Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.Opening a book is a unique conversation with another, the chance to enter and occupy the headspace of a writer, a character, a voice screaming out into the void. We see life—our own world or fantastic realities that function as elaborate metaphors for our own—through another’s eyes, walk a mile in another’s skin as Atticus Finch would say, and learn that despite the differences between individuals, we are all part of the same chorus of humanity. There has been much research into showing that reading assists the building of empathy in children, and many fine publications such as articles inThe Guardian or a similar one in Scientific American. Reading is a fresh perspective that helps us to shape our own. Lolita, a masterpiece by Vladimir Nabokov, takes us into the mind, heart and soul of a man none of us wish to become, yet Humbert Humbert’s voice is as important to the human comedy as is anyone else’s voice. Nabokov is a master of literary games and jokes, and Lolita is a work of art that often evokes knee-jerk reactions even just by mention of the title, which is precisely what Nabokov loves Nabokov has a fascination with literary games, detail and jokes, and Lolita is a gorgeously complex work that touches on taboo subjects to force our reaction and is loaded with allusions and important details and clues that invite us to play his game and learn. Vanity Fair called Lolita ‘The only convincing love story of our century,’ yet is it the relationship between Hubert and Dolores that is the love story (and tomes could be written debating the topic), or the love of literature? Lolita is a love story to language that soars through the stratosphere with some of the finest attention to detail in prose and plotting to seduce the reader into Humbert’s literary vision of events as justification of the horrors that transpire.I’ve no ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions - Nabokov*Nabokov is a supreme maestro of language. Few authors since Joyce have such acute attention to the supreme specifications of each word choice to build the maximum potential of a sentence. ‘I only have words to play with’ insists Humbert, and Nabokov uses words like playthings with the very best of them. Each noun, verb and adjective are precisely picked to elevate the tone of a scene through connotative commentary as well as attention to poetic flow, puns and general atmosphere. Even the names are exquisitely invented, from Lolita chosen for ‘the necessary note of archness and caress’ and the last name Haze being a pun on the German word hase, meaning rabbit, which is suggestive of her as prey. There is also the music of the name Humbert Humbert: the double rumble is, I think, very nasty and suggestive. It is a hateful name for a hateful person. It is also a kingly name, and I needed a royal vibration for Humbert the Fierce and Humbert the Humble. The double rumble also exists with couples like John and Jean or Leslie and Louise to denote a cohesion of two individuals into a cumulative force of The Couple. Nabokov often rejects any interpretation of his work, insisting that it is just sheer creative force with nothing undermining the themes and symbols, a mere game of words being projected onto the page. While this may be a shirking of any Freudian (which he so detested) or deconstructionist interpretation, it is comforting to know that an author would pay such attention to words to build the perfect game board for the reader to immerse themselves in. America comes alive in his words and descriptions as Humbert and his charge travel the nation seeking any excuse for a sightseeing adventure. Even in the author's afterword Nabokov rejects the notion that Lolita is a commentary on America, or an examination of ‘young America debauching Old Europe or vice versa. As intention is often overshadowed by interpretation, the reader may find much to discuss in the matter, but what is most important is to see Nabokov constructing a linguistic America through the observations and experiences of Humbert as he travels. ‘It had taken me some forty years to invent Russia and Western Europe, said Nabokov in an interview discussing the creation of the novel, ‘and now I was faced with a similar task, with a lesser amount of time at my disposal.’ Nabokov set about inventing America in prose in Lolita, drawing on his travels and hotel stays with his wife on a butterfly hunting quest through the states to color the world of Humbert and create a true-to-life game board for his literary puzzles.You can always count on a murder for a fancy prose style.While the scintillating cacophony of words are the invention of Nabokov’s, they are also of and through the character of Humbert Humbert. The aforementioned affection towards naming is part of Humbert’s method of pseudonyms that both protect the ‘real’ in-novel people but also nudge towards Humbert’s own literary bent This is a character that quotes and alludes to an erudite array of fiction in order to seek an authorial immortality of his own by putting his deeds to paper in eloquent fashion, both his immortality and that of his relationship with Dolores: ‘and this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.’ One is left to question the validity of truth—truth of the assertion of the novel as a realistic portrayal of the Novel’s reality—as expressed by its narrator. Humbert is unquestionably an unreliable narrator, much like many of Poe’s narrators such as in The Cask of Amontillado through which every undergrad writes their first essay on unreliable narration.In a kingdom by the sea. The allusions to Poe’s work is highly critical to the understanding of Lolita. As Humbert would wish it to be understood, Humbert’s nymphomania stems from a romance pruned by death with Annabel Leigh during his youthful years. The two star-crossed pre-teens shared a summer fling before her untimely death, leaving Humbert’s sexual attraction stunted to those of similar budding maturity. The name and the constant references to a kingdom by the sea allude to the poem Annabel Lee by Edgar Allan Poe, an author who married his 13 year old cousin. In fact, Humbert repeatedly reminds readers that romance with young girls is rampant in literature, such as Dante and his nine-year-old Beatrice or Lewis Carroll’s (another author frequently alluded to in the text) fixation with young girls, and that many cultures historically saw no qualms with union between man and pre-teen girls. Humbert is attempting to justify his actions by seeking sanctuary in history. However, his history of amourous occasions with Annabel Leigh should be called into question for validity as the aptly named Annabel may only exist in Humbert’s literary vision of how things ‘should be’. Funny how Ms Leigh is only captured in a photograph where she is blurred and indistinguishable, a photograph that Humbert is unable to produce. Perhaps she is merely a justification, a romanticised fantasy befitting of her name.She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.It must be questioned then as to what we can believe from Humbert. Lolita is a name given to Dolores by Humbert alone, her mother preferring the diminutive ‘Lo’ (ponderously parallel to ‘Hum’). We understand Dolores only through the filter of Humbert and rarely do we even see her dialogue other than summarized by him. He insists that she was the one to seduce and sexualize him, but we are not present for the scene. Perhaps the seductive Lolita only exists in the mind of Humbert to accommodate his rationality and distract us, and himself, from the grisly truth of his statutory rape¹. It would be interesting on a re-read to note every time Humbert refers to his step-daughter as Dolores, Lo, Dolly, or Lolita, as she seems to be Lolita only in the sexual moments. While Humbert insists upon his love for Lolita, often to win the heart of the reader by asserting genuine love, his love lands solely upon physical elements. She is repeatedly eyed over for her physical and sexual traits, but never for her personality or intellectual qualities (the latter of which he tends to condescend). The Webster’s Dictionary defines ‘lolita’ as a precociously seductive girl, though a more accurate definition would be a precociously sexual girl as affected by rape. Nabokov teases the knee-jerk reaction in the reader, and while many refuse to read the novel due to it’s taboo sexuality, it is equally disquieting how many thrive on it.²If, as Nabokov insists, the novel is not about the intermingling of Europe and America, perhaps the generational gap is the true investigation. While Humbert and his Lolita may have a relationship, there is an emotional gap of maturation that is evident even to Humbert. He sees in her stories an assertion of maturity that seems comical to adults, and her experimentation with sexuality reeks of juvenility to him, yet he pounces upon it like a lion lurking in the tall weeds. Humbert is highly vain and egotistical, constantly reminding the reader of his good looks. He even tells the reader that he looks similar to a music icon of whom which Dolores has a crush, a Dolores that falls victim to believing every magazine and commercial advertisement that falls her way. While Humbert is much older, he reflects the youth culture of intellectual and physical attraction and uses this to his advantage.