Lolita in 100 books to read before you die

May 23, 2024 Gayle rated it it was ok · review of another edition

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Lolita is narrated in the first person by the main character, a French literature professor born in Paris in 1910 and who moved to New England just before WWII. It is now 1952 and he is awaiting trial in prison and from where he writes his memoir under the pseudonym, Humbert Humbert. In it he talks to the reader as if they are the jury and describes his obsession with a 12-year-old girl, or as he calls her a “nymphet”, Dolores (Dolly, Lo, Lolita) Haze, whom he describes as having kidnapped, drug Lolita is narrated in the first person by the main character, a French literature professor born in Paris in 1910 and who moved to New England just before WWII. It is now 1952 and he is awaiting trial in prison and from where he writes his memoir under the pseudonym, Humbert Humbert. In it he talks to the reader as if they are the jury and describes his obsession with a 12-year-old girl, or as he calls her a “nymphet”, Dolores (Dolly, Lo, Lolita) Haze, whom he describes as having kidnapped, drugged and abused after marrying her mother, Charlotte and becoming her stepfather. After Charlotte’s accidental death, Humbert and Lolita go on a road trip across America staying at 342 different motels before eventually ending back at their New England home.

Dolly goes to a private girls school for a while before they embark on another road trip. This time Humbert gets a feeling they are being followed. When Dolores becomes ill and goes to hospital she is discharged by a man called Clare Quilty, a playwright and film director, who has crossed their paths before several times. Humbert falls into a depression for two years at the loss of Lolita and tries to find her without success. Eventually he receives a letter from Lolita, now 17 years old, telling him she is married and pregnant. He visits her, learns about Quilty, realises that he is in love with her, and then murders Quilty. Lolita dies in childbirth and Humbert dies of heart failure in prison. We are never truly sure if Humbert’s memoir is reliable - it may all be a story made up by a madman, and we never hear Lolita’s side of things.

One of the inspirations for the novel is explicitly mentioned Chapter 33 of Part II: "Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank Lasalle, a fifty-year-old mechanic, had done to eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?”. 11-year-old Florence Horner was kidnapped in 1948 by 50-year-old mechanic Frank La Salle, who had caught her stealing a five-cent notebook. La Salle traveled with her over various states for 21 months. He claimed that he was an FBI agent.

There are various double entendres and word plays in the narrative including a character called “Vivian Darkbloom," whose name is an anagram for "Vladimir Nabokov”. In Nabokov’s Afterword which is published in all editions after 1956, he says there is “no moral to the story”.
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