exists readers who find titillating the display of mural words in those hopelessly banal and enormous novels which are typed out by the thumbs of tense mediocrities and called "powerful" and "stark" by the reviewing hack.

He is equally dismissive of accusations of pornography:
While it is true that in ancient Europe, and well into the eighteenth century (obvious examples come from France), deliberate lewdness was not inconsistent with flashes of comedy, or vigorous satire, or even the verve of a fine poet in a wanton mood, it is also true that in modern times the term 'pornography' connotes mediocrity, commercialism, and certain strict rules of narration.

Speaking of ego, I know it's wrong to judge the author based on his fictional character, and that Lolita is in no way autobiographical, but our not so humble Humbert Humbert is similarly burdened by his egocentric belief in his own superiority to the riffraff he had to deal with in his journeys. He can be a suave and entertaining bastard with his Old World charm and his caustic observations of New World affectations and petty mindedness. Repeatedly he mentions how good looking he is, 'like a Hollywood actor' and how cultured he is. He's also a real clever fellow with all his word games and chess playing and self serving psychological arguments he uses to justify his criminal behaviour. A reader can almost be swayed to his cause by his gleeful recollections of the tactical maneuvering in getting his dirty hands on the object of his desire:

Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as "nymphets".

In another place : My little cup brims with tiddles. - this one referring to his encyclopaedic knowledge of preadolescent girls physiology and mentality.

I didn't buy into his arguments. True, I have direct knowledge of traditional gipsy communities where even today 12 year old girls are considered marriageble. My issue with Humbert is not so much the age of his nymphet but one of premeditation and one of consent. He paints himself as a helpless sclave of his obsessions, yet he goes about the conquest with relentless focus and subterfuge. He shows no remorse, no regrets for his actions  with the exception of the very last pages of the novel, but for me it was a case of too little, too late  . The most damning circumstance comes once he has Lolita under control: a classic case of the criminal blaming the victim and blackening her character. 'She made me do it, Your Honor! She's no innocent!' argument left a bitter taste in my mouth.

... she was holding in her hands a beautiful, banal, Eden-red apple.

To compound his guilt in my eyes, Humbert is clearly browbeating / bullying the girl into keeping the secret with threats of orphanage and with physical violence. I think my reaction is not accidental. Nabokov the chessmaster who spent days devising game puzzles and the entomologyst who stared for hours at a microscope and catalogued butterfly sex organs knows how to play with the reader's expectations, and there are clues and portents on every page that Humbert is an unreliable narrator and that the story is headed for a bitter ending (not a spoiler, since the book opens up with the death of Humbert Humbert in prison). It may be a single phrase of the girl going to sleep crying 'every night, every night' . It may be the foreshadowing presence of the gun in his baggage.

Another aspect that bothered me is the lack of empathy, the objectification of Lolita. The novel is all about Humbert, and Dolores Haze remains hazy to the end in her characterization and motivations. Humbert is singing hymns to her body and to her youth, but he doesn't bother to talk to her, to get to know her. He is all about jealous control, exclusivity, obsession. In the later chapters he is more interested in extracting revenge for his wounded ego than in helping Lolita through a difficult moment.

I think I've talked enough about Humbert 'pederosis'. If this were all the novel is about, probably it would have been forgotten by now, seeing as it isn't all that explicitly lewd as its detractors tried to demonstrate. Apart from one famous couch scene, the author uses suggestion and allusion towards intimate details, and prefers to concentrate on the mind-games Hubert plays. I have identified two major themes that have little to do with Lolita but justify for me the opera magnus label:

1 - the roadtrip - the journey through 1950's American landscape: the sweeping vistas, the dusty small towns, the dingy motels and the endless highways, the small minded people and the cultural desert as witnessed by the Old Blood European intellectual. Lolita belongs in the same category with On the Road by Kerouac and with Travels With Charley by Steinbeck. The main difference being that instead of drinking companion or trusty pet, Humbert takes along his trip a nubile plaything.

2 - the language - such joy, such exuberance, such playful subversion of conventions in the construction of the phrase, in the descriptions of ordinary objects or emotions make a stark contrast to the morbid plot and inspire me to consider re-reading the novel only for savouring the stylish presentation and the numerous hidden gems of literary reference, anagrams and ricanements (furious sarcasm). I'm lucky in being familiar with the French language, but I think I will still need an annotated edition of the text next time. For example, I think I caught a reference to Theodore Dreiser in a scene on the lake with Lolita's mother, and I would like confirmation.

Other discoveries include a word that wikipedia doesn't recognize, but it is familiar in Romanian language, probably of Turkish or Slavic origin: 'charshaf' instead of diaphanous veil, simultaneously hiding and revealing Lolita's charms.

The English language is not a fixed, rigid system to Nabokov, it is constantly changing, evolving, renewing itself with new blood - from French, German or Latin roots, from science or from pop culture elements, from invented words and from looking at old, familiar words from a different perspective. Here's a few examples:

My west-door neighbor, who might have been a businessman or a college teacher, or both, would speak to me once in a while as he barbered some late garden blooms or watered his car, or, at a later date, defrosted his driveway. (I don't mind if these verbs are all wrong)

or The tone of his brain had affinities with my own. He mimed and mocked me. His allusions were definitely highbrow. He was well-read. He knew French. He was versed in logodaedaly and logomancy. He was an amateur of sex lore. He had a feminine handwriting. He did not use a fountain pen which fact, as any psychoanalyst will tell you, meant that the patient was a repressed undinist.

I checked and 'logodaedaly' stands for the arbitrary or capricious coining of words; 'logomancy' for word divination; 'undinist' for onanist. I'm still baffled by 'kiddoid gnomide' . Something about goats and gnomes? Probably.

There's even some Lewis Carroll word association and nonsense rhymes around, probably used to mock psychoanalysts:

The Squirl and his Squirrel,
The Rabs and their Rabbits
Have certain obscure
and peculiar habits.
Male hummingbirds
Make the most exquisite rockets.
The snake when he walks
holds his hands in his pockets...

mocking or not, his efforts at poetry can be beautiful and haunting:

My car is limping,
Dolores Haze,
And the last long lap
is the hardest,
And I shall be dumped
where the weed decays,
And the rest is rust and stardust.

From Nabokov's afterword comes the best summary of the novel and the best reason for recommending the book:

An American critic suggested that 'Lolita' was the record of my love affair with the romantic novel. The substitution 'English language' for 'romantic novel' would make this elegant formula more correct.

Dolores Haze deserved better.

Dolores Haze deserved better.

Dolores Haze deserved better.

Dolores Haze deserved better.

Dolores Haze deserved better.

Dolores Haze deserved better.

Call her what you please—Lo, Dolly, Lola, Mrs. Richard F. Schiller—but don't ever call her Lolita. Lolita was Humbert's name for her. She deserves her own identity.