Oh, and incidentally, with all the Halloween hoopla, I forgot to mention that yesterday's (ok, last night's) post was # 100 for What Went Wong. Thanks for your patronage, and hopefully by this time next year, there'll be another 100 more.
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| Source: Amazon.com |
From the book’s cover:
Awe and exhilaration--along with heartbreak and mordant wit--abound in Lolita, 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.
Synopsis:
To summarize the book, we have Humbert Humbert (no, I didn't stutter), a European gentleman who, through the queer vagaries of childhood experience, ongoing activities, and plain old predilection, is an aspiring pedophile. Understand right away that just because I explained it that way doesn't mean I find it any less morally reprehensible. I'm just describing it as the author gives it, but he does it through situations and I'm summarizing those situations.
Humbert has a rather normal experience as a youth in which he feels attraction/arousal for a girl near his age (who later dies of typhus), but he never gets over the physical desire for girls of that type. And I do mean girls. It's very... disturbing.
Anyway, through the course of the story, Humbert moves to the United States. As he gets older, he continues to stalk little girls and fantasize about doing things I can't even begin to imagine with them. Finally he gets his chance. While lodging at a boarding house run by a lady named Charlotte Haze, Humbert becomes hopelessly infatuated with her daughter, Dolores. The sobriquet for Dolores, as you probably know, is Lola, or for someone you are tender about: "Lolita." Thus the book's title.
I won't go into too many details here about how Humbert goes about flirting with the girl, and eventually how his machinations are found out by her mother (who had already married Humbert, though he finds nothing desirable about the woman other than her daughter), how Charlotte is killed in a fortuitous accident (for Humbert that is; she was just about to mail tell-all letters after discovering his depravity), and how Humbert takes Dolores on the road (literally, if you'll forgive my unintended double entente there).
Dolores is, at first blush, a fairly willing participant in this nasty thing, though she is too young to really understand what she's getting into. Humbert isn't even her "first," as it were. The kid is only 13 years old! They say our day is one in which kids have sexual relations at younger and younger ages, but this book was written in the early/mid 1950s and is set to take place in the late 1940s; it really presages such behavior in a sad and discomforting sort of way.
Anyway, Humbert is quite controlling of his child paramour, and goes to insane lengths to keep her all to himself in body and soul. They travel about the country, touring all the sights via the roadside motel scene. As Lolita starts to mature, she becomes sneaky and deceptive, as well as boorish and vulgar, as Humbert would put it. It also is clear she always knew that what was going on between her and Humbert was wrong, but Nabokov does a great job of weaving the emotional and psychological complications that such an incestuous relationship would have on a child of her age. The effect is that not only is the subject matter you are reading is disturbing, but the skill he has in writing it is likewise disturbing as well.
The complications of their life together lead Humbert to a form of paranoia over the girl. He starts seeing people following him, especially one guy who resembles a cousin of his from Switzerland. It is so convoluted that you, as the reader, have a hard time being sure if there really is something going on, if Lolita has taken a new lover in secret, or if Humbert is simply mad. There is enough to recommend the former two, and yet the latter (madness) seems more and more likely as the book progresses.
Eventually somebody snatches Delores from a small-town hospital where she is convalescing after having a bad case of the flu (or something like that - I forget the illness specifics, but it wasn't life-threatening). The mystery man Humbert keeps seeing everywhere has swooped in and made off with the girl. Humbert then sets out on a country-wide search for both abductor and abductee. He has this idea that he will have offspring with Lolita, and that he will "carry on" with that "nymphet" (a term Nabokov termed) when she comes of age as well.
The book's conclusion I will leave to you to discover, if you are interested and have not already been through its pages yourself. I'll just say that Humbert does find Lolita eventually, and that things are very different with her when he does, but the fool still asks her to come away with him again. And also I'll say that through a good portion of the book, Humbert, speaking in confessional style, keeps referring to a murder which he has committed. He does kill somebody at the end of the book, and then his sanity seems to snap and... well, if you really want to know, and you can stomach the subject matter, find out for yourself.
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| The author, Vladimir Nabokov. To be honest, the reason I first heard of Nabokov - and then Lolita - was that song by The Police, "Don't Stand So Close to Me." Strange, but true. / Source: FamousAuthors.org |
What I liked about it:
Well, the writing in the book is really quite good. Nabokov has a real talent for painting a picture. I think my synopsis has made that much clear. And the literary symbolism, difficult for me to verbalize but which I recognized nevertheless, is rich and practically dripping from the pages. If you can get past Humbert on a moral sense that is, which may prove difficult for some. It was tough for me, at times. I don't consider myself overly Puritanical, but some things are easy to clench up on, you know? Especially for a man with a young daughter, like me. We are naturally protective of our children, and I felt that "papa bear" getting angry as I read some of the more disturbing parts in Lolita.
