Whenever I read a book that is a known classic I categorize it as a “Recently Read” post instead of a review. Because who do I think I am, the New York Times? I’m not going to change the lasting opinion held for a book like this! This is the label I give to Lolita, the modern American classic that is considered just as controversial as it is esteemed.
Here’s the synopsis from its Goodreads page:
Awe and exhiliration–along with heartbreak and mordant wit–abound inLolita, 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.
I first found this novel on a list of some of the best books with an unreliable narrator, a “genre” (would you really call it that?) that I’ve been really interested in lately. Once you get over the “doomed passion” he has for young Lolita, it really is a fascinating read. It’s interesting to me that this book is considered an erotic novel when there are very few pages of actual physical, sexual contact between any two characters.
Humbert Humbert’s descent into madness was what kept the book going, not any steamy sex scenes between Humbert and Lolita, for which I am thankful. He begins wasting away with alcoholism and appears to stop eating as Lolita begins pulling away, something of which he is both aware and petrified.
Denial is another part of his deranged mind on display for the reader. Only it’s not just denial – it’s denial and paranoia mixed together in a hybrid that I’ve never seen before and found very compelling. The bizarrerie of the final scene concludes the story that is very fitting for the overall arc of the novel.
Also, did you know that the case of Lolita very closely mirrors an actual kidnapping case? If you’re interested, this essay from Hazlitt on the case of Sally Horner gives some insight into what could have been Nabakov’s inspiration.
I have many friends who have stayed far away from Lolita because of its controversial subject matter. What are your thoughts on the book?
