Lolita

May 12, 2011 Ceridwen rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: america-and-environs, capital-m-modern, capital-r-romantic, daddy-drinks-because-you-cry, gothic, incest-is-best, red-scare, the-housewife

Cross-posted on Readerling

Lolita is a premonition of the slasher film by way of the Gothic novel, the point of view monster breathing in the grass as the co-educational campers couple amongst the furniture of middle America. It begins with that slasher staple, the note from the shrink, a wheezy clueless sort who mistakes fact for innuendo. This whole book occurs after the blackbird whistles, just to make an obscure poetic reference. The beginning sections reminded me of my local love, the anecdo...more Cross-posted on Readerling

Lolita is a premonition of the slasher film by way of the Gothic novel, the point of view monster breathing in the grass as the co-educational campers couple amongst the furniture of middle America. It begins with that slasher staple, the note from the shrink, a wheezy clueless sort who mistakes fact for innuendo. This whole book occurs after the blackbird whistles, just to make an obscure poetic reference. The beginning sections reminded me of my local love, the anecdotal satirist of my youth, Sinclair Lewis, with his intricate and bawling America, laid out in sitting rooms and social climbing, Humbert the outsider, Humbert the imaginary monster, Hubert the European of our fantasies, all dissolution and our fevered dreams cum nightmares. (Har har.)

The beginning is outrageously funny, the way horror stories are, Humberts parentheses side-commenting about this and that, a dagger commentary sheathed in brackets. Wait, a moment for his parentheses. Woolf may have taught me to love the semicolon, although that affection was in full bloom before I hit her mastery, but Nabokov and his creature (his Creature) have taught me to love those brief, epigrammatic asides. I await DFW to teach me the beauty of the endnote. At some point though, the whole thing grabbed me by the throat and shook, the way a dog does with prey (a cat, a wild-eyed rabbit) and I found myself shaken into another novel completely – the road trip novel, the long, undulating America, the Gothic panic of the narrow space recreated in a thousand unnamed American burgs and their sticky hotels, the mountains (which ones?) rising purple and ground down in the distance, the Oedipal struggle completely drawn with fangs that bite Oedipus in his hoary ass. Lo Lee Ta. A series of consonants and vowels that refuse to coalesce into meaning.

Humbert is aggressively contructed, a narrator so damaged that the character is so fictional, so unreal, that it shimmers with the hot road mirage of truth, just up the bend, just under the bed. Humbert is awful, gross, a fraud, on so many levels; his Lolita, his Dolly, a work of the most perverse art. Like a character in a Browning monologue, we cannot believe anything he says, about her, about himself, the rough Freudian gloss muddling on about bad hearts and the newspaper, about childhood and its damage. Grrr, my heart's abhorrence. No. Unlike a Browning poem, we can't simply reverse Humbert's statements to see past to the facts. Messy, like a mind, like knees in the dew-wet grass. Like any good Gothic novel, the bracket of the doctor's statement is unclosed, and we end with Humbert and his musings on immortality. (Spoilers, I say, but that is ironic, at best.)

When I was 12, I had this friend. I still have her, as they say. We were not close at that time, just near in the surname alphabet, sitting close to one another, a desk away, two desks away. We liked each other; we were friends of the giggling sort. One day, she opened her purse, a denim number that looked like my own, and showed me the contents. Her eyes slanted away from mine. Look. Inside was a knife, in with the lipstick and tissue. Why do you have a knife? I asked, round-eyed, not understanding. My step-father...and here is an ellipses of details that are neither your business or mine, in the end. We slant our eyes away. I urged her naively to seek out an authority and tell, as children say. She did. It did not go well.

You can write it in yourself, and I will not disgorge the hard details of this revelation or its rending conclusion. Her story is so commonplace as to be cliché, which makes it all the worse. That is not what this book is about. This book does not mistake fact for innuendo. It is the story of the madness of storytelling; the madness of the way we construct ourselves and others; a madness that won't adhere to a lineal, Freudian causality. My friend's step-father, the real monster, was a plump, useless, banal man with a beard and fat hands, may he roast in hell forever. Humbert is not this. He is fire and words, a long prissy, fated monologue that turns fiction on itself, a long slow gin of puns – there I made one, do you see? - an unclosed bracket on the American dream. Schwink schwink schink. (less)

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Jan 04, 2012 Tatiana rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: those who will not fall for Humbert's lies

Shelves: classics, 1001, 2012, national-book-award

I wasn't even going to write a review of Lolita after finishing it, because, honestly, how many reviews does this classic need? That is, until I started pocking around and reading what others have to say about it. Many reactions to this book are puzzling to me. In this world of Jerry Sanduskys and such, there are still people who find this "erotic," who in the end feel compassionate towards the narrator, who think that Lolita was the one who seduced and manipulated poor Humbert? Well, I beg to d...more

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Oct 24, 2012 Garima rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Those who LOVE to read

Shelves: books-to-read-before-you-die, favorites

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 :P. And then there were one of my aunts, whom 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 Educa...more

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Nov 27, 2012 Emily May rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: classics, 1001-read, fave-classics

Now, this is going to be embarrassing to admit.

As we all should know, reading and enjoying a book is largely about interpretation. People are not the same and we all view things differently, one individual might see a relationship in a book as "passionate" while another could see it as "damaging". When characters make bad decisions, some will view it as stupidity and others will view it as an accurate representation of humanity's imperfections. Not only that, but time often changes the way one p...more Now, this is going to be embarrassing to admit.

As we all should know, reading and enjoying a book is largely about interpretation. People are not the same and we all view things differently, one individual might see a relationship in a book as "passionate" while another could see it as "damaging". When characters make bad decisions, some will view it as stupidity and others will view it as an accurate representation of humanity's imperfections. Not only that, but time often changes the way one person sees things. A teenager does not usually have the same outlook on life and relationships that someone of thirty does, and neither of them have the same outlook as someone of seventy does.

So it's time that I admit, when reading this at thirteen, my younger brain actually romanticised Humbert's depravity and saw the relationship between him and Lolita as some tragic love affair that could never work out for the obvious reasons. It was (surprise, surprise) Tatiana's review that made me wonder if I'd had a screw loose when reading this years ago, her interpretation was so far from what I remembered that I simply had to find time for a re-read. This summer, I did just that. I am going to point my shameful finger of blame at my age when I first read it, I was as fooled by Humbert as the young Lolita was.

Humbert is not a reliable narrator, his declaration that Lolita was responsible for seducing him is repulsive and wrong. Because, in the end, an adult has no excuse for having sex with a child, even if they're walking around half-naked and offering it up - adults have a responsibility not to take advantage of children, and I now realise how this case is no exception. This is not some tragic romantic tale about forbidden love, it is the story of how a grown man repeatedly raped a young girl. The fact that it is so easy to be taken in by him either says something about how brilliant a writer Nabokov is (which he is), or how much society still loves to blame the victim.