[W]e are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader’s mind.If Lolita is a joke, then the reader is the butt of it. As Dolores is seduced by Humbert, so is the reader by his charismatic ways. We are drawn into his world. into his justifications, enamored by his prose and then held in sick bondage to his will. We know that his story is a manifestation, yet we cannot escape it, practically don’t want to escape it as a sort of perverted Stockholm Syndrome. We are even made implicit in his crimes. ‘I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't,’ he tells us, bringing us into his first sexual experience with Lolita to make us a part of it. If we condemn him, then we must condemn ourselves since we complicit with the act. We are bonded to him and unable to escape by the time we realize he has wooed us with his words as he has wooed Dolores with his looks and intellect. We, the reader, are his judge and jury as he sits in prison with a fatal heart condition (he slips so far into his literary reenactment of his crimes that he writes himself to be literally dying of a broken heart), and he seduces us to both pardon him of his crimes and immortalize both himself and his love-lust for Lolita through our eternal reading and remembrance of him. Everything we read has been tweaked to literary perfection to accommodate his fantasy in our minds. Even Dolly's socks become a metaphor through his retelling. When she is his pure nymphet, her socks are pulled up and pure white. Yet as she fades in his eyes, her socks are always described as rumpled and soiled. Socks are a permeating motif of the novel that is both a indication of Humbert's literary assertions and a thermometer of his passion and opinion of his step-daughter.Nabokov was obsessed with detail. In teaching he insisted upon maps of Dublin or Samsa’s apartment to understand Joyce and Kafka respectively. He made students visualize a train car to understand Anna Karenina. This is the sort of book to rub in the faces of anyone who insists that a blue chair can be a simple blue chair and not a symbol. Those sort of writers, if they are published, are not remembered because we have writers like Nabokov where every blessed word is another beautiful piece to the puzzle. Nabokov invented his literary America to give a map for his character’s to race across, and filled their travels with allusions, names made of anagrams, puns, jokes, and moral investigations. We cannot help but be seduced by Humbert become a further victim in his fantasy of Lolita drawn from the sensuality stolen between the legs of Dolores. While Humbert is a clear villain in a comedy of moral errors³ we realize that his illness is just one facet of him. We must remember when we condemn someone that there are many other facets of their personality and lives that aren’t that unlike our own. This is Nabokov’s joke on us all. ‘The rest is rust and stardust.’100/100I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t’aimais, je t’aimais! And there were times when I knew how you felt, and it was hell to know it, my little one. Lolita girl, brave Dolly Schiller.*All quotes from the author, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the interviews and essays of Nabokov collected in Strong Opinions. Furthermore, biographical information on Nabokov is lifted from Speak, Memory.¹ Later in the novel Humbert drops his guard and recalls the sexual relationship between Hum and Lo as her left with hollow, sad eyes. I recall certain moments, let us call them icebergs in paradise, when after having had my fill of her –after fabulous, insane exertions that left me limp and azure-barred–I would gather her in my arms with, at last, a mute moan of human tenderness (her skin glistening in the neon light coming from the paved court through the slits in the blind, her soot-black lashes matted, her grave gray eyes more vacant than ever–for all the world a little patient still in the confusion of a drug after a major operation)–and the tenderness would deepen to shame and despair, and I would lull and rock my lone light Lolita in my marble arms, and moan in her warm hair, and caress her at random and mutely ask her blessing, and at the peak of this human agonized selfless tendernessThere is a sense of remorse for his actions that sprout through his narrative in the later portion of the novel and ask us to rethink our earlier perceptions. This account of intercourse reveals one that is not as one of willful harmony but aggressive assertion of dominance over a passive partner. ² Perhaps more people thrive on the Humbert justification than we’d like to admit, or at least have learned how to capitalize on it. The New Republic once ran a fascinating article highly worth reading that addresses the ‘lolita culture’ in today’s world of pop icons like Brittany Spears posing with a teddy bear in the nude (we acknowledge that she is not underaged but invokes the image of a young girl) or Katy Perry singing about copulation in a living room blanket fort like a child. Also of interest in the article is the town of Lolita, Texas where officials considered changing the town name to distance themselves from the novel.³ This novel is essentially a comedy, and is quite funny when you let your guard down. However, it is also a tragedy. Martin Amis provides a wonderful introduction that points out that the tragedy is not Humbert’s fate, which he deserves, or his murder of Quilty. Nobody seems to pass judgement on his murder, enacted in a sick yet hilariously slapstick scene. The true tragedy is Dolores in her role as Lolita. ‘He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.’
