Book Review
Title: Lolita
Author: Vladimir Nabokov
Genre: Classic
Rating: *****
Review: I have read Lolita a few times and loved it more and more each time I’ve read it and the movie with Jeremy Irons is outstanding. I decided to pick it up again for Becca’s Bookoplathon since it is one of the very few translated works I own and if my memory serves it was originally published in French. It still stuns me reading this for the 4th or 5th time that the introduction by the fictious editor explains the whole story you just don’t understand it until you have consumed the whole of Humbert’s tale. The opening sequence of Lolita doesn’t even relate to Lolita herself as it details Humbert’s childhood, his first love Annabel and how she quite possibly led to his love of Lolita, his string of romance and paid women and eventually his marriage which ended quite disastrously even by his standards. Humbert is a compelling protagonist to follow and I highly recommend listening to the audiobook narrated by Jeremy Irons as he played Humbert in the 1997 movie adaptation which I will be watching and reviewing very soon. Humbert compels you to like him despite his inherently “evil” nature although I thoroughly debated this in my college essay relating to the psychology of this character and his numerous mental health issues.
By the time Humbert meets Lolita for the first time and he explains the rush of emotion he felt at seeing her and in some ways his lost love, Annabel, in her, we like him even though we don’t want to and we sympathise with him, even the “struggles” he recounts, in regard to his sexual and romantic ventures, and he meets the love of his life, the person he would and does kill for, completely by accident, almost as if the meeting was arranged by the fates themselves. As Humbert settles into life with the Haze family, he knows of the mother’s interest in him but completely ignores it most of the time although there are time where he indulges her just to placate her so he can spend more time with Lolita. Dolores as she is supposed to be called finds Humbert to be quite handsome and does observe him from afar as do must young girl to older attractive men or movie stars. I myself, had quite the childhood crush on actors like Anthony Hopkins and Alan Rickman that did develop into an undying love as I got older, but I realised that my fantasies would never be reality and was content with that. However, in this case, on Sunday afternoon, Humbert does cross the line with Lolita, and while he believes she is completely unaware of the incident, she is aware of it given the way she looks at him afterwards. While most would say this is the beginning of the abuse of Lolita, as I argued in my essay, Lolita is in some way an instigator of Humbert’s physical affections as she doesn’t rebuff him or make any negative responses to these small touches and when he does take advantage of her, she is repulsed or even remotely upset by the act. I even went on to argue at the age of nearly 13, most girls are aware of sex and may even be pursuing small sexual encounters, kissing and mostly innocent touching which is why Lolita allows Humbert to do what he does but later she is completely aware of what he wants from her and uses that to get what she wants, it is a dark and disturbing relationship but it is a mutual exchange for the most part.
As time passes Charlotte decides to send Lolita off to a summer camp and Humbert realises that he is going to be parted from her, but he is looking forward to her return home. However, in that time he learns what he has always known in the Charlotte is in love with him and he decides to marry her in order to disguise and further his relationship with Lolita as her step-father although he does begin planting seeds of doubt about Lolita’s parentage that will blossom later on. They have a small, quiet wedding and Humbert is pleased with himself, how everything comes crashing down when Charlotte tells Humbert that she plans to send Lolita off to boarding school after returning from camp and this is something that he can not allow and he decides to put a plan together to bend Charlotte to his will. Humbert even contemplates killing her and has the perfect opportunity to do so but can’t bring himself to do it and this is lucky since it turns out the act would have been witnessed by one of Charlotte’s close friends. Afterwards, he decides to assert some dominance over Charlotte as her husband, but we know that this bubble is going to pop soon when Charlotte learns of his true intentions towards her daughter. However, he does allows us to examine the relationship between Charlotte and her daughter and it appears that Charlotte seemingly hates her daughter and does everything she can to pressure her to act and be a certain way that pleases only her and when her daughter rebels against that pressure, Charlotte lashes out, not physically but emotionally and verbally. As Charlotte learns of Humbert’s true intentions for Lolita while he is lost in his scheming for when she returns, we are thrust towards the singular event that kicks off the meat of this novel, Charlotte’s death. Charlotte is planning to leave Humbert and take her daughter with her but in her hurry to get to the mailbox, she is hit by a car that had swerved to avoid a neighbour’s dog and is killed. Humbert at first is in complete shock but after discreetly destroying the letters Charlotte had written, he makes use of those harmless seeds he had planted earlier in the novel to make the Farlow’s believe that Lolita is his child and that he plans to collect her from camp after her mother’s funeral and take her away for a while for them to get over Charlotte’s death together.
Humbert has a completely ulterior motive here as he wants to take Lolita away from all the prying eyes of the town in order to have her completely to himself but he isn’t sure yet whether or not he is actually going to tell Lolita of her mother’s death, but this singular event sets in motion the course that Humbert and Lolita are going to take in the rest of the book and directly leads to the incident which has landed Humbert in prison and while he has hinted at the event, he hasn’t directly said what it is but it isn’t the incident the reader assumes it is. By the time Humbert picks Lolita up from camp he understands that she isn’t the same girl that arrived there a month before although he doesn’t know why that is just yet. He informs her that her mother is ill but not gravely so and definitely not dead in order to lure her to him and on the road trip that is going to come. They drive to the Enchanted Hunters for the night but that isn’t without some horseplay along the way, as Lolita demands a kiss from Humbert like the one, she stole before she went to camp. Now, this is where the element of doubt or belief falls to the reader, the reader can choose to believe Humbert, or the reader can choose to doubt him. After reading this book many times, I believe that this kiss before camp happened as Humbert said and everything leading up to their first sexual encounter is as Humbert describes it and while I reserve judgement on whether it was solely Lolita seducing Humbert, I do believe that these first exchanges were mutual and that over time the spell of disillusion Humbert had over Lolita broke leading to their respective actions later in the novel. By the time we reach the end of part one, Lolita and Humbert have established a sexual relationship, although the first time might have been mutual, the second is brought on by the callous way Humbert tells Lolita her mother is dead and that begins to downhill spiral that paves the way for disaster.
