;)
ABAW: Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Thursday, February 3, 2011 at 10:15AM Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
I’ve read excerpts and I knew the general plot of this novel, but this is the first time I’ve read Lolita, or anything else by Nabokov. My first reaction was to wonder whether Nabokov set himself the challenge of trying to write a story that would make readers sympathetic to a pedophile.
Early on, I found it difficult to see anything but the tragedy in the story. Even knowing the general plot ahead of time, I was still surprised by the intensity of the story. I was amused by the amazingly circuitous and convoluted language Nabokov employs to infer Humbert’s desires and actions without being explicit or obscene.
Only when I’d reached the absurd final scenes between Humbert and his nemesis did the humor begin to resolve for me, and upon reflection, I started to find many other moments in the story grimly funny.
Lolita is an absurd love story, a darkly comical story with some scenes that are almost slapstick mayhem.
Humbert is such a terrible, unreliable narrator, yet so brilliantly and consistently wrought. I could not hate him. I even found it difficult to revile him sometimes, though that was my gut inclination. Humbert’s obsessive attention to the details surrounding Lolita make him completely blind to other things, which Nabokov reveals with such delicious subtlety, even through Humbert’s voice.
Don’t get me wrong. Humbert is a pedophile. He is a child rapist. He destroys Lolita’s life. He consistently rips her from normalcy, even disrupting her desperate efforts to be a regular kid in their year playing house. He doesn’t realize the extent of his destruction until he has lost her. Humbert always thinks he is trying to fill a fantasy for Lolita-with their travel exploits, with the year of school, with her participation in theater-but it is Lolita that knows the reality of their situation, and it is Lolita that ultimately decides when to end the normalcy farce and when to end the relationship completely. Humbert destroys her life, but he doesn’t destroy her sense of self. She leaves Humbert to pursue other options, but she doesn’t prostitute herself or allow others to exploit her, and she manages to achieve a kind of stable normativity in her brief life.
I find it horrifying on one level to joke about pedophilia, child rape, and child kidnapping. Humbert is reprehensible, but I found it difficult not to laugh at him and the situations he creates for himself. I also found it difficult not to be a tiny bit sympathetic to him, in his (mostly) single-minded pursuit of love.
There are perverts, and then there are Perverts. And then there are people, like Nabokov, who wield language with subtlety and a sharp edge of masterful innuendo. I can’t put my finger on it now, but my favorite line in the book is about grasshoppers spurting (not leaping or jumping or flying, mind you—SPURTING) from the tall weeds.
A Book A Week, Read Something in Words 
Reader Comments (2)
I read Lolita some years ago and I didn't love it like everyone seemed to do. Aside from the line that swept me off my feet, "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."
That could have been the end of the story for me, despite his play with language, his dark humor, his variegated twists and Lolita's eventual escape. I appreciate your thoughts on the subject, like one day I could think it differently.
That is a fantastic line, Victoria, and it encapsulates so many things about the book. The language play, the obsession, the skewed view of the narrator (her name is different in different contexts). And it hints at that uncomfortable problem for a reader who can revel in a line like that and still be totally skeeved out by the pedophilia.
I cannot say that I loved it, but I can say that I did feel differently about it at the end than at the beginning, and I do respect and appreciate the language and the ballsiness of the writing. I would bet that Nabokov would dismiss "bravery," but surely he would come up with something more colorful than "ballsiness."