Review: Lolita

LOLITA by Vladimir Nabokov, published in France in 1955 and not until 1958 by the Putnam Publishing group. My book was published June 1997, Vintage Books a division of Random House. I must say I have a love hate relationship with this book. I hate the book because of the subject matter, I love the book because of how it was written.

You can tell that Vladimir was a poet because of the prose in the book, his use words and not graphic detail to talk about how Humbert Humbert and Lolita interacted. You knew what was happening without being hit over the head with the act. The story goes into the mind of a man obsessed with what he calls nymphets. He is blinded by his own desires that he does not see that it is a one-sided affair.

In the book towards the end of the story our narrator Humbert Humbert says that he did not want his story released until Lolita and he had passed, because he did not want her harmed by the book. Humbert suggests that the time of release would be around 2000. This is interesting to me because I feel that we have been inoculated with all sorts of criminal behavior. However, having said that I recently read that this book was made into a play with the girl character being older and still it was not well received. This subject is touched on by many of the shows we see and it always makes me cringe. So why was I able to read this book.

I almost stopped at part one in the book, just like many of the publishers who rejected the book. But I decided to carry on, simply because I wanted resolution in the book. What happens to the characters are they stuck in this relationship forever, does she ever get rescued, does anyone ever find out? All these questions plagued me as I read, and he talked of murder in the beginning without saying who, so I needed to find that out. It is so well written that there were times I felt some sympathy for Humbert Humbert, before coming back to the fact that he put himself in this position because of his predilection for nymphets.

In the back of the book Vladimir talks about what drove him to write this book. He said he wrote a short story in France after reading a story about an ape who was kept behind bars, who scientist trained to produce a sketch. The sketch the ape produced was the bars of his cage. That is how Lolita must have felt, if she did what Humbert wanted she got a treat, movie, tennis, party, but if she did not follow the rules she was not allowed to do anything outside of the house.

A good book that I would recommend for adults. The subject matter is off putting and trying to understand the psychology is just too complicated for younger readers, in my opinion.