Literary Fiction

I had my girlfriend read this book with me as I knew she would enjoy it as much as I had been at the time. When we finished, we took ample time to talk about it. Quotes were pulled from popular resources, but remain as relevant as any piece of text in the book.

Constantly fought about, banned in three countries for some lengths of time, and questionable though legal, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita is no stranger to controversy, even from the very first word of the very first paragraph ("Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins."). Nabokov uses this piece as to deconstruct preconceptions about your average sex offender by putting you in the very shoes of one, and through copious amounts of pervasive language and mental exploration, Humbert Humbert manages to find some endearment beneath his tortured and monstrous shell. Of course, he is ultimately dissonant with us, though not for lack of effort, but I think this odd relationship we have with such an unlikely and despicable man is the true reason for this books controversy. Every thought of Humbert's is candid, and though disturbed, his outlook on an otherwise dismal reality without Lo is deliberately beautiful, rife with language and shakespearian eloquence.

All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other's soul and flesh; but there we were, unable even to mate as slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do so.”

Mmm. Tragic like Shakespeare, too.

Humbert is, himself, a very fascinating character. As he's written, we are supposed to make him out to be very attractive, well built, well-to-do, intelligent, and worldly. His only real flaw is warped view on sexuality, which he manages to explain as pervasively as possible in the beginning of the novel. We can, to some degree, understand why he is stuck in the limbo that he is. We can applaud for him when he does show constraint, and given the onslaught of characters that are made to be hated (particularly Charlotte, I think) the world in which he lives truly concerns itself with just H. H. and Lo. We read with intensity when he doesn't show constraint. We want him to be happy. And we want Lolita to be happy too, which she seems to be from the beginning, though she does get caught up in a world over her head. Either way, these characters are very engaging and dangerously agreeable. Without Quilty, there would be little offset to the truly neurotic nature of the writing. Acting as the tails to heads, they are irrevocably two sides of the same coin, much to Humbert's chagrin.

We fell to wrestling again. We rolled all over the floor, in each other's arms, like two huge helpless children. He was naked and goatish under his robe, and I felt suffocated as he rolled over me. I rolled over him. We rolled over me. They rolled over him. We rolled over us.

Here is perhaps the best example of how Humbert understands his relationship with the dentist. Every negative statement about Quilty is immediately a part of Humbert's own life, and this reflection is a saving grace of sorts for this dangerous novel (apart from the completely necessary foreword). Though the language is beautiful and the content is as subdued as can possibly be, this will always be to most (and superficially to all) a book about a pedophile, and as unfortunate as that is, it does manage to hold its own against critics, and over fifty years after it's been written, it's still used as an example of important (or in this case integral) literature in schools and colleges the world over.