Reviews with content warning for Racial slurs - Lolita

despite the annoying amount of french throughout this book, and the difficult language that made me have to reread almost every paragraph, i loved this book. humbert is an unreliable narrator, which is what made this such an interesting and unique read. he recounts everything so particularly, either with too much detail, or by admitting he doesn’t remember nor care about what actually happened. it makes you second guess everything, it’s hard to truly tell exactly what happened. his lack of self awareness (he heard lolita crying every night; he saw her eyes become dull and void) he was convinced it was a love story. but us, the readers, know it’s truly a horror story.

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priscill4's review against another edition

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slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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salome_veils's review against another edition

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dark sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

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bubblyfemme's review against another edition

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challenging dark slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Fist of all, heavy trigger warning: This book is not for the faint of heart, I struggled a lot with parts of it, and if you somehow don’t know the premise of Lolita please check the trigger warnings.

This is one of those books I would never had imagined myself giving a high rating, due to the nature of the content. However, the writing is so poetic and the author is able to masterfully manipulate words to perfectly convey meaning.

I read this novel under the impression that Nabokov sought to portray to the reader a psychopathic rapists mind. I view this as a character study of a very twisted man who is trying to manipulate the reader, and perhaps himself into believing that he wasn’t ‘that bad’.

I think having some rudimentary knowledge of the psychological field of the 1950’s is helpful when reading this book, so I’d recommend reading up a little on Freud, and perhaps Bowlby (who studied in the 60’s after the book was published) as some of his theories could be applied to the characters within the book. I think, despite our narrators hatred for psychoanalysis, analysing H.H makes the book far more interesting, and also highlights many of the books linguistic themes.

Despite the frankly disgusting nature of the book, I was in awe of the writing and I have always been drawn to books with an unreliable narrator. This book is an enigma to me, I hated the content but on the other hand have never spent so long trying to ‘understand’ or analyse a book I was not studying for school. The sheer impact this book has had on me currently warrants the 5 star rating, this may change in future if I re-read it though.

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