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A review by rebeccazh
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
So, after many years, I finally read this book. I think all that I want to say has been said already, but here are my thoughts: I love Nabokov's writing. Reading Humbert Humbert's narration repels but attracts me; it's beautiful, and it makes me so grossed out that such a disgusting topic can be made so beautiful.
Lolita, the girl, is both the Other and the Object. I distrust every claim Humbert Humbert makes about her -- he has never seen her; he only sees her as an object of desire/dream made flesh. Poor girl. It boils my blood to see articles or people claim that this is a love story. It emphatically is not. Occasional hints of truth peek out from Humbert Humbert's slippery narration, where he says things like:
"This was an orphan. This was a lone child, an absolute waif, with whom the heavy-limbed, foul-smelling adult had had strenuous intercourse three times that very morning."
I mean. You can't get clearer than that. But looking at the reception to this book, the fact that 'Lolita' has come to stand in for a sexually precocious girl, just disgusts me. It's a special kind of awful that we're in a world where a self-professed paedophile and murderer is romanticized as a tragic but devoted sort of lover, because we're so used to romanticizing possessive/abusive/controlling behavior by men. Or that girls want to be that nymphet/sexual siren Humbert claims twelve-year-old Lolita is. Because the thing about Lolita is that she is attractive to Humbert not for her sexual precociousness; it's precisely because she is not sexually mature that he lusts after her.
This novel really reminds me of an outsider's view (an outsider who found a home) of America, because of Nabokov's enamoured/fascinated, love-hate relation to American consumerism: the post-WWII culture of bad TV, consumer goods, jukeboxes, bad movies... Love the jabs he took at Freud. I can't stand Freud. The world Nabokov depicts is quintessentially American: even young girls are consumer goods.
Lolita, the girl, is both the Other and the Object. I distrust every claim Humbert Humbert makes about her -- he has never seen her; he only sees her as an object of desire/dream made flesh. Poor girl. It boils my blood to see articles or people claim that this is a love story. It emphatically is not. Occasional hints of truth peek out from Humbert Humbert's slippery narration, where he says things like:
"This was an orphan. This was a lone child, an absolute waif, with whom the heavy-limbed, foul-smelling adult had had strenuous intercourse three times that very morning."
I mean. You can't get clearer than that. But looking at the reception to this book, the fact that 'Lolita' has come to stand in for a sexually precocious girl, just disgusts me. It's a special kind of awful that we're in a world where a self-professed paedophile and murderer is romanticized as a tragic but devoted sort of lover, because we're so used to romanticizing possessive/abusive/controlling behavior by men. Or that girls want to be that nymphet/sexual siren Humbert claims twelve-year-old Lolita is. Because the thing about Lolita is that she is attractive to Humbert not for her sexual precociousness; it's precisely because she is not sexually mature that he lusts after her.
This novel really reminds me of an outsider's view (an outsider who found a home) of America, because of Nabokov's enamoured/fascinated, love-hate relation to American consumerism: the post-WWII culture of bad TV, consumer goods, jukeboxes, bad movies... Love the jabs he took at Freud. I can't stand Freud. The world Nabokov depicts is quintessentially American: even young girls are consumer goods.