Warning: contains spoilers for The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, L'âge de raison and this bookI remember seeing an interview with Nabokov, where he was asked what long-term effect he thought Lolita had had. I suppose the interviewer was looking for some comment on the liberalization of censorship laws, or something like that. Nabokov didn't want to play - as you can see in Look at the Harlequins, he was pretty tired of these questions. So he said well, as far as he could make out, there had only been one effect. Mothers of young girls named Dolores no longer affectionately called them Lolita. I loved this reply for its magnificent unhelpfulness. In a very narrow sense, Nabokov was surely right. I challenge anyone to prove, beyond any reasonable doubt, that Lolita has had any effect over and above the one he named. And in principle I also approve of Nabokov's attitude towards critics, and the way he loved teasing them. Pale Fire is another long joke at the critics' expense (how many other books are there where most of the action takes place in the footnotes?), and, like John Shade, he burned his rough drafts to make sure that posterity had as little material as possible to work with. But, if one wants to go against Nabokov's stated wishes and indulge in a small amount of speculation, it does seem to me that Lolita has had a substantial effect in terms of popularizing the narrative technique where a character is initially presented in sympathetic terms, and then gradually revealed as a monster. Two examples that immediately spring to mind are Martin Amis and Ruth Rendell. In Lolita, Nabokov cunningly introduces Humbert as a rather engaging personality, and fabricates all sorts of extenuating circumstances. To start off with, there's the tragic story of his childhood romance with poor Annabel Leigh. Then Lo is far from innocent, and, as Humbert points out, she seduces him. But the fact remains that, whatever excuses you may come up with, it's just wrong for an adult male to have sex with a twelve year old girl. After a while Humbert, and the reader, is forced to admit that he has turned her into a whore who fellates him for small change, and then cries herself to sleep every night. You feel disgusted with yourself for ever being dumb enough to fall for this slick con artist.Hopefully, the controversial opinions I've just expressed won't result in some overzealous Iranian cleric putting a fatwa on me - one of the first things the Ayatollah Khomeini did on gaining power was to lower the age of consent to 9, on the grounds that the Prophet's youngest wife was that age when she married him. You see how dangerous this speculative analysis can be?____________________________________While making dinner (turkey fajitas), I thought about the question Paul raised, whether we can believe what Humbert is telling us. I was wondering what evidence I could present to support my point of view, which is that he only distorts the truth and omits things, rather than simply lying outright.I would say that my basic argument is that Humbert isn't really writing for us, he's writing for himself, so any lies he tells are going to be the kind of lies one tells to oneself, rather than those one tells to other people. It's true that people do sometimes plain flat-out lie to themselves. But Humbert is a smart, educated guy who thinks a lot, and he doesn't seem delusional; I find it plausible that he is more telling the story his way, and working hard to find an interpretation that makes his actions pardonable. But this involves greater and greater distortion of the facts, and in the end there are things he can no longer explain away. It hits so hard because he's previously done a good job of making the reader identify with him; the reader almost feels that he has been lying to himself.I came up with a couple more books to which I'd had similar reactions. One is Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, where it turns out that the murderer is the person narrating the story. I remember a friend saying that nothing had ever creeped him out quite as badly: he felt for a second that he, himself, was the murderer! Less obviously, there's Sartre's L'âge de raison. Mathieu doesn't seem like such a bad guy, even though he's a bit of a dope, and nothing he does really comes across as particularly evil. Yet, somewhere near the end, you're forced to admit that he is in fact a person who will steal a substantial amount of money from a friend in order to pay for his mistress's abortion. You wonder why you previously felt sympathetic.A final thought I had while preparing dinner. One of the very scariest things about Lolita is that Humbert, in a real sense, loves Lo. However, this results in him raping her and turning her into a child prostitute. A couple of years ago, I watched the movie Mysterious Skin, which takes the same theme even further: it's one of the most disquieting films I've ever seen. Has anyone else come across it? Would be interested to get reactions.