I don't know whether to feel better about my original feelings or be horrified that even the description for the audiobook describes the novel as: "a love story almost shocking in its beauty and tenderness." And I also know that I have no right to criticise other people who saw it in such a way, but I would ask you to read it again, to look beyond Humbert's snivelling and self-pity, to see the man who considers murdering a woman so he can be free to have sex with her twelve year old daughter, the man who feels sorry for himself when a pubescent girl doesn't want to have sex with him because she's still hurt from the last time. Is that love? Maybe it was for a thirteen year old looking through Humbert's perverted eyes, but I'm glad I understand it better now.

Nabokov has written a brilliant and disturbing novel, my opinion of it hasn't changed in that respect. I found it surprisingly easy to read and became absorbed quickly - even all those years ago. His portrayal of Humbert's perverted mind is scarily good, perhaps even too good if people can so easily be convinced to side with a paedophile - which is often regarded as the ultimate crime of all, isn't it? Even cold-blooded murderers go after prisoners who've messed with kids. And, as much as I feel ashamed for being so taken in by Humbert, I know that it's not just me who was fooled. Hell, even the GR description proves it. But, believe me, Lolita is a victim and no amount of saddening flashbacks to Humbert's past can change that. (less)

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Aug 12, 2011 Ian Graye rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: reviews, read-2011, reviews-5-stars, nabokov

Between the Covers

This afternoon, I said to my local bookseller (a lovely lady of a similar mature age to me!) that I had just finished “Lolita” and asked if she had ever read it.
She replied firmly, “No…and I’m not going to either. He’s a paedophile.”
A bit taken aback, I enquired further, “Who? The author or the character?”
Fortunately, she replied, “The character.”
For me, this exchange showed how much “Lolita” can still sharply divide opinion, even within lovers of fiction.
This wasn’t the conver...more

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Apr 21, 2013 Anthony Vacca rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2013, my-own-personal-jukebox

(see comment #4 for beginnings)
What makes writing about love so difficult is that you always end up only talking about yourself. Musicians have it easy, or rather, they make it look easy. There’s that feeling you get when you hear a song (say your woman’s left you, or your man; say your life feels like it’s in breakdown, someone was there and now they’re not, no discrimination between death and simple rejection) and you are filled with this small sense of wonder, that, this song, right now, was...more

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Aug 15, 2012 Mary Ellen rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: EVERYONE

I recently got into an argument with a friend about Lolita. I contend that it's one of the most beautiful books ever written, and that it's twice as amazing because Nabakov wrote it in English (which is his second or third language).

She contended that it was about a child molestor and was inexcusable.

I argued that it was more about chronicling a slightly off-kilter man's descent into wretched madness and total loathsomeness. A portrait of a child molestor, not necessarily a sanctioning of one.

S...more

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Jul 12, 2007 Namrirru rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: russian, e

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 p...more 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. (less)

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Mar 13, 2007 Rolls rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: pervs

An old friend used to say that "Ulysses" was a good book to read but not a good book to "read". After reading "Lolita" I understand what he meant.

Nabokov was a man obsessed with word games and this book is crammed cover to cover with many brilliant examples. Language delighted the man and that certainly comes across. What makes this acheivement even more amazing was that English was his third or fourth language. It is mind blowing that he or anyone could write so fluidly in a "foreign" tongue. I...more An old friend used to say that "Ulysses" was a good book to read but not a good book to "read". After reading "Lolita" I understand what he meant.

Nabokov was a man obsessed with word games and this book is crammed cover to cover with many brilliant examples. Language delighted the man and that certainly comes across. What makes this acheivement even more amazing was that English was his third or fourth language. It is mind blowing that he or anyone could write so fluidly in a "foreign" tongue. If this was enough to make a novel great then this would be one of my top ten.

But what if, as a reader, you demand that an author make his characters compelling and the narrative involving? I would say then that this book is not for you. Humbert and Dolores Haze (Lolita) only ever (to my mind) become three dimensional at odd moments here and there. He comes off as a mincing, foppish but ultimately unbelievable sort. I never bought into him until very near the end when for a few sentences Nabokov makes his remorse credible. But it is too late for that. I was already annoyed as hell by his rococo narration. The character of Lolita as well is shrill and one note through out. Only intermittently does she come across as worthy of compassion.

As for the story, once the seduction takes place it loses a lot of its forward momentum. It begins to feel repetitive and only comes alive again when Humbert reaches the very end of his self control and attempts to lash out at one he believes wronged him. All in all I think this is a book that could stand to lose about fifty pages.

There is much to love about it though. It could have been truly replusive. Nabokov knew that his concept was already off putting and that the execution need not be so. Rather than serving up spewing fluids and hungry orifices he treats us to healthy doses of wit and charm. Bravo!

"Lolita" is obviously literature with a capital "L." It is a work by a man of letters who happened to be a genius - for that reason alone it deserves reading. Just don't be surprised that once you're done you don't feel like recommending it to anyone.(less)

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Jan 07, 2013 Riku Sayuj rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Riku by: Himanshu Rai

Shelves: reviews, favorites, classics

Another review has been put up here. That one is equally bad and confused, you might as well just skim this:

Still dazed by the stupor of melancholy and perversion that Humbert Humbert has exposed my poor brain to. Still trying to make sense of the monster/poet/victim and of Lolita, the symbol of our age. Who exploited whom, who were the villains and who were to be punished, these thoughts are still swirling in my head; desperately trying to ascribe meaning beyond the mere acts of the novel, to r...more Another review has been put up here. That one is equally bad and confused, you might as well just skim this:

Still dazed by the stupor of melancholy and perversion that Humbert Humbert has exposed my poor brain to. Still trying to make sense of the monster/poet/victim and of Lolita, the symbol of our age. Who exploited whom, who were the villains and who were to be punished, these thoughts are still swirling in my head; desperately trying to ascribe meaning beyond the mere acts of the novel, to read into the disparities between nature and actions. A see-saw of poetry and debauchery. I also wonder how much I missed out on due to my handicap of not knowing french.

The primary effect of this beauty and poetry is that we keep geting charmed by this old-world, aristocratic protagonist who can talk in such a poetic way and then he gently turns around and reminds us of what he is contemplating doing to that young girl and we draw back in revulsion again, only to be ensnared in his honeyed prose a few lines later. And so it goes, tiring you out and enchanting you.

So, a review will come as soon as I can reconcile the beauty of the novel with its deep, dark underbelly and some meaning that is not merely moral emerges.

That might take many readings and I am not sure that is something I am willing to put myself through. But a review, however small, helps clarify the book in my head and, for that I will try.

Another thing I want to make sense of is this - Nabokov’s account of the old newspaper story that inspired him to start a work such as Lolita presented in the novel’s afterword "On a Book Entitled Lolita" - The story was about “an ape in the Jardin des Plantes, who after months of coaxing by the scientists, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: the sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage." - Isn't that just surreal? The connection with Humbert is right there at the edge of my imagination, in his own prison maybe and maybe in the prison that was his life's lust. I don't now, but what pleasure to ponder.