The next portion of the novel covers Lolita and Humbert’s road trip across America in the year August 1947 – August 1948 which seems a little boring but you soon realise especially when re-reading, that there are small hints to what is to come in the people Lolita is meeting and the interactions the pair have with certain people and places. However, this year is interspersed with moment of fear, fear of discovery for Humbert and this eventually leads to him wanting to settle in one place for a little while, to give himself some cover and backstory should the need arise. He settles on Beardsley as it has an all-girls school and college at which he has connections to establish a base but we can already see the distance growing between Humbert and Lolita which is a little heart-breaking given the fact that we have come to like Humbert despite what he is doing, but we also realise that Lolita isn’t completely innocent either and that she wasn’t innocent even when she and Humbert has their first interactions. After settling in Beardsley, Humbert finds that his anxiety is increased rather than decreased because he has a whole new set of troubles to worry about. The first is namely boys but Humbert uses some very creative techniques to keep Lolita calm and pleasant but he is also aware that he has to be careful with the money he gives her because she might have enough to run away and leave him, which is exactly what she is planning to do even if he is unaware of it. The second is some of her female friend like Mona, who seem to know a lot more about their relationship than they let on and we can also see Lolita trying to distract Humbert with other girl children as it is clear to see she no longer wants that relationship with him and as someone who has read the book before we know she has already moved onto someone else. It is interesting to note that this someone else, even though he isn’t revealed until much later, is similar in age to Humbert although he is lacking in looks, in Humbert’s opinion. This clearly shows that Lolita is targeting or choosing men of this age because she can get things out of them that she can’t from boys her own age and all she has to do is supply the same reward either age group would want.
As more time passes in Beardsley, we see the relationship between Humber and Lolita begin to break down as she gets older and he becomes irater and at times more violent with her than he has ever been in the past. However, during this time we can see more clearly how Lolita is manipulating Humbert into moving again with the promise that they will go where she wants, not for amusement, but for the chance to leave Humbert and be with her new love interest who she has been communicating with and seeing during the times when Humbert thoughts she was a tennis practice, play rehearsals or piano lessons, yet he stubbornly refuses to see what Lolita is doing to him only for him to realise it too late near the end of the novel. Seeing Lolita transform from a naïve child to a manipulative young woman is interesting as it reverses their roles in the relationship. Humbert who had been the manipulator in getting Lolita into a position that pleased him has now become the manipulated as she is doing the same to him. As we creep into the final section of the novel, Lolita and Humber are on the road again but this time he notices that Lolita is acting strangely often disappearing. A sudden chance in their relationship comes when he realises that she has slept with someone else completely under his nose and this is the first time he forces himself upon her, but this almost seems planned by Lolita herself. This theory is further compounded when a car is following them and Humbert seems to be under the impression it is a police officer but we know better especially when Quilty seems to be appearing at times and places far too convenient to be anything other than a pre-arranged meeting and how he comes into play much later is a masterful piece of work. I also play to read Ada and The Enchanter by Nabokov as they are often called the predecessors to Lolita and if it resembles this novel even slightly then I am guaranteed to love it. One thing I must applaud Nabokov for is his use of grey morality as the novel is told from Humbert’s perspective we have to take everything with a grain of salt as he is going to show himself in the best light possible, however, we always have the seed of doubt that some of the events he describes are completely true as they can’t be anything other than the true and they seem so mundane that Humbert has no reason to lie about them considering he is writing this account from his prison cell.
As their journey continues Humbert becomes more and more paranoid but we can see Lolita’s manipulations at work even if he refuses to see them. Eventually as we suspected Lolita falls ill and is in hospital, while she is there Humbert himself falls ill, and by the time he has recovered he learns Lolita was collected by her “uncle” and taken to “grandfather’s place” and Humbert knows he has lost her. For the next three years he attempts to find her with little success and eventually meets a woman named Rita who helps him deal with the loneliness Lolita has left behind but he can never forget her. After years of hopeless searching Humbert one day receives a letter from Lolita, now married and heavily pregnant asking for financial help and he immediately sets out hoping to kill the man who took her from him and reclaim his love. However, upon arriving he finds that Lolita isn’t as he remembers her, but he still loves her dearly and she under duress gives him the name he has been searching for and all the pieces come together at last. Seeing the reunion of this pair given how much they have gone through is wonderful as we can see that Lolita doesn’t harbour any grudges against Humbert and he still loves her despite her having grown up and being swollen with another man’s child but we know of the dual tragedies that are to come. The ending of Lolita brings Humbert’s true character into the light as we see him murder the man he believes took Lolita from him as he still refuses to accept that she had any part in leaving him, even though she has clearly stated he broke her life. However, Lolita doesn’t really seem to hold a grudge as she has moved on with her life and by the time Humbert concludes his memoir, Lolita dies the following morning giving birth to a stillborn girl despite the fact he wanted her to outlive him by many years. We also know Humbert died of an aneurysm I like to imagine he died of a broken heart after learning Lolita had died and she was the only reason for his continued existence not matter how evil or depraved that existence was. If you haven’t read Lolita, I would recommend it, if you can get past the disgusting subject matter, the lyrical writing style and Humbert’s voice are hypnotic and almost sway you into believing his account.
Buy it here:
Paperback/Hardcover: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
Kindle Edition: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
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