Also, and this was probably the best part of the whole book for me, Jeremy Irons did the narration. When from time to time I couldn't take much more of Humbert Humbert, Iron's diction and subtle menace of tone would save me for a few more minutes. You know how "Uncle Scar" in the Lion King was so delightfully wicked and thus so appealing? Well there you go. Humbert's perversity would be almost unbearable without Irons's cheerfully dark reading.
What I didn’t like about it:
This is actually kinda tricky. See, the book's writing, in and of itself, is good.. But the subject matter? It's terrible. As I have alluded to, it was difficult to read about something which, for myself, I find fundamentally reprehensible. And yet Nabokov pulled it off with style.
The only other thing I can really say against the book, besides the fact that I can't understand why any grown man would find a little girl appealing in that sort of way, is that he used French a great deal in the text. With no possible way for easy translation in the audiobook copy I listened to, it made for holes in the story. I don't understand enough French to comprehend some of the passages. So there is that. Though it did give the novel ambiance, I suppose. Just the same, I like to understand what I'm reading. My obsessive-compulsive side coming out, I guess.
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| Two faces of Humbert Humbert. Top: Stanley Kubrick's 1962 version of Lolita, starring James Mason as Humbert and Sue Lyon as Lolita. Bottom: Jeremy Irons and Dominique Swain in those roles. I have never seen either film, nor do I really intend to do so. If I had to say who looks the part, I'd say Sue Lyon looks younger (Swain seems too physically mature to me for the part), but - probably due to him being the reader of the version I listened to, Irons for Humbert. Mason looks too... mid-century to me. Irons appears like he could actually be an aging European gentleman of reputable background, but with enough menace in his features to give the part the needed gravity. Then again, I could just be crazy. / Sources: PhilosophyBlog.com.au (top photo) and GlobeUniversity.edu (bottom photo) |
What I learned, if anything:
I don't know what to say about what I learned. I certainly wouldn't say I learned anything of value about pedophilia, though I can see how the book might give people ideas (shudder). Nor can I say that I learned anything about real love, because there is none that I perceived in the story whatsoever.
I guess you could say I learned that Nabokov's writing, which I had heard online to be quite good, is as advertised. You see, I once Googled "100 best best fiction" or something like that and read a few articles, and Lolita was consistently among the ranks of the best. Now I know why, in part. On the other hand, I can't see why people would find a story so dark and full of perversity worthy of so much praise. That is as much a conundrum as the book itself, to me. Kind of like those Fifty Shades of Gray books I recently heard praise for, but do not plan to read myself.
Recommendation:
Lolita is a dark piece of fiction. I think recommending it is a difficult thing. I can't in good conscience say I would advise people to read this. While the material itself is well written and - shall I dare use the word? - compelling, it is not something I'd recommend to anybody I know. I mean, I wouldn't be having a conversation with a friend and just happen to say, "you know, you should read Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. It's great and really worth your time." I can't see myself saying that.
On the other hand, I do think the book has some redeeming value. Not the characters in it (Humbert obviously not, but Delores herself has issues too, though much of it does stem from the abusive relationship thing), nor the story, nor the way it ends. If you can read the subtext of the novel, there are themes that I glimpsed (not being a truly "deep" reader) that made the book palatable. And yet it is hard for me to really point to a part of the book and say: "this is why it is good." It's subsurface stuff, as well as the writer's knack for flourish, that makes it engrossing.
You know, I'm going to cop out and say that if my review has peaked your interest (in a good sort of way) that you should read a real literary critic's opinion on it. I can't say as I know of any that I trust, but I will Google it, see what I find, and add a link below.
Moments pass...
Ok, found a couple. I read through this literary review (see below) by Erica Jong, and what she points out did resonate with me as I reflect on Lolita. Though as I already mentioned, I am no literary critic. Just a guy who reads books and likes saying what he thinks.
Erica Jong's literary review of Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita, on New York Times.com
And for a shorter and more concise appraisal of the book than either I or Ms. Jong provided, there is a good review 2/3rds of the way down the page at this link:
Complete Review.com review of Lolita
My bottom line: I think Lolita was worth my time. I think the book itself was good, though I am uncomfortable with the activities involved. It's like finding something to be morally repugnant and yet being able to understand the person who did the act. It confuses me, and I confess, I wish to move on and put the book behind me now, even though it was a better experience - overall - than reading Catcher in the Rye. Go figure.
Learn more about Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov, on Amazon.com
The parting comment:
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| Source: LolSnaps.com |
This photo is not from the recent Hurricane Sandy (I've had it in my "parting comments" folder for awhile now), though it seems to fit just the same. Speaking of Sandy, best wishes and prayers to all those who have been affected by her... pets included (grin).
Ick. ...to the book, not your writing.
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