One thing I can confidently say even with my shock at the rest of the novel is that the opening paragraph is perhaps the most beautiful and alluring one I have ever read - It draws you into this perverse universe where every dark secret thought is open to scrutiny like some succubi, a beautiful mermaid or Lamia who lures you only to crucify you. The mind thrills and the eyes laze over the paragraph and you are aglow in the ecstasy the rest of the book seems to promise, thinking of the beauty that is waiting for you in those pages, the plays of language, the thrill of appreciating such wonder and you are happy that this book, Lolita, that you have heard so much about is going to be a delight. But of course, the book is just like a nymph as described in it, it tantalizes with ethereal beauty only to expose our world to the harsh reality of man's nature - at least I think so. The book is the real Lolita not any character in it.(less)

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Jul 09, 2011 Paul rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: modern-classic, novels

Other formerly shocking novels of previous centuries have lost their power, batteries quite flat (Madame Bovary, Ulysses, Lady Chatterly’s Lover) – we love them still but we wince no more, we may be quite amused at the idea that this word or that idea was not allowed in polite society – we may, indeed, be vastly amused at the very idea of polite society because society is just not very polite at all these days. But uniquely, Lolita, this great and appalling novel, only gets more shocking and mor...more

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Aug 16, 2010 Jason rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Nymph. Nymphet. Nymphetiquette. Nymphology. Nymphism. I will never think of 12 year old girls the same way. There’s a stain on my brain. The power of this book is that it’s creepy and taboo, but the pedophilia and incest is so damn plausible. There’s a criminal, upsetting proclivity of the subject matter, but the whole thing is oiled with reason--SAY IT AINT SO. It’s deviant, queer, puerile, and yet ever so human, darkly human, perverted in the corner.

Lolita lingers in my mind, like an accidenta...more

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Dec 01, 2007 Natalie rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, not-on-kindle

This book was disappointing and over-hyped.

When people talk about this book, they say things like it will "change the way you think" or that it's disquieting because it makes the reader sympathize with a pedophile. I thought wow, that much be worth reading.

Now I wonder if I read the same book as everyone else, or if *that* many people have misinterpreted it. It started out great: Humbert Humbert, the narrator, discusses different societies in the past that found it acceptable for very young wome...more This book was disappointing and over-hyped.

When people talk about this book, they say things like it will "change the way you think" or that it's disquieting because it makes the reader sympathize with a pedophile. I thought wow, that much be worth reading.

Now I wonder if I read the same book as everyone else, or if *that* many people have misinterpreted it. It started out great: Humbert Humbert, the narrator, discusses different societies in the past that found it acceptable for very young women to have sex with much older men. He also thinks his pedophilia might be the result of his desire to regain something of a romance he had when he was a teenager, wherein the girl he was in love with died. I sympathized with him here and we were moving into morally grey territory, so I thought the book was on track to be everything everyone says it is. If he and a young girl fell in love with each other, I would certainly question a lot of things I thought before.

Nope. Nothing between him and Lolita can be described as love. Lets see, he detested Lolita's personality. He wanted to impregnate Lolita so he could molest her children and their grandchildren when she was too old for him to find attractive. He would rape her despite the fact that she cried every time. He would rape her when she was seriously ill. He mind-fucked her thoroughly. He physically abused her. He manipulated her into sex acts by paying her money and other things she wanted, effectively turning her into a prostitute.

Needless to say, I felt no moral ambiguity when the novel ended. He was just a crazy pervert. That doesn't make me rethink what love is at all, since love entered nowhere in the equation -- it was the lust of a psychologically unstable man. I wasn't disquieted by any sort of sympathy for him; past the first couple chapters it becomes clear that he's just a horrible person who tries to justify his pedophilia with things that don't sound so bad.

In fact, the novel just reaffirmed what I thought before, that pedophiles are bad people who ruin children's lives, and on the whole it seemed completely pointless.

What's worse is that it's a fairly slow read, with fifty pages passing at a time with nothing happening. Nabokov's prose is impressive and clever, but about two-thirds of the writing served no purpose so much of that same prose actually diluted and detracted from the book. I would say to myself, "That's an amazing description of something completely pointless." He seemed to just like to hear himself talking at points, and his afterward seems to confirm this. I feel like the book would have been better off if those passages had been omitted.

However, I can appreciate the realism of Humbert Humbert's character. In fact, the one thing the story had going for it was realism. It just felt pointless by the time I finished, when I was expecting something much more groundbreaking. It might be fair to blame all the people who over-hyped the book, rather than blame Nabokov. Removed from the hype its merits are easier to see.

The more I think about it, perhaps many others *have* misinterpreted the book. It seemed to me that Nabokov's purpose was to punish the narrator. I can see the appeal of that, though I still feel it was pointless. And it's certainly less lofty than some of the things the other interpretations say, but at least it's more accurate.

To be honest, I'm a little irritated that I went into reading the book based on what appears to be a completely off-base interpretation, because I can't quite undo that in my mind. On the one hand it seems unfair to criticize an author on the basis that they didn't change how I think, but I'm not sure how I could have avoided it, since the cover of my edition has a quote that calls it, "the only convincing love story of our time."

It's not a horrible book, but it's probably the most overrated book I've ever read.
(less)

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May 04, 2008 Chris rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: any literate fans of Casey Parker

*Ranked as one of the Top 100 Fiction of the 20th Century*
I’m not quite sure how to put this in words. Hell, I’m not sure what I intend to say, so this is going to be ugly. If you want to sit in on this exercise be my guest, you’ve probably got more important things to do, such as organizing your cassette tapes and LPs before shoving them in a box destined for the attic, believe me, your time will be better spent, especially when you take that stroll down memory lane and consider how killer it w...more *Ranked as one of the Top 100 Fiction of the 20th Century*
I’m not quite sure how to put this in words. Hell, I’m not sure what I intend to say, so this is going to be ugly. If you want to sit in on this exercise be my guest, you’ve probably got more important things to do, such as organizing your cassette tapes and LPs before shoving them in a box destined for the attic, believe me, your time will be better spent, especially when you take that stroll down memory lane and consider how killer it would be to rock out to Depeche Mode and A-Ha all afternoon (it’s possible you’re one of those badasses with some Dead Kennedys on cassette, more power to you, feel free to tear off your shirt and bathe with a 40oz of Big Bear). You might want to clean your bong while you’re at it; you never know how immersed you’ll get in the hazy recollections of your exploits during the New Wave or burgeoning Hardcore era and might prefer a soundtrack to complement your deranged thoughts.

As for Lolita, maybe this tangential bullshit will help get my point across… I’ve recently taken a keen interest in watching “Deadliest Catch”, but as soon as the show concludes I wonder “What have I walked away with, after investing 50 minutes and 4 rum & cokes to the accompaniment of these awe-inspiring images of man battling the elements to strike bepincered gold?” Not much, appears to be the answer; it’s just a bunch of crabs, crabs, crabs, and master-baiting, the simple ingredients of all my friendships and relationships. Sure, it’s awesome to watch sea-faring maniacs risk life and limb to haul in the nasty creatures that pay their bills, but there’s nothing else to it, just dudes getting stoked over a huge haul of crabs, or lamenting some element of the life they’ve chosen. Then you get to thinking how these dudes’ wives manage without them at sea for 20+ days at a time; obviously they are in the crab-catching business as well. And the real kick in the ass is that I don’t even eat crab, hell, I’ve never even tried a dish that incorporates any crab. When I consider the ridiculousness of it all, it seems pretty disheartening. This sort of pointless introspection is probably how Des Esseintes got his start, so I’ll leave it at that before it becomes habit-forming.