What do You think about Lolita (2000)?
NO SPOILERS"The only convincing love story of our century" así es como catalogó Vanity Fair a la desgarradora novela del autor Vladimir Nabokov. Y en parte es cierto. Lolita, cuenta la palpitante historia de Humbert, un académico experto en literatura francesa que por los destinos de su vida, llega a parar en Ramsdale, una pequeña ciudad en New England. Ahí es donde conoce a Dolores (aka Lolita), una nymphet que lo cautiva desde el primer momento. El hace llamar nymphet, a niñas entre 10 y 14 años que tienen una esencia sexual especial, que las hace diferentes al resto de las pre-adolescentes. Humbert es el narrador y escritor de la historia (desde la cárcel), y con su atractivo estilo, logra convertir a los receptores de la novela en unos personajes omnipresentes de su propia mente. Explorando sus emociones y pensamientos más recónditos, llegamos a entender que Lolita, no es más que una historia de amor descalabrado y retorcido. Sin embargo, esta relación narrador-lector, hace que de una u otra forma, el receptor sienta un incómodo sentimiento de empatía y complicidad con Humbert, un pedófilo. ”It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.” Una de las cosas más atractivas de la novela son los personajes de Humbert (sí, de nuevo) y Lolita. Por el lado de Humbert, es un personaje que va experimentando una serie de cambios significativos acorde pasan las páginas. Llega a aceptar su situación pedofílica hasta un nivel de comodidad impensado. Acompañado con una personalidad pacífica y tranquila en las primeras páginas, también pudimos explorar su otra faceta más impulsiva.Lolita es el personaje que bajo mi punto de vista, experimenta más cambios a lo largo de la novela. Fuimos introducidos a “Lo” con una personalidad pasiva e inocente, pero acorde pasaba el tiempo, veíamos que su personalidad calculadora, a veces ninfómana, y posesiva, fueron tomando el protagonismo de su identidad. Es por eso que gracias a su lenguaje no explícito, su narración densa, su estilo crudo y sus descripciones engrosadas de detalles, le dan a Lolita, el merecido puesto dentro de las mejores novelas escritas entre 1923 y 2005 según la revista Time.
—Mateo
Impossible to rate as it's an awful subject, but very well written. The skill of the book (and what makes it most disturbing for me), is that it isn't a clear-cut story of innocent child and predatory adult (which is not to excuse Humbert's actions), and it's only told from one - very biased - point of view. Since writing this review, I've discovered that Nabokov was a synaesthete. If I (re)read him, I'll have to bear that in mind. See: http://blogs.plos.org/neurotribes/201... .This book raises many intriguing and troubling questions, balanced out by beautiful writing. Some see it as a love story, but I see no love - not even self love. The subject is appalling, but it’s not explicit, which has the disturbing effect of making the reader complicit in Humbert’s fantasies and later, his actions.* Some minor spoilers below (but the story is well-known) *It is written as the supposedly honest confession of a paedophile, with overtones of necrophilia (initially he intends to drug her to rape her) and incest (when he is Lolita’s (step)father and even fantasises about her bearing him a child to replace her in his sexual affections). It mixes psychological self-analysis, wry humour, literary flourishes and endless excuses and justifications, though at other times he relishes his debauchery. Mostly he writes in a detached way, especially early on, occasionally slipping into the third person for himself. Although it’s meant to be “true”, I couldn’t see why Lolita stuck with Humbert once the initial excitement had worn off, even allowing for the fact she enjoyed manipulating him for gifts and money (her loose morals, he said) and there was no one obvious for her to turn to. Nor was there any explanation as to why she was so sexually precocious (it seems to predate her fling at summer camp), which is odd, as it could have provided further justification for Humbert. Also, the bit where the headmistress of Beardsley School tells Humbert that she is “morbidly uninterested in sexual matters” was bizarrely implausible.Humbert gives plenty reasons why he should not feel guilty (“nymphets” are demoniac; it’s a natural urge; other societies allow such relationships; if she