Lolita - Shower after Reading

Project update: I reached my deadline on Friday, January 25, at 11:59pm. While I have not completed all the posts -- though I will be continuing to post them until they're completed -- I did meet my 30-book goal, finishing the last of 11,352 pages on Sunday, January 20; and I have watched 31 of my 60 movies. I therefore consider my project a success, having devoured 30 books and 30 movies in my 30th year! I will continue to watch the movies on the list and post the blogs here, just because I like to see a project to completion, even if not quite by the deadline I set for myself in the beginning. :) Thanks for reading! -AJ

Lolita

Author: Vladimir Nabokov

Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer. –Narrator

You see, I loved her. It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.
–Narrator

I am trying to describe these things not to relive them in my present boundless misery, but to sort out the portion of hell and the portion of heaven in that strange, awful, maddening world – nymphet love. The beastly and beautiful merged at one point, and it is that borderline I would like to fix, and I feel I fail to do so utterly. –Narrator

[Lolita] groped for words. I supplied them mentally ("He broke my heart. You merely broke my life"). –Narrator

I loved you. I was a pentapod monster. But I loved you. –Narrator

This book is considered controversial and it was on my list because I wanted to see what all the hype was about. Regretting that curiosity now…

According to Barnes & Noble:

Awe and exhilaration—along with heartbreak and mordant wit—abound in Lolita, Nabokov's most famous and controversial novel, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America. Most of all, it is a meditation on love—love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.

This blurb only vaguely describes the central focus of this book: Humbert Humbert's relationship with the underage daughter of his late wife. And when I say underage, I'm not talking about a 16-year-old; when their relationship starts, Delores is only 12. I don't feel I can lay out my reaction to this book unless I first give a brief detail of its plot.

Our narrator (Humbert Humbert himself) tells us of his obsession with Delores (also referred to as Lo, Lola, Dolly and, of course, Lolita) – an obsession which leads him to drug her in a plan to take advantage of her in her semi-conscious state. As the story unfolds, she gives herself up to him, sometimes very willingly and sometimes less so, as they travel around the country hotel-jumping. She eventually tires of Humbert or of the traveling, and takes a chance to escape with another man. Humbert engages in a relationship with an adult while still looking for his Loilta. He receives a letter from her, now 17, which says she is married, pregnant and in need of money. He tracks her down and offers money in exchange for the name of the man she escaped with. Once Humbert has the name, he pursues and then kills him; Humbert gets away with murder, only to be arrested shortly thereafter for driving erratically. From the foreword, we know that both Humbert and Lolita die (he of a coronary thrombosis; she during childbirth) before the book is published.

This book made me feel extremely… dirty. Reading of the narrator's lustful desires and actions on a child made me cringe again and again. It was uncomfortable peering through the eyes of a fiend at a young woman, though I cannot say she was exactly an innocent player in all of this. She quickly turned her predicament into a lucrative one, demanding money or favors before performing any of his desired acts, making her some sort of captive prostitute.

Humbert's approach to life, love, lust and murder was that of a deranged man, not quite recovered from the mental breakdown that brought him to Lolita's house in the first place. He seemed to be able to focus on only one thing at a time (getting Lolita, then keeping Lolita, then finding Lolita, then killing her "abductor"). And because of that, the story seemed to drag on a bit for me. As Humbert focused on only one thing at a time, each part of the book dragged on until he someone else caused change: Lolita's initiating sex that first time; Lolita and her abductor's running away; Lolita's sending a letter to him; the abductor's taking his last breath.

Honestly, I know the book is praised for the way in which it's written and the bold statements it apparently makes. But for me, the ending couldn't have come soon enough. I was done with this book long before it was done with me… much as how Lolita'd tired of Humbert long before he'd tired of her.

My takeaway: True love knows no age difference, though the law disagrees. And reading the Wikipedia plot description of a controversial book BEFORE you vow to read it is smart… she says in hindsight.