Lolita

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta."

Author: Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Year published: 1955 in Paris, 1958 New York
Personal enjoyment: 10/10

Would I read it again: All. Day. Long. 

Lolita is an beautiful literary masterpiece, brimming with richly woven tapestries of metaphors and wordplays. Spawning two successful films, and influencing numerous singers, authors and artists, I know I am not the only one who has been touched by this story.

Even the name Lolita I now think of as exquisite. I love the way it plays on my tongue, as mentioned by Humbert in the quote above.

Plot:

The story is written from the perspective of  'Humbert Humbert', who is in prison for a murder  alluded to as the killing of the man who took his Lolita, Dolores Haze, away from him.

Humbert is a professor who, after losing his first pubescent love to death ,develops a longing fetish for a class of girls he terms 'nymphets'. These nymphets are not innocent young girls but demonic temptresses  between the ages of 12 and 14 (essentially before they've been fully been through puberty). After a handful of failed relationships and brothel visits he realizes that no woman can compare to the unreal pleasures of a nymphet.

By chance (or perverse divine fate) he arrives at the New England home of Charlotte Haze, a widow, who is prospectively seeking a well-to-do, and ideally a tall dark and handsome man like Humbert in which to rent the spare room of her home to for the summer months. Though cringing at the thought of spending a single consecutive moment longer in the gaudy house, fate intervened and Charlotte's daughter was sunbathing  at the exact moment the house tour reached the back yard. And Charlotte's daughter happened to be the most divine little girl our protagonist could have dreamed of ...

If you're already disgusted, grab a paper bag, the story gets more and more perverse as you go along.

Themes: 

The power of language

Like a literary shroud, language disguises shocking content and gives it a shade of beauty it does not deserve.  In this way, Humbert seduces his readers as fully and slyly as he seduces Lolita herself. 

And this, THIS, is what makes Lolita such an incredibly book. It stretches the power of language to it's limits, doing what was previously thought impossible: persuading you to sympathise with a paedophile.

 

Innocence

The idea of innocence in the novel refers first to Humbert's lack of it. He is, after all, telling his story from jail. And though he recounts the story of his affair with Lolita, he doesn't try to play off that he didn't do anything wrong,(though he tries to win the reader to his side.)
Innocence also emerges as a theme in connection to America, a country that has fully embraced consumer possibilities, shallow movie magazines, and popular culture. Humbert links Lolita's lack of innocence to all of this American-ness, but he also makes a point of explaining that Lolita was not a virgin when he got to her and that she seduced him. In other words, he did not steal her innocence.

Morality and Ethics

Humbert is torn between ethics and ego, law and lust. He offers many defenses for what he has done – psychological (trying to recover from losing Annabel), legal and literary (it may be illegal here and now, but look at East India, and what about Dante and Beatrice, Petrarch and Laureen?), and personal (after all Lolita was experienced and seduced me). The degree of his justification is proven here: just because he wasn't the first to get to Lolita and just because she seduced him, he says it's OK that he carries on for years as he does. Plus his whole nymphet, enchantment, demoniac theme intends to imply that he just couldn't help himself!

American cultures (and perhaps it's incompatibility with European culture?)

His trips across America in Lolita detail this fascination (and repulsion). He scrutinizes every absurd tourist trap, crappy motel, consumer habit, national compulsion, and stereotype of American culture. He both rejects the fussy, musty ways of Europe and plays upon American perceptions of the sophisticated European intellectual. To him, Charlotte represents the worst of American culture: an unthinking, mediocre, upstart with pretentions to cultural sophistication. Still, he is all too ready to let her fantasize about his European background.

Though Humbert recognizes all of Lolita's bad-mannered, outspoken, brash American-ness, he gives her a pass, and in fact embraces her slang and love of lowbrow magazines and Hollywood movies. Unlike her mother, she utterly repudiates, even mocks, his pretense to cleverness and refuses to be reformed or refined by him. Humbert often covertly associates Lolita with America, praising their shared youth and vulgarity. His admission that he has defiled America bears a strong parallel to his treatment of Lolita. Nabokov himself was hurt by accusations that the book was "un-American," an assessment, in his words, that "pains me considerably more than the idiotic accusation of immorality" (source: James Kincaid, "Lolita at Middle Age"). America is the land of mass culture, a modern society of consumer goods, a nation of tourist sights and souvenirs, where everything is commodified and collectable.

My verdict:

Having already watched two of the films made from the book, I knew the story very well. But I think the wonderful power of Labokov's language brought the book alive in a way the films could not. Lolita was the closest I ever got, and ever will get, to sympathising with a paedophile. Language is powerful stuff.

There is one fault, and one fault only, that I found. After Lolita went off with Quilty, there was a very long and boring section up until Humbert was reunited with Lolita, where nothing happened of much interest. Or maybe I was just impatient...
I enjoyed how the adjectives used to describe nymphets like "frail" and "fragile" could also be used to describe butterflies. Ironically, by Humbert effectively studying, capturing and pinning down the nymphets, he destroys the very delicate quality he adores. I found it interesting that Labokov happened to be an avid butterfly-collector. 

Further help for students:
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/lolita/context.html
http://www.gradesaver.com/lolita/
http://www.shmoop.com/lolita/literary-devices.html