I contemplated a lot about this book. Because it shook me, deep to my core. Never in my life have I read a book that made me this uncomfortable. I am not exaggerating when I tell you that I had moments, whilst reading this, where I felt like throwing up. And not metaphorically. I really felt like I had to puke. This book was the most exhausting and draining read of my life so far; you cannot fathom how stressed out I was, whenever I picked this up.

That being said, I think it is an important piece of literature. One of the best. And the fact that Nabokov isn't an English native speaker, is mind-boggling to me. That man is pure genius. As a writer you can learn a lot from this book, you can learn how to lull your audience in with an unreliable narrator, you can learn from his beauty of language, you can learn that to write these ideas is not to endorse them. Sadly, there are people out there calling Nabokov a pedophile. Like how stupid can you get? As a writer, you shouldn't be afraid to try yourself on something challenging, something different - on something that most people won't understand and therefore loathe. No, you should do you. Fuck what you've heard, and what others might say of you and work.

So, I have a lot of respect for Nabokov as a writer and I have a lot of respect for Lolita as a book. When I finished this, I cried. I lay sobbing in bed for some minutes. A piece of my heart broke over this book. I am not one of those people who will defend Humbert, I never felt a speck of sympathy for that man. I always saw him for what he really was: a rapist and a child molester. A man who was obsessed with his idea of the perfect nymphet. And Nabokov makes that very clear, I don't want to elaborate (to be honest, I didn't even plan to write a review for this... but now the words are just flowing out of me) because I can't take it, but Nabokov shows very clearly throughout this whole book how Humbert is sexually and psychologically absuing little Dolores. This is not a romanticizing of abuse. This is not a tragic love story. This is one of the most brutal accounts of abuse there is. But there are people who don't want to understand this, and so they want to ban this book and its author... because that's the easy way. Not to think about the important problems that Nabokov was brave enough to write about, but to just keep them out of sight.

It is important for art to be challenging. It is important for art to break taboos. Art shouldn't be comforting.

For now, I just want to forget this book. I really do. It's nasty. But I know I can't, and deep down, I also know that I really don't want to. It is one of those rare books that has changed me, as a reader, and as a person. I honestly don't know what's left to say: You don't have to read this book... but if you do, and you need someone to talk about, I am here for you.

أجاد نابوكوف الحكي على لسان رجل مُختل نفسيا
ورغم بشاعة الهوس بالفتيات الصغيرات
والعلاقة المرضية الاستغلالية بين همبرت ولوليتا
إلا ان الرواية مكتوبة بحرفية وأسلوب مميز

I finished reading this book over a month ago and I've had plenty of time to think about it, but I'm afraid I don't have anything substantial to say. There is something so uncanny about our fascination with characters like Humbert Humbert that it is best left untouched - we wish to pack it into some sort of metaphorical hot air balloon and set it sailing. We also hope that this hot air balloon will crash into an abyss deep within the recesses of our minds and never be seen again.

I've been told that the shocking, repulsive thoughts that we sometimes have is just a mechanism, a way for our brains to remind us of what we deem unacceptable. But there are people like Humbert Humbert who live this repulsion and make it their own. Their thoughts are so warped that they occupy all of their mindspace.

And there is something almost equally repulsive about us, normal people, who watch these thoughts seeping into reality through Humbert Humbert's exercising of his agency. We watch with horrified fascination and we want to take away this agency from him. Yet, we also want to know how Lolita was tortured and how much she suffered, because that is the story and we are mere readers. And we do not ever see Lolita's own agency in this book - we do not read a single chapter, a single paragraph, a single sentence through her perspective. We are just left filling in the gaps for her and this does not always happen in a favorable way since we are always reading from Humbert Humbert's perspective. Nabokov is such an extraordinary master of prose that despite our best efforts, we often end up rooting for Humbert Humbert. And so we watch our own reading process with abject horror.

I avoided reading this book for the longest time. This book that has been widely interpreted and that Nabokov himself refused to offer any interpretations of, has puzzled readers for decades. I suspected that I wouldn't know what to make of it and I can now confirm that my suspicion was right. To me, the book was one big psychological game.