I have read that Nabokov quote many times.
I love the book because, to me, it’s like an interesting version of Moby Dick told through Ahab. Poor HH goes to the country because he had a nervous breakdown. Then through chance gets set up with Lolita and her mother.
If you can’t read the book I highly recomend getting the book on tape version with Jeremy Irons reading it. He was the best thing about the recent movie version and his voice for HH is pefect.
Love the Eichmann anecdote, pravnik.
I had heard the European love affair/disgust for American culture theory before I read the book, so I saw a lot of that–most interesting if you look at the way the American side of culture (Lolita) is depicted–you simply cannot interest Lolita in snobbish intellectualism, a huge temptation for Humbert. Also, Lo ends up marrying a disabled vet and can scarcely believe that Humbert isn’t interested in her money.
The bit that recurs most often in my head is that Humbert really loved Lolita–the point being that love can be real but still be so imperfect as to be a horrible parody of love. There are some things that are so naturally beautiful, so perfect, that my attempts to use or describe them are desecrations. Like what happens when an effete European dandy tries to write about a country or a language or something.
Lo-lee-ta. The tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps…
Not one of my favorite books, but I do have quite an appreciation for the writing, and quite an appreciation even for the plot… I dream of one day teaching a course on “Taboo Love”…
This book will definitely be on the reading list.
I know I’m resurrecting this thread, but wasn’t Lolita published in 1955? Eichmann would have been in prison that long?
He eluded capture until 1960. He was executed in 1962.
"...down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth.
Lo. Lee. Ta."
This, quoted by my future fiancé, then just odd guy I worked with who I didn’t really know, was what made me sit up and take a second look, made me know, after five minutes more, that he was The One™.
ugh. just an odd guy…whom…
for somebudy who 'perciates a well-turned phrase, I sure am SOL.
What do you think Nabakov would think of the internet language, all these LOLs, LMAO, IANAWHatever, l33t stuff?
Me, I think I may hear him spinnin’.
I dunno. Lolita would surely be the one chatting and using IMs, not Humbert. The lingo would therefore be another example of how America has no high class, but still has something unselfconscious that Humbert is in love with. Humbert would hate and love the lingo at the same time.
Juliet, of Romeo & Juliet, was only 14, two years older. I think some states in the US used to have
an age of consent of 12, so as far as age goes, the laws might have not been the same back then
as they are now.
I only saw the video versions of Lolita—& like Casablanca, when they walk up
the mountain & come back smoking cigarets—the sexuality in Lolita seems rather obscured. Is the
book more clear on this or does it leave specific details out?
“Her kiss, to my delirious embarrassment, had some rather comical refinements of flutter and probe which made me conclude she had been coached at an early age by a little Lesbian.” [Vintage Books Ed. 133]
The book isn’t (as H.H. claims he isn’t) “concerned with so-called ‘sex’ at all.” The only erotic scene is one where Lolita is sort of sitting on H.H.'s lap, and it serves to both engage and shame the reader, not much more. It’s almost like Nabakov is saying, “here, this is what this book could be, but isn’t, as it is not that kind of book.”
There’s one part where Lolita says something like, “you hurt me!” after a roadside encounter with H.H. on the roadtrip. It just breaks your heart. Definitely a book you read for the writing, not “sick ya-yas” or superficial plot.
Well, thank you all. I might give it another try, especially on tape. If I do, I’ll let you know what I think after a longer, older reading (listening)
carlotta
This thread got me to thinking about the book again, so I went out and picked up The Annotated Lolita, edited by Alfred Appel, Jr. If you’re interested in learning more about the book and its many allusions, etc. I recommend checking it out. I’m only through the first chapter and it’s been well worth it.
handy-Romeo and Juliet is set in the fourteen, so I don’t see how that compares to Lolita.
[Arise… arrriiiiiise!]
I just watched the Jeremy Irons version of the movie last night. Oh… my… god. I haven’t seen a movie so completely engrossing in a long time. Little Dolores was represented quite well, and the narration was set just right. The director made no mistake to keep reminding us that 'Lo was just a little girl, even for all her experimentation. And knowledge.
