Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita
A literary masterpiece on the difficult topic of child abuse.
Looking back at his life from a prison cell, Humbert Humbert tells the story of his relationship with the young girl Lolita. Humbert grew up in Europe sometime in the early 20th century. His first teenage love, Annabelle, dies of typhus, leaving Humbert with a life-long obsession with pre-pubescent girls or "nymphets" as he refers to them. In an attempt to settle down and break with his obsession, Humbert weds a Polish woman in Paris, a marriage which ultimately ends in divorce. After his divorce, Humbert moves to the United States to take up a heritage. Working as a private teacher, Humbert encounters 11 years old Dolores, or Lolita as Humbert calls her. He decides to give in to the advances of Lolita's mother, Charlotte Haze, in order to stay close to the daughter.
Charlotte finds him out after a short time, but then abruptly dies in a traffic accident. Humbert begins a restless road trip throughout the United States with Lolita. Lolita is showing herself increasingly reluctant vis-à-vis Humbert's advances, but Humbert manages to subdue her through a mixture of inducements and threats. Finally, Lolita manages to run off with another elder man who claims to be her uncle.
Having searched without results for two years, Humbert finally receives a letter from Lolita. It turns out Lolita is pregnant, about to get married to a war veteran and needs financial support. The elder man she had originally left Humbert for, Clare Quilty, had been an acquaintance of Lolita's mother. At first in love with him, Lolita left Quilty when he tried to have hear feature in a pornographic movie. Realizing that Lolita won't return to him, Humbert heads off, kills Quilty, and has himself captured by police.
A masterpiece. The novel still reads as scandalous as it probably did at its publication. From a normative perspective, it is difficult to bear a story of child abuse told from the point of view of the perpetrator, who only occasionally considers the victim. Still, Nabokov is a powerful enough narrator to leave one not only with a feeling of disgust, but also one of pity. What Nabokov offers is first and foremost a story of a man who seems to be slowly losing his mind and whose life unravels step by step. For me, it remained unclear whether Humbert was in the end still a man who could be held accountable for his deeds or not.
Nabokov also makes masterful use of the English language. The ironic distance he attributes to Humbert, the sophistacted language in which Humbert recounts his life story, and also the episodes of lucidity, remorse and regret makes Humbert an almost likable character. Humbert's slow descent into a frantic mania is impressively described. This is one of the few examples of a well-narrated stream of consciousness, a narrative technique I have otherwise never been a fan of.
Favorite quotes:
"It occurred to me that regular hours, home-cooked meals, all the conventions of marriage, the prophylactic routine of its bedroom activities and, who knows, the eventual flowering of certain moral values , of certain spiritual substitutes, might help me, if not to purge myself of my degrading and dangerous desires, at least to keep them under pacific control."
"As I look back at those seasick murals, at that strange and monstrous moment, I can only explain my behavior then by the mechanism of that dream vacuum wherein revolves a deranged mind; but at the time, it all seemed quite simple and inevitable to me.
"At the hotel we had separate rooms, but in the middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, and we made it up very gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go."
"And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night, every night- the moment I feigned sleep."
"Alas, I was unable to transcend the simple human fact that whatever spiritual solace I might find, whatever lithophanic eternities might be provided for me, nothing could make my Lolita forget the foul lust I had inflicted upon her."
"It had become gradually clear to my conventional Lolita during our singular and bestial cohabitation that even the most miserable of family lives was better than the parody of incest, which, in the long-run, I could offer the waif."
A literary masterpiece on the difficult topic of child abuse.
Looking back at his life from a prison cell, Humbert Humbert tells the story of his relationship with the young girl Lolita. Humbert grew up in Europe sometime in the early 20th century. His first teenage love, Annabelle, dies of typhus, leaving Humbert with a life-long obsession with pre-pubescent girls or "nymphets" as he refers to them. In an attempt to settle down and break with his obsession, Humbert weds a Polish woman in Paris, a marriage which ultimately ends in divorce. After his divorce, Humbert moves to the United States to take up a heritage. Working as a private teacher, Humbert encounters 11 years old Dolores, or Lolita as Humbert calls her. He decides to give in to the advances of Lolita's mother, Charlotte Haze, in order to stay close to the daughter.
Charlotte finds him out after a short time, but then abruptly dies in a traffic accident. Humbert begins a restless road trip throughout the United States with Lolita. Lolita is showing herself increasingly reluctant vis-à-vis Humbert's advances, but Humbert manages to subdue her through a mixture of inducements and threats. Finally, Lolita manages to run off with another elder man who claims to be her uncle.
Having searched without results for two years, Humbert finally receives a letter from Lolita. It turns out Lolita is pregnant, about to get married to a war veteran and needs financial support. The elder man she had originally left Humbert for, Clare Quilty, had been an acquaintance of Lolita's mother. At first in love with him, Lolita left Quilty when he tried to have hear feature in a pornographic movie. Realizing that Lolita won't return to him, Humbert heads off, kills Quilty, and has himself captured by police.
A masterpiece. The novel still reads as scandalous as it probably did at its publication. From a normative perspective, it is difficult to bear a story of child abuse told from the point of view of the perpetrator, who only occasionally considers the victim. Still, Nabokov is a powerful enough narrator to leave one not only with a feeling of disgust, but also one of pity. What Nabokov offers is first and foremost a story of a man who seems to be slowly losing his mind and whose life unravels step by step. For me, it remained unclear whether Humbert was in the end still a man who could be held accountable for his deeds or not.
Nabokov also makes masterful use of the English language. The ironic distance he attributes to Humbert, the sophistacted language in which Humbert recounts his life story, and also the episodes of lucidity, remorse and regret makes Humbert an almost likable character. Humbert's slow descent into a frantic mania is impressively described. This is one of the few examples of a well-narrated stream of consciousness, a narrative technique I have otherwise never been a fan of.
Favorite quotes:
"It occurred to me that regular hours, home-cooked meals, all the conventions of marriage, the prophylactic routine of its bedroom activities and, who knows, the eventual flowering of certain moral values , of certain spiritual substitutes, might help me, if not to purge myself of my degrading and dangerous desires, at least to keep them under pacific control."
"As I look back at those seasick murals, at that strange and monstrous moment, I can only explain my behavior then by the mechanism of that dream vacuum wherein revolves a deranged mind; but at the time, it all seemed quite simple and inevitable to me.
"At the hotel we had separate rooms, but in the middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, and we made it up very gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go."
"And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night, every night- the moment I feigned sleep."
"Alas, I was unable to transcend the simple human fact that whatever spiritual solace I might find, whatever lithophanic eternities might be provided for me, nothing could make my Lolita forget the foul lust I had inflicted upon her."
"It had become gradually clear to my conventional Lolita during our singular and bestial cohabitation that even the most miserable of family lives was better than the parody of incest, which, in the long-run, I could offer the waif."