I can’t say that my opinion of Lolita is much different. It’s just Humbert Humbert endlessly rhapsodizing about nymphettes, most substantially, his nymphette, Lolita. And that’s it; I’ve probably never read anything so one-dimensional in my life. I’m sure the upper echelons of literary critics found myriad reasons beyond my primitive sensibilities for including this in the Top 100 works of 20th century fiction, I just don’t happen to see it. One of these qualifiers might be this absurd statement on the back cover, ‘Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America’. Now, when we consider the social climate at the time of publication, with book-banning and obscenity trials recently being all the rage, and you know that in order to somehow foist upon the public a tale concerning a grown man’s obsession and fornication with a 12 year old girl the defenders of this thinly-veiled smut have to somehow show that there is something above and beyond mere prurient interest hidden between the covers of the book, so statements like the one above are thrown out there to mind-f#ck all. I don’t even know what the hell that statement on the cover is supposed to mean, but ‘postwar America’ were powerful buzzwords at the time, and truly, what else could you possibly use as a thematic defense for this book, seeing as the book has nothing to offer except the ridiculous tale of a weathered old pervert ogling young girls on the hopscotch courts, finding one that epitomizes his unacceptable desires, and eventually having his way with her before attempting to completely control her young body and mind during a trek that can only be considered kidnapping on the grandest scale. Let’s not forget that when his precious nymphette is purloined by an unknown fiend, he goes off to ambush the guy and shoot his ass; this is not the behavior of the ‘hypercivilized’; my own rather sloppy upbringing declares that anyone with a shred of civility offers his adversary a duel rather than attack him unawares, Humbert is a lowly coward of the worst disposition. The ‘hypercivilized’ don’t go around bagging 85 pound kids sporting skinned knees from spills at the roller-rink, real men fish for those awesome and voluptuous Amazonians, the women who proudly stand 5’10” or more and have generous curves that modern fabrics fruitlessly struggle to contain from spilling forth in all their fully-developed glory. Our man Humbert has no such redeeming qualities; he’s a scoundrel of the lowest and basest rank. Let’s not forget that he weeps, and when I conjure a mental image of the elusive ‘hypercivilized European’, weeping like a bitch and throwing a tantrum doesn’t enter the picture.

While the frauds who compiled the Top 100 Fiction list and I might diverge in our estimations of Lolita, I will agree with our man John Updike when he states “Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically.” There is no denying that the book is phenomenally written, but the repetition of nymphette-this and nymphette-that simply overwhelmed me; I was left with an indelible image of Nabokov sitting there alternately referencing his thesaurus and a collection of kiddie porn for inspiration while hammering this out. I’d have enjoyed this book a thousand times more had it been about turtles, or walnuts, or my mother's first communion, hell, anything else. Nymphettes suck: there is a reason I don’t go trolling for trim at the nearest bus station, who the hell wants to put up with the behavior of a pubescent trollop?

There isn’t a whole hell of a lot that I know, but I do know this; if my choices were either read Lolita again or spend a day crabbing in the arctic, I’d better be prepared to get some frostbite on my beanbag.
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May 09, 2013 Jason rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: for-kindle, wine-club, 2013, reviewed

WAIT A SECOND. Doesn’t Sting refer to Humbert Humbert as the “old man in that book by Nabokov”? If so, then maybe he ought to have reread Lolita before opening his big fat mouth. Because that “old man,” Mr. Fields of Gold, happens to be only in his 30s.

How fucking offensive.

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view all 56 comments

Jason What I meant about 9–11 is that an object of affection in that age group would have been more difficult, if not impossible, for the narrator to justif...more
updated May 10, 2013 08:03pm

Ian Graye I think I get you. I never really took his "justification" that Dolores had come onto him very seriously anyway. It would certainly be legally irrelev...more
May 10, 2013 09:01pm

Jan 16, 2009 David rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 5q

LUST AND LEPIDOPTERY
(Legend of a Licentious Logophile)

1. Libidinous linguist lusts after landlady's lass.
2. Lecherous lodger weds lovelorn landlady.
3. Landlady loses life.
4. Lascivious lewd looks after little Lolita.
5. Lubricious Lolita loves licking lollipops lambitively.
6. Licentious lecturer loves Lolita louchely.
7. Lechery lands lusty lamister in legal limbo.
8. Lachrymose libertine languishes in lockup.

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Jun 19, 2011 Mariel rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Humbert, dressed in cobras

Recommended to Mariel by: This is the dream of Humbert and Humbert

Lolita is my wallowing in the recesses of another's mind. This book is a snake mind pit.

It also broke my heart for the realization that knowing other people can be completely and totally foriegn. It is incredibly depressing to me how many people I've known (all female) who took Humbert's word about anything Lolita felt. Nabokov's genius was also in the telling between the lines. Those beats in spaces, the silences. How could they miss that? How could anyone get so lost in the wallowing that the...more

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Sep 11, 2007 Harajyuku rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: all-timefavorites

The other day I finished reading Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita." Thank God. It was wonderful. I compare the experience to cutting through black briars with roses growing and only a dull wooden machete in hand. "Lolita" was solid and boring, a monstrously obese... thing that danced like light through meadows of bumblebess and sharp grass and seven types of silky-soft wheat. I could not even believe that its toes could leave the ground. I still cannot. It was like a cherubim, only uglier; it was a pa...more The other day I finished reading Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita." Thank God. It was wonderful. I compare the experience to cutting through black briars with roses growing and only a dull wooden machete in hand. "Lolita" was solid and boring, a monstrously obese... thing that danced like light through meadows of bumblebess and sharp grass and seven types of silky-soft wheat. I could not even believe that its toes could leave the ground. I still cannot. It was like a cherubim, only uglier; it was a pain to taste and a joy to swallow and I am both sorry and proud that it is over and that I have been the one to kill it. Reading Nabokov is healthy for me – he opens my vocabulary, reminds me of words I had forgotten and left rotting, endows me with an articulate voice so starkly unlike my own cloudy, muddled one. He writes in a voice unnatural to most minds but easily tangible, and thus easily mutated and adopted by others. But I think that, in the end, it was Humbert Humbert that I loved best. I must be his only sympathizer in all the world – most do not trouble themselves with the affairs of monsters, but I felt myself strangely affected by him. Usually I have no tolerance for men throwing themselves so eagerly away and calmly walking the path to destruction, but I liked him – in all his evil and wretchedness. Even my heart bled for him, poor doomed beast that he was. The worst was that I could not even bring myself to hate Lolita herself – the vapid, disgusting victim, that shallow nymphet with only the aery beauty to her and nothing more, everything else sucked into the abyss and leaving nothing. Such a refreshing book, as well - blissfully absent of obnoxious symbolism and metaphors. Sometimes one just wants a love story to be a goddamned love story, never mind Humbert being Old Europe and Dolores Haze suburban America. Screw analysis - I enjoyed it, even though it was a bitch to hack away at. I enjoyed it, because the blood I bled on those thorns was real and my own, all my own, and it's been such a time since last I could care so much for a character. Makes you wonder what I've been reading lately, no?(less)

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Jun 30, 2007 Eli rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: novels

This book scared the living daylights out of me.