My god.
It was a sad, sad movie, but what was strange (for me) was that, in seeing sad movies, usually one is led to tears. You feel them building, that is to say. But here, I was just sort of weak from watching and when I saw those last two lines it was like the dam broke.
I’ve got to read this book.
I’m a movie watcher, not a book reader so my point of view may be a little different.
BUT…what makes the story for me is that you come to sympathise for Humbert even though you know it is wrong…and that is very disturbing. It throws your whole moral standing on it’s ear. It makes him look like the victim. And I think that’s great stories do…they make you question what you thought was right. You might come to the conclusion that your originally thought…but you at least considered another possibility no matter how brief.
Especially the jeremy irons version. You’re lying if you don’t think dominque swain was sexy…right or wrong. And you’re lying if you didn’t feel pathos for humbert.
Well, Humbert’s lying a bit here; there is at least one scene (rather early, with him in his bathrobe) which, while by no means pornographic, borders on the explicit.
–Cliffy
I think a lot of posters have done a great job explaining why this book is so well regarded and very much worth reading, so I won’t try to add to that. I do, however, have a couple of points:
I seem to recall (sorry, no cite) that later biographers of Nabokov have identified some evidence that he himself was a pedophile - I recall someone reporting him spending a summer at a resort with a young girl and, it being the innocent 50’s, no one questioned it. It certainly would explain why he was able to write such true-sounding prose about it.
The true first edition was published in Paris as part of the “Traveller’s Series” - the books were in a uniform green and white soft cover, and usually soft porn. A couple of other classics were published in the same series - The Ginger Man and Naked Lunch come to mind. I have a first U.S. edition, which was published a few years later, after the whole censorship furor had died down…
Everybody gets distracted by the sex, but the subject of Lolita is not sexuality, but America: that incredible, bizarre, horrible new American culture that Nabakov was so fascinated and repulsed by. (Thanks to grendel72 and those few others who have already mentioned this.)
I’ve read that his favorite part of the book was the motel court tour of America, but that is something that merely seems unreadably dated today.
And that leaves the sex. But we even get the sex wrong. Nabokov was writing an indictment of American infantile sexuality - American infantile adult sexuality, how American woman seemed to him to be children, using men as daddies, and especially vice versa. (Note the difference between American women and the European child he is so enchanted of when he is himself a child.) What better dramatic devise than to make the focus of this indictment an actual pre-teen?
Lolita is the oddest child in American literature, unlike every other 12-year-old who had preceded her. She is a miniature adult, wise and accomplished in a way that Holden Caulfield could not even comprehend. What is always lost in the retelling of the book - and is not even mentioned in this thread - is that Lolita had already lost her virginity before going on the trip with Humbert, and that she is the one to make the move into his bed rather than the other way around.
Yet she is a child, a true pre-pubescent (which is why the movie versions fail before they begin), and one in whom Humbert loses true sexual interest in after she achieves puberty, marries and becomes pregnant.
Perhaps the most chilling scene in American literature - also oddly not mentioned here - is the one in which Lolita is forced to trade blow jobs for her milk money every morning before school. That encapsulates the true core of the book. Nobody remembers it; nobody gets it; and that’s why Nabokov was frustrated to the point of madness by American responses to the novel for the rest of his life.
Lolita is also one of my favorite novels.
Nabokov sets up a very interesting situation of loopholes to Humbert Humbert’s “guilt”. First, Lolita was not a virgin when Humbert had her: she had already lost her virginity to a boy at her summer camp. Second, Lolita catches on to Humbert’s attraction, and she as much seduces Humbert as he does her. Third, at the time (the 1940s), a 14-year-old girl could marry in several states with the permission of her parents or guardian. Lolita’s parents were dead, and Humbert was her guardian. Fourth, for those moralists unplacated by those previous three justifications, Nabokov does have Humbert go mad and die.