Finished 9/26
Book: Lolita
Written by: Vladamir Nabokov
Main Themes:
Obsession, fixation, child-rearing, child-fucking (not really, but yes, tho sort of in the background), the impossibility of happiness, of true joy.
Summary:
A tell-all memoir by intellectual and pedophile “Humbert Humbert” (a self-given alias), centering on his relationship and cross-country adventures with a young preteen girl, Dolores Haze. Dolores is called Lo by her mother, Charlotte, which inspires the titular moniker by which Humbert most often refers to his ‘nymphet’. Begins with a brief introduction of his upbringing and romantic history before he meets the Haze family (single mom and daughter). Humbert gets to know the Haze’s and being a self-described very handsome man, captures the hearts of both mother and daughter, and marries mom in a strange turn in order to be closer to child.
In a convenient turn, mother is removed from the situation, and Humbert is left alone with his prize in a guardianship role. He takes his new ward across the country on a daddy-daughter sex/roadtrip. The majority of the book focuses on their time together visiting motel after motel, and there’s a bit of an ode to old americana in there, a very specific slice situated in the 30s or 40s? The war is never mentioned. Humberts physical trysts with the girl take a backseat to the strange relationship management that becomes more father/daughter than anything. He tries to keep her away from boys, to educate her and make her a refined woman, using bribery and a variety of other tactics to get her to comply. They spend a couple tenuous years together before Humbert becomes convinced they’re being followed, growing increasingly paranoiac – is little Lo in on the plot??
Lolita does disappear, and poppa becomes obsessed with finding her and killing the phantom who abducted her, and there’s a very humorous confrontation towards the end when Humbert gets to satisfy this particular bit. The whole bit is written as a sort of confession for the crime in which he’s been arrested (his arrest is written in humorous detail as well).
General Impressions:
Nabakov writes in a post-script that he was inspired to write the book after reading about a gorilla in captivity who’d been taught to paint, and the first thing it painted were the black bars of his cage. And Humbert Humbert is an intelligent, brilliant man who is imprisoned by an inability to feel true love or ecstasy with anyone except young girls. Not just any girl-child either, but a ‘nymphet,’ a word he coined, with a specific set of qualities you or I would find difficult to recognize. This childish obsession is at odds with his sort of hyper-mature demeanor as a humorless intellectual. I found him sympathetic because he’s self-aware, smart, maybe a little nostalgic for the brief sexual escapade/happiness he had only ever experienced as a child. But he clearly prizes his own feelings above anyone elses. He may be a sociopath, as he only seems to be aware of his own suffering, has little respect for anyone else, and only briefly confronts the implications his actions may have had on Dolores towards the end of the book. But he seems to maintain that he did everything for Lolita, from a place of true love. And it’s believable, in a I-believe-that-you-believe-that kind of way.
Stylistically it’s just a pleasure to read. Nabakov has an incredible command of the English language, long roller-coaster sentences with flourishes all around. Glad my kindle has a dictionary, as I used it often. Even his few uncomfortable descriptions of sexual acts are artfully described. Not in a way to cause arousal but in a way that one really gets where this guy is coming from. They are thankfully few and far between. I occasionally alternated between delight and boredom, one minute laughing at a particularly cutting observation, and another losing focus in a sea of interminable sentences. Started slow but picked up steam through the second half.
Selected quotes:
-Humbert describing his marriage to Charlotte Haze.
“And when, by means of pitifully ardent, naively lascivious caresses, she of the noble nipple and massive thigh prepared me for the performance of my nightly duty, it was still a nymphet’s scent that in despair I tried to pick up, as I bayed through the undergrowth of dark decaying forests.”
“With the zest of a banal young bride, she started to “glorify the home.” Knowing as I did its every cranny by heart—since those days when from my chair I mentally mapped out Lolita’s course through the house—I had long entered into a sort of emotional relationship with it, with its very ugliness and dirt, and now I could amost feel the wretched thing cower in its reluctance to endure the bath of ecru and ocher and putty-buff-and-snuff that Charlotte planned.”
-On Dolores
“And less than six inches from me and my burning life, was nebulous Lolita! After a long stirless vigil, my tentacles moved towards her again, and this time the creak of the mattress did not awake her. I managed to bring my ravenous bulk so close to her that I felt the aura of her bare shoulder like a warm breath upon my cheek.”
“Her weekly allowance, paid to her under condition she fulfill her basic obligations, was twenty-one cents… and went up to a one dollar five before its end. This was a more than generous arrangement seeing she constantly received from me all kinds of small presents and had for the asking any sweetmeat or movie under the moon—although, of course, I might fondly demand an additional kiss, or even a whole collection of assorted caresses, when I knew she coveted very badly some item of juvenile amusement. She was however, not easy to deal with.”
“I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everthing, mais je ‘amais, je t’amais! And there were times when I knew how you felt, and it was hell to know it, my little one.”