As everyone says - its gorgeously written. The language is so rich that it somehow spills over the sentences - there's more to them than you can easily ingest. The writing makes the whole thing a pleasure to read, and in a lot of ways puts Nabakov in control from the start - there isn't a lot of room to imagine motives since Nabakov explains so much. I should point out that were a lesser writer spend any time at all writing in a language I can't r...more This book scared the living daylights out of me.

As everyone says - its gorgeously written. The language is so rich that it somehow spills over the sentences - there's more to them than you can easily ingest. The writing makes the whole thing a pleasure to read, and in a lot of ways puts Nabakov in control from the start - there isn't a lot of room to imagine motives since Nabakov explains so much. I should point out that were a lesser writer spend any time at all writing in a language I can't read, I may have been tempted to put the whole thing down, but that here, despite entire passages in French, it never crossed my mind to do anything but read on.

There is a recurring temptation to read this as a love story. Humbert Humbert is lovingly obsessed with Lolita. Since he's the narrator of the story, his passion is the lens through which everything is viewed. But Nabakov allows just enough of the unfiltered (fictional) reality through to make it pretty clear that this is a story about a frightened, terribly abused little hostage and her tormentor. The constant flips between seeing Humbert as unfortunately in love with the wrong person, and him as a monster sucking every bit of life out of his prisoner is what is so frightening. It begs the question - how much of reality could we all reconfigure to fit our obsession, or even our love?

The characters, at least Lolita and Humbert are brilliant and true. Lolita is deeply sympathetic, and at points, so is Humbert. The place of the book is everywhere in motion, and little pinpoints across the country are written about with confidence and clarity. The settings precisely frame the story.

There is enough disturbing erotisism that I felt a little strange reading it in broad public view, but it its certainly not explicit in any traditional sense.

Brilliant, complex and extraordinarily readable, this is a book of such force and depth, that it seemed to me nearly impossible to get the whole picture on a single reading. It is definitely one I will pick up again. (less)

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Jun 15, 2011 K.D. Oliveros rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 1001-core, favorites

Nabokov himself said that this novel was his best. I still have to read the others but I agree when critics say that this is one of the best English novels ever. For me, the reason is the irony of having a very sick theme - pedophilia - but told brilliantly that you would fall in love with the book and you don't readily really know why.

From the famous opening statement: "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta:..." up to his closing statements "I am thinking of au...more Nabokov himself said that this novel was his best. I still have to read the others but I agree when critics say that this is one of the best English novels ever. For me, the reason is the irony of having a very sick theme - pedophilia - but told brilliantly that you would fall in love with the book and you don't readily really know why.

From the famous opening statement: "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta:..." up to his closing statements "I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigment, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita", Nabokov filled up the 300+ pps of this book with his captivating narrative. His choice of words is precise and never boring. The rhythm and cadence of his sentences are invigorating which I think is distinctively Nabokov. This as opposed to let's say the short and concise yet picturesque narrative of Ernest Hemingway in The Old Man and The Sea. When you read a page of a book by Hemingway or Gabriel Garcia Marquez, even without looking at the book's cover, you would right away know who the author is. This is true for Nabokov, I think.

I am a father of a 14-year old girl and I just could not imagine having a man, especially a middle age one, lusting and going after her when she was still 12 years old. Just that for a plot and it is enough for me to immediately drop the book. According to Wikipedia, at the time of its writing, Nabokov was trying to make a name for himself as a writer in the US. He was born in Russia, stayed and wrote in Germany and France before finally moving to the US. He wrote Lolita very carefully and it took him two years writing and re-writing the book. It is the only one of the few novels that is included almost in all Best Novels Lists: 1001, 501, Time Magazine 100, Newsweek 100, Modern Library 100, etc.

So, I spent the last 4 days reading and appreciating this novel. It is one of the old classics (first published in 1955) that could hardly put me to sleep. It is very stimulating to the brain and engaging: "Gentlemen of the jury..." says Humbert Humbert which is very appropriate since from page 1, you know that you hate him for being a sex maniac and sick, sick pedophile. But along the way, because of Nabokov's eloquence on words, you would understand his point of view: he used to love a young girl who died before they were able to consummate their affair. Thus, though the theme is about a sick-in-the-head man, it is a love story that is told in a brilliant one-of-a-kind prose.

Sana Nabokov brought his PC in heaven and continue writing good novels there! (less)

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Oct 04, 2009 Matt rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

My favorite book in all of literature. When I first encountered this title at the age of nineteen I finally realized that great writers were "doing stuff" besides just telling stories. Sure, in high school there was plenty of dry discussion about symbolism and foreshadowing and even dryer in-class readings of poets like Emily Dickinson and Anne Bradstreet(Ugh!), but at that point it all sounded like "The Yellow Rose of Texas" to me.

As I cannot even begin to give this book a straight (or even ob...more My favorite book in all of literature. When I first encountered this title at the age of nineteen I finally realized that great writers were "doing stuff" besides just telling stories. Sure, in high school there was plenty of dry discussion about symbolism and foreshadowing and even dryer in-class readings of poets like Emily Dickinson and Anne Bradstreet(Ugh!), but at that point it all sounded like "The Yellow Rose of Texas" to me.

As I cannot even begin to give this book a straight (or even objective) review, I must run back to the shelter of the random thoughts format...

It seriously pisses me off that less literary-minded folk who are aware of this work always seem to refer to it as "that child molester book."

H.H. is a classic example of the unreliable narrator, but I am constantly amazed at just how inept and bumbling that character unwittingly portrays himself despite his half-truths and gold-plated recollections. Young Delores is in control of the balance of power in that relationship throughout the main narrative. His perversions seem to be of a puritanically circumspect variety as well.

H.H. suffers a mental breakdown at some point in the time-line of his confessions. Before I had always believed that it happened during the second cross-country trip, but after this reading I am now suspicious that it was in fact much earlier.

The opening two paragraphs of this work are damned near perfect in my mind...

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.

When you say the author's name in your head do you pronounce it NAH-bah-kov or na-BOK-ov? I ask because I recently stumbled across an interview reprint online in which he railed on the various American butcherings of his name, and then (presumably) whacked the interviewer with a butterfly net a time or two.

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Mar 31, 2013 Michael rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 1001-books-to-read-before-you-die, modern-librarys-100-best-novels, russian, modern-classic, literary-fiction, post-modernism, 1950s, satire, book-club-literary-exploration

Lolita is the highly controversial novel of Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged literature professor and his obsession with twelve year-old Dolores Haze. Of whom he becomes a step father as well as being sexually involved. Considered one of the most controversial novels of the twentieth century, Lolita is known not just for the disturbing nature but for the unreliable narration and sophisticated writing style.