was drugged she’d never know; it’s not as bad as murder; he’s generous and indulgent), but Nabokov muddies it further by the fact that Lolita is not a virgin and actually takes the initiative in their first sexual encounter and at least one subsequent one, even though she doesn’t appear to enjoy it. That's enough justification for Humbert (hopefully not Nabakov), and leaves the reader unsettled and unconvinced.The second half of the book is more muddled and, at times manic, reflecting Humbert’s own decline. After all the dreadful things he does, his final downfall is a literal but relatively trivial crossing of the line: a gloriously ironic way to end such a troubling novel.Would such a book be published today, now society is more paranoid about paedophiles? Zoe Heller wrote Notes on a Scandal (called What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal A Novel in the US), but that was an older woman with a teenage boy. What does the writing of such a book say about Nabokov and, more troublingly, what does the reading of it say about me?(My review of Notes on a Scandal is here: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/....)
—Cecily
Nabokov often writes his novels in the perspective of detestable villains. You never like them, you're never supposed to like them, and Nabokov doesn't like them either. He slaps them around and humiliates them. And in the end, they pay the price for their sins. Readers never seem to realize this. They become immersed in the psychology of the book and feel defiled by it all. Instead, they should sit back and watch the bastards suffer. The stories are written in their own view so that makes the punishment all the more sweet. The reader knows exactly what the scheisemeister is feeling - pain, pain, pain. That's one of the reasons I like Nabokov so much. The bad guys really get it. It's not just getting killed or caught at the end, you really feel their anguish. Mmm... schadenfreude." I sort of believe the reason why most of the characters are 2 dimensional is precisely because of who is potraying them, a depraved person. A depraved person who commits terrible, unforgivable crimes against people. How could he commit those crimes if he saw them as the human beings that they are? It's easier for a crook to swindle if he dehumanizes his victims. At the end of Lolita, Lolita transfigures. She's a sensitive, care-worn woman, but only because HH realizes her as such. That's why he can murder the man who betrayed her at the end. He was a filthy mongrel that deserved to die for what he did to her. "She groped for words. I supplied them mentally ("He broke my heart. You merely broke my life")." I don't remember, but this could be the first time he "supplied [words] mentally" in a way that's true and unselfish. He finally understood her as a person and sacrificed himself to revenge her. Perhaps, HH's only redeeming quality. In Nabokov's books where the villain is the protagonist, the only other charachter with real depth or psychology is a character who the protagonists loves. The little daughter in Laughter in the Dark, Lolita at the end the novel, Despair? The protagonist in that one is a sociopath and doesn't give his novel-mates anything, but their personalities pop out. You can feel them from the distance. Other novels I've read by him don't exactly fit this mold. In Pnin, everyone is a little characterized but still quite real, Pale Fire is written by an almost-villain and you love everyone but him, especially the wife of the poet, Invitation to a Beheading, not even the main protagonist was very real. He had the same consciousness and feelings that a "K" would have in one of Kafka's novels. But he had no believable history, it's all just a dreamscape that doesn't have half the terror as Kafka's novels have. I never finished Ada or Ador. It's Lolita x 10 in smuttiness. "Is this really necessary??" And it wasn't believable either. Just a fantasy. Of course, not all his novels are going to follow the same formula, but they are written by the same writer, the same mind. So I'm still working on him. I really think he's one of the best writers of the 20th century. He doesn't just tell a story, he explores the psyche and human perceptions, how a certain person feels, sees, or reacts to things. If they were normal people, it wouldn't be interesting, but he picks villains or eccentrics.
—Namrirru
