A book that led me on the path to damnation. I don’t think you could find a more guilty title in my library. I had journeyed through de Sade, Serpieri and Manara, Mandiargues, Pauline Réage, but none had produced the itch that literally threw me into Monsieur’s arms. I see it clearly now. I should have been kept well apart from the yellowing old copy that stood innocently on the shelf. It was there I learned all there is to know about a particular type of man, worldly but weary, whose gaze is invariably drawn to young girls, and how those men focus on bodies that are no longer children’s but not quite women’s. It’s the book in which I learned about the inner voice that draws them to nymphets. I learned how to decipher the vice beneath their respectable appearance, their adoration of the tousled goddesses they name Lolita. Lolita. Demanding beyond reason, possessive and jealous, drawn into an endless war (which she has already won) against all other females, looking down on them despite her diminutive stature, her slender limbs and her age: she is fifteen years old, the age at which Nabokov killed her.