Vladimir Nabokov’s masterpiece, Lolita, is one of those books that are worth reading even if...more Lolita is the highly controversial novel of Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged literature professor and his obsession with twelve year-old Dolores Haze. Of whom he becomes a step father as well as being sexually involved. Considered one of the most controversial novels of the twentieth century, Lolita is known not just for the disturbing nature but for the unreliable narration and sophisticated writing style.

Vladimir Nabokov’s masterpiece, Lolita, is one of those books that are worth reading even if it makes you very uncomfortable. The protagonist is the villain who tries so hard to gain the readers sympathy through his sincerity and melancholy. But as the story progress you can even see that he has lost of sympathy for himself and starts referring to himself as maniac who deprived Dolores of her childhood. The novel provides a remarkable perspective into the mind of a man you just want to hate and I will admit it can be a little exciting to watch him go through hell. Nabokov writes a hated character in the hope to knock him around and give him some humility and the reader is left wondering if he will learn from his mistakes.

This has often been described as an erotic novel, even the Great Soviet Encyclopedia called Lolita “an experiment in combining an erotic novel with an instructive novel of manners”. Personally I think of this book as a satirical tragedy with elements of eroticism and remorse. The narrator spends a fair chunk of the book begging the reader to understand that he is not proud of his actions and he is often stricken with guilt at the awareness of robbing Lolita of her childhood. But there is a case to be made at the fact that this is just an exploitation of a weak adult by a corrupt child but this can be problematic and not something I wish to go into great deal about.

The novel as a whole is a very one sided argument, we know how Humbert feels about the entire situation; we hear this to a very sickening degree. He has remorse but his obsession keeps him from ever changing, but one has to wonder what was really going through the mind of Dolores. I have to wonder how she sees the situation or even what she was thinking or feeling throughout the novel. We, as readers, can only surmise since we are forced to absorb Humbert’s feelings.

It is interesting to point out just how two dimensional all the characters are; all except himself and Lolita, which he goes into great detail. It reminds me of life; people tend to describe each other in a two dimensional manner unless we are obsessed with or interested in the person. This technique of writing really added to the realistic feeling of this book.

Lolita was a really awkward and sickening novel to read, there aren’t many books out there that have made me sick to my stomach. Lolita pulls off that feeling that horror novels try to achieve yet often get wrong – that feeling of uneasiness for the reader. This is my second read of this novel, so I knew what to expect and I was able to look past the controversial elements and focus on what this book can offer to the literary world.

Apart from the elements of oppression and an authority figure trying to assert their dominance this book explores tragicomedy, unreliable narration, irony and because Vladimir Nabokov is a Russian it could be a metaphor for totalitarianism. There are many themes you can explore within the novel but the one that will stick in most people’s minds is the lasting damage created by child sexual abuse.

Interestingly enough Vladimir Nabokov is a surrealist often linked to Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Kafka which make you wonder about some of the elements of this book even more. With a love of intricate word play and synesthetic detail Lolita turns into a wry observation of western culture. The novel is full of cleaver word play, double entendres, multilingual puns and in the end when you boil done to why people love it, it is just a beautifully written novel.

You may not enjoy reading this book but you might enjoy having read it. I have to admit that I enjoyed this book more the second time around; there is great beauty to be found in this book and while content makes this book difficult to get through it is well worth the effort. I remember one of my first blog posts on literature was called “What Would You Read in an Introduction to Fiction Course” where I listed the books I’d include if I was to create an introduction to Fiction course and Lolita was one of my choices. Having now reread this book, it just validates my choice even more, there is so much to explore in this book that it has been put back on my list of books to reread.

This review originally appeared on my blog; http://literary-exploration.com/2013/...(less)

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Aug 01, 2012 Ian Graye rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: reviews, reviews-5-stars, read-2012, nabokov

A Review of Lolita from a Cellphone

Though it's true that Nabokov
Has gone and killed her off,
She still lives in my mind and
I'd really like to meet her.

She features in my ev'ry dream
And so, in all humility,
I'm sure I'd be better for her
Than Humbert, who was too haughty.

She'd be a few years older
And I a little bolder.
Especially now that we are grown,
It wouldn't be that naughty.

In my long and loving arms
It would be so much sweeter,
Though there's no telling in a book
How it is that I would treat her....more

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Jul 16, 2012 mp04 rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: lit-gems, russian, paradigm-shifters-sacred

