Michael Finocchiaro's Reviews > Lolita

Astoundingly beautiful prose, a self-aware psychotic narrator who is both unapologetic and yet disgusted by his crime...so many themes in this book, so much symmetry (342).

Humbert Humbert knows he is both brilliant and insanely obsessed with pre-pubescent girls. He tortures his psychiatrists "cunningly leading them on; never letting them see [he] knew every trick of the trade" (P. 34). He becomes a lodger with Ms. Haze, a widow, and sees his nymphet in her yard, "a blue sea-wave swelled under [his] heart and, from a mat in a pool of sun, half-naked, kneeling, turning about on her knees, there was my Riviera love peering at me over dark glasses." (P. 39) He obsesses over Lo listening - in his fateful diary - to details as minor as "the staccato sound [a toilet paper roll makes] as it turns." (P. 49). The text is both reprehensible and hilarious, the writing always being of a sublimely dreamy quality. Was Roth inspired by this scene when he wrote of Nathan Zuckerman hunting around the room of Amy Bellette in The Ghost Writer?

Fate throws HH and his Lo together (no spoilers, I promise). HH holds a reformatory existence over her as a ransom for the naughtiness he extracts. There are a few epic road trips:

"As we pushed westward, patches of what the garbage-man called 'sage brush' appeared, and then the mysterious outlines of table-like hills, and then red bluffs ink-blotted with junipers, and then a mountain range, dun grading into blue, and blue into dream, and the desert would meet us with a steady gale, dust, gray thorn bushes, and hideous bits of tissue paper mimicking pale flowers among the prickles of wind-tortured withered stalks all along the highway; in the middle of which there sometimes stood simple cows, immobilized in a position (tail left, eyelashes right) cutting across all human rules of traffic." (P. 153)

How did Nabokov pull this off? He arrived in the US in 1941 and conceived Lolita during a drive out in the Western US in 1955 (otherwise how could you explain the precision and realism of the above sentence?) This being his third work in a non-native English language (translated by him back to Russian in 1965 - parenthetically are there any Russophones reading this post that have read both the English and Russian Lolitas? What is the Russian one like?)

I love this description of an otherwise nondescript gas station in the middle of nowhere:

"I stared in such dull discomfort of mind at those stationary trivialities that looked almost surprised, like staring rustics, to find themselves in the stranded traveler's field of vision: that green garbage can, those very black, very whitewalled tires for sale, those bright cans of motor oil, that red icebox with assorted drinks, the four, five, seven discarded bottles within the incomplete crossword puzzle of their wooden cells, that bug patiently walking up the inside of the window of the office." (P. 211)

I could only dream of aspiring to write descriptions like that, and English is my native language. Pure genius.

There is a lot of tennis in the novel, particularly towards the end leading me to wonder if DFW was a huge Nabakov fan (being similarly obsessed with the sport.) Here is a description of chess that certainly must have given DFW some inspiration:
"I saw the board as a square as of limpid water with rare shells and stratagems rosily visible upon the smooth tessellated bottom, which to my confused adversary was all ooze and squid-cloud." (P. 233)

There is a wonderful little poem near the end:
"The moral sense in mortals is the duty
We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty." (P. 283)

The central problem in the novel is of course HH's seduction of Lo and her sometimes complicity (rebelling against the mother who never loved her). But both he and Lo are aware that he is a sham:
"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, was the best I could offer the waif." (P. 287)

Nabokov insisted that there is no moral to this novel - it is neither a condoning nor condemnation of incest. That kind of judgmental attitude would clearly have ruined the text. That being said, we clearly see that HH is a hopeless pervert and a predator, a father's worst nightmare- and we see how Lo ends up - lost, but defiant to the end.

The topic is, of course, extremely taboo, but Nabakov’s gift to get inside HH’s head and show us how dark and twisted his rationale is, as well as the clear damage it causes to Lolita serves to condemn the aspect of using one’s intellectual and physical power as well as a way of subjugating a young victim to predation. That this particular victim revealed her inner strength in both the struggle and the capitulation is what makes it great literature. If we contrast this with Boris Vian’s I Spit on Your Graves from 1946, where raping little girls is just a way of blowing off steam and rebelling against the system, we see that Lolita and HH are self-conscious characters whereas the first-person protagonist in Vian is just a licentious, violent psychopath with zero guilt or restraint and with no conscience other than some racist, pseudo-socialist ideals.

Lolita is a novel of extraordinary power and beauty in which Nabokov challenges us to read beyond our disgust and fear and live uncomfortably in HH's mind for 300 beautifully written pages. Hard to forget and impossible to ignore, it is Nabokov's greatest contribution to literature imo.