Pompously I babbled. I will kick it to the ground and stomp on it, spit on it, tear it asunder and burn it, but never will I read it. Nabokov corrupts. I knew my words were hollow, as hollow as my core was, hollow and enveloped in pain, but I uttered them with a vehemence, a temerity that only a young aspiring writer can display.
My friend offered it to me as I was boarding my train. That book, enveloped in a plain Penguin Classics cover with its six silent letters jeering at me cheekily: L O L...more Pompously I babbled. I will kick it to the ground and stomp on it, spit on it, tear it asunder and burn it, but never will I read it. Nabokov corrupts. I knew my words were hollow, as hollow as my core was, hollow and enveloped in pain, but I uttered them with a vehemence, a temerity that only a young aspiring writer can display.
My friend offered it to me as I was boarding my train. That book, enveloped in a plain Penguin Classics cover with its six silent letters jeering at me cheekily: L O L I T A - it was right before my eyes. I could never be a writer if I don't read it, he said. I could never be a writer! I, the one who has arrived to strip the literature overburdened with frivolous words and gimmicks and insincerity and set it free, grab it and shove it into a new era - I could not be a writer if I don't read this blatant diabolical conceited display of genius. Hah!
I snatched it and once more I laid eyes on its first page that was imprisoned in my memory like a stubborn ghost from a nightmare. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. MY ARSE! Thad - I snapped it close. The passengers in the air conditioned compartment stared at me, my anger, my shabby clothes, my unshaved face... the girl sitting opposite to me, primly dressed, oh so beautiful and young- budding, with an angelic face and a dolorous silence (DOLOROUS!), she snorted. She looked at me: from my filthy floaters to my filthy hair, and snorted; and she looked long enough to let me know she snorted. How I wished to throw the book on her face! What do you know of me- you spoiled educated illiterate? And what do you have to be so proud about: tiny breasts, wiry hands, a neck like that plastic bottle to crush after use? I opened the book - The Book - and underlined every word, every phrase, every play and trick that I would never - never - use. I underlined and underlined and underlined, paragraphs after paragraphs, pages, a whole chapter, one pretension followed by next - my hand moving of its own, my mind reading swiftly, repeatedly, filling in itself to remain sane. If I'd stopped I'd hit her. That swollen-headed breastless barren bitch!
So I read on. Chuckling, cursing, reciting; coursing through the demonic narrator's first loves and many sessions of love-making, Mr. Fate throwing in his arms the cunning little Lolita. And I read on. My twisting tongue got tired but it was rollicking, frolicking, masticating the delicious wordplays, the lyrical sentences, the pages that flowed like wistful zephyrs. Zephyrs! I’d never used a word like zephyrs! Wordplays, games, sports: this is not a novel but an exhibition – a series of games for display and attention, for fun and mockery. MY Novel will have none of it. My novel, my unborn, kicking, maturing novel, the first I am pregnant with, it will be pure and uncorrupting. It will be born to give, to serve, to add something to the lives of my miserable readers: their weeping souls meeting mine through the portal of my words; isn't that reason enough to write with a bleeding heart? To be wounded, to be pierced, to be honest and direct? I am not here to show them who I am. I am not here to impose. I am here to share their woes, to give them space and stillness and all that they so dearly desire but search for in the wrong places, outside. No, I am not a mad old man running naked in the sun and shouting, "Look at it. My dick. How big! How Big!"
She became intrigued, my eunuch co-passenger. She saw me reading and reveling, she saw me reciting and whining , she peered at the book cover. Yes, Lolita, a Penguin Classic. You might have heard of Penguin. You might have heard of Lolita. You might have seen it in a bookstore that you visit every fortnight, girl - BLATANTLY DISPLAYED in the ‘Bestsellers’ shelf and ‘Classics’ and ‘This Month’s Recommendation’. You might have bought it; the owner might have made you buy it. He might have sweet-talked you, asked your reading interest then suggested this one. This too is a love story... umm... only slightly twisted. Nabokov, this guy was a genius, madam. It’s a Must Read, madam. And madam, you might have bought it, inserted it with utmost care in your sandalwood book shelf, where along with your Slam Book and your pink colored journals from 1998 to 2001 and Eric Segal's Love Story this book basks - displayed blatantly.
She - our honorable mademoiselle - finally became uncomfortable. Relentless staring often does that. She neatly sipped mineral water from her plastic bottle, neatly and delicately, and talked nicely in her nicely voice to the fellow passengers, fluffing her nose and settling her hair - her hair falling on her fair, meagerly visible shoulders. Each strand a rivulet flooding with sensuality... I wanted to kiss her nape, smell her hair, drink her in. Crush her. I wanted to make love with her in the filthy toilet of that first class train compartment then crush her. I wanted to fuck her on the commode and flush her out. Her pompous nose was more repulsive than the plumy prose. (!)
I delved into the book once again, dwelling in the twisting, turning sentences, losing and finding my way out through the overpowering vortex of his descriptions –his merciless ramblings, while the characters roamed around the country, hiding and seeking, screaking and weeping, hideously performing their wanton acts in motels and in mornings: mourning, luring, grieving, wheedling.
Who the hell cared! Who gave a damn! The darkness of my thoughts was darker than their acts, much darker and more despicable than any writer’s imagination. But that very darkness was a tunnel to my soul. I must traverse it, I must let it soak me in, let it soak in me, so that together we may discover the dimensions of my existence as yet unexplored.
It is this that I want to share, ladies and gentleman of the jury. Beauty, untouched, unblemished - unblemishable, that resides unexpressed in the core of our beings – it is this that I want to materialize. My sentences will be broken. My prose pruned and prickly. My words coarse. I will have something new to say, something as yet unsaid, but my phrases will be cliched. Verbs unspectacular. Won't you still read me? Won't you see past the veil of words to learn what I have to offer? Beauty of text is filthy, a cover up... a make up to conceal the ugliness of banality. Old wine new bottle. What should a writer know more about - poems and rhymes and rhetoric or pain and death and philosophy? I will offer you my spite and my soul, my blood and my blessings, my everything – that is a promise. I might be blunt and boorish... but there won’t be a single word that is dishonest, not a sentence that is borrowed. Not one spurious feeling. Will you still read me: if I am unpoetic and uncouth and unseemly? Or will you snort - snort and stare long enough to let me know you snorted, you tiny breasted readers, you members of the jury...you educated illiterates?
I jumped out of the empty train. I was back in my hometown, the town of phonies and wannabes, of ambitious hardworking money-minters, and I was alone and unslept and read. I had finished the novel in fourteen hours straight, reading in the dim passage light all through the night, and I had cried in the empty car. Language! It is a breathing, pulsating entity. Not a dead sheet of words, not an imperial whimsical jamboree, not a soulless body whoring on the whims and impulses of preachers – it was a spirit from ethereal worlds, more alive, more tangible than I was.
So what? I told myself I did not care. The end was good, better than its famed beginning. Yes, like everyone who ever read this book I loved and loathed him - that guy, that delightful despicable fiend whose name I could not bring myself to write. I did ponder on fate and morality, on our primeval instincts, on the prisons of our mind, but only very briefly. I don't give a rat's ass to it, I said. Nabokov corrupts and I have emerged victorious, almost. I am still a young aspiring writer who does not know how to write. Yet I will and they will read me. They will have to - I will lay bare my soul to them. "Look at it! Look at it! How big. How big."
I threw the book in a bin and flew out of the railway station. I was relieved - I should have been relieved but I wasn't. I should have torn the book into pieces; I should have kicked it to the ground, spit on it and burnt it. I should have fucked it and flushed it out.
I ran back, blindly, insanely. The trash can was empty; a frail old man had just cleared it. I begged him, bribed him to open the trash bags and let me fish out something: yes, yes, it is precious. Very precious. Among discarded food and condoms and milk cans, in the smell of vomits and faeces and rotting eggs, I buried my hands and rummaged, feeling through the dump with my closed eyes and clenched teeth. There it was, its Penguin Classics cover spoiled and sullied beyond repair, but its six ugly letters still staring at me like a proud prudish nymphet. L O L I T A. I was hunted. I was enchanted.
I spat on it, I kicked it to the ground and stomped on it, I wiped it clean with sand and my shirt. And I kissed it, tears flowing out of my eyes without stopping. Nabokov, you master of masters, you wizard of creative writing, fuck you!(less)

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Nov 15, 2007 David rated it 5 of 5 stars

Lolita is a road novel, but its kind of the anti-On The Road (it was published in 1955, two years before Kerouac’s breakout book). Humbert Humbert and Sal Paradise travel some of the same roads, around the same time, but rather than some holy quest through sanctified towns in search of enlightenment and kicks, Humbert’s is a furtive, illicit journey through a bland, tacky, ephemeral, clumsily commercialized landscape. On the other hand, both Sal and Humbert are bohemians of sorts, and both cast...more Lolita is a road novel, but its kind of the anti-On The Road (it was published in 1955, two years before Kerouac’s breakout book). Humbert Humbert and Sal Paradise travel some of the same roads, around the same time, but rather than some holy quest through sanctified towns in search of enlightenment and kicks, Humbert’s is a furtive, illicit journey through a bland, tacky, ephemeral, clumsily commercialized landscape. On the other hand, both Sal and Humbert are bohemians of sorts, and both cast a jaundiced eye at 50’s conformity and conventionality. In Humbert’s eyes, Dolly suffers as much from being an ordinary American adolescent in a tabloid culture as from being the victim of a pedophile. In his twisted view he’s improving her mind while corrupting her morals. But unlike Sal/Kerouac’s celebration of America’s cities and backroads, Humbert’s is a snobbish, jaundiced, extremely unromantic view of the American landscape and 50’s culture.

Lolita is also a book about the expressive possibilities of the English language. In a trite sense this is true of every novel ever written in English. They are all on some level about what you can do, and can fail to do, with the English language. But English was Nabokov’s second language (at least!), and English itself is more of a theme in this novel than it would be were the novel written by a native speaker. Humbert is something of a pedant, and the reader is dazzled by his exuberant and playful use of the language. I guess it goes to the whole outsider theme: Humbert as a cultured, old world European looking askance at 50’s culture; Humbert the nonnative speaker become hyperliterate in his second language; Humbert the pedophile with a more meta understanding of the taboo against sex with children than people who’ve simply internalized it. It’s in the nature of taboos that one refrains from reflecting on them.

And that’s the genuinely disturbing thing about this novel: you willingly spend 300 pages inside the head of a charming psychopath for whom the taboo against sex with children is just an arbitrary social proscription (Humbert briefly recounts historical examples in which the proscription did not exist, and remarks upon the arbitrariness of the various statutory definitions of where the line is drawn). Humbert is repulsive, but you can’t feel superior to him because he’s smarter and more self-aware than you are. Without at all condoning his acts, you begin to see things his way, even though you never really lose sight of Humbert’s massive blind spot: the inability to see that sex with a child violates a sacred trust—that adults will treat children as ends rather than means—and forces the child to experience a reality they are not yet emotionally equipped for. In some ways I suppose Humbert is a precursor to Hannibal Lecter, although while Lecter arguably does more despicable things—kills people and eats them—Humbert is a far more disturbing character.
(less)

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Jun 26, 2007 Kelly rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: everyone with an open mind, and an appreciation for beauty. No. Just everyone.

Shelves: fiction, owned, 20th-century-postwar-to-late, grand-opera

I was in equal parts disturbed by, enthralled by, and in love with this book. Love and passion triumph over everything else. And I don't mean this in the cutesy, Hallmark sort of way either. That is the message of this book. No matter how wrong, now evil, how disgusting, how perverted, love wins. Or what people call "love" in any case (obsession is probably a better word). But it's not insignificant that that's what the delusion is called. If you can believe it, that is the message of this book....more

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Jan 07, 2013 Riku Sayuj rated it 5 of 5 stars

Qualifier:

Here is the review I had planned in my earlier rambling. I had half-hoped that I would brood over it, and in due time, some blazingly original understanding of the book would shine through in a review (as it usually does!). Now enough time has passed and I have even given the book a second go-over. I am still lost. So here, for your reading pleasure, is the second-hand review, the old mish-mash of familiar thoughts, the dusty talk about beauty and about confused morality and vague hint...more Qualifier:

Here is the review I had planned in my earlier rambling. I had half-hoped that I would brood over it, and in due time, some blazingly original understanding of the book would shine through in a review (as it usually does!). Now enough time has passed and I have even given the book a second go-over. I am still lost. So here, for your reading pleasure, is the second-hand review, the old mish-mash of familiar thoughts, the dusty talk about beauty and about confused morality and vague hints at some hidden depth. It is just table-talk as far as Lolita is concerned. Do you really want to read it? Why don't you read a more intelligent counter-analysis here? I warned you --

Review:

Lolita should probably be read with a french dictionary in one hand and a glass of wine on the table side and even that doesn't guarantee that you will understand the full beauty of the prose.

Only the beauty of the language distracts one enough to get through the head-over-heals atrocities that litter the pages. At times I felt strongly that it is more of a study in beauty and aesthetics than is it about morality or on examining the pathos of society - as we want every literary book to be.

The fact that it doubles as a weird post-apocalyptic parent-daughter road-trip, where they cruise on against the dark landscape of a morally devastated world was for me only a backdrop to the exquisite ode to beauty that the book was. But, the road-trip nevertheless occupies a central position in the narrative. The Appalachian roads are the witness to the worst of the perversions - the dark moral descent. And then the tide reverses and the same roads are traversed again in a mad descent of the intellect into madness. But somehow, in that second journey Humbert gains a surer knowledge of what the relationship between beauty and innocence is and about what appreciation should be tolerated and what terminated.

The most disturbing factor about the whole reading experience was the dawning sense that the poor Lolita whom you are to pity is not so innocent after all. She represents the modern youth - who knows all the worst secrets of earth and indulges them without any sense of the absurd or evil. The innocence lost is regained due to a lack of angst at what an earlier generation considered morally base. What is not acceptable in this post-apocalyptic moral world? Apparently nothing, the worst transgressions are treated as matter of fact and the two interlopers are never discovered and even murder is committed in the midst of mad jocularity. It’s a comedy roiling in depravity, masquerading as a confession. It is as darkly-funny as ‘darkly-funny’ can get. Post-modernism marries Absurdist literature in Nabokov's Lolita.

The fabricated foreword too gives tantalizing clues on how to decipher the novel and the protagonist - but as you finish the novel you realize that the foreword was an example of how someone who just doesn't “get it” would view the novel. It is a negative signpost to guide you where not to go. The afterword is very factual and gives a better understanding of the book.

As the B&N site says, Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written... that is, ecstatically. The novel is indeed too perfectly crafted, you want to scream at it in disgust and you want to coo at it in adoration. It is like one of those abhorrent but so-perfect marble statues - it is beautiful enough to be feared but your eyes can never look away once fixed on its perfect form. As a fellow goodreader has said, you may not enjoy reading this book but you might enjoy having read it. Reading it is worth the time, just to marvel at what our mundane, every-day language can become in the hands of a true artist. Forget what it describes, go with the music, dance a little.(less)

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Jun 07, 2012 Chrissie rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: audio, humorous, usa, relationships

I am going to tell you what I wish I had been told before reading this book. This is a memoir told from the first person point of view. I guess we all know that this book is about a pedophile, about incest. Yes it is, but it is extremely well written. And for this reason, due to this author’s talent, it is often very funny and thought provoking. It is not just about incest. It is also about love and teenage kids and anger and craziness too. Humbert writes this memoir to figure out who he is and...more

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May 21, 2008 The Scarlet Pervygirl rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is not a book about a pedophile: it is a book about everything modern adult women fear to be true about adult men; and the book about the most terrible fears I've ever had being true in the most terrible ways possible is also the most beautiful book I've ever read.

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Aug 06, 2012 Sam rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: tbr-before-i-die, classics, psychology

“offensive” is frequently but a synonym for “unusual; and a great work of art is of course always original, and thus by its very nature should come as a more or less shocking surprise.

– From the Forward by John Ray.

In this novel, the reader is asked to be the deciding jury. So here is my verdict: Humbert Humbert is found guilty of being a sociopath. How did I decide this? Well, let’s look at how many traits of a sociopath we can link to the character profile of Humbert:

Manipulation

Humbert gets...more

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topics	posts	views	last activity
Lolita	3	50	1 hour, 40 min ago
The Modern Librar...: * Lolita - Nabokov	5	28	May 04, 2013 10:53am
The book is dragging	28	286	May 01, 2013 09:36am
Literary Exploration: Final Thoughts Spoilers	8	57	Apr 04, 2013 04:04pm

title link	preview: Lolita
avg rating	preview: Lolita Goodreads rating: 3.82 (284545 ratings)
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