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A review by booksbythekilo
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
5.0
Lolita has prodded me into breaking a pattern by forcing me to write a review (when all I usually do is to give a book the rating it warrants by what it made me feel before launching myself at the next title) because I feel the need to justify the five rating I am giving it, more to ease my own conscience at rating such a detestable story so highly.
It is a classic for a reason; the prose, if read patiently and with complete understanding, is more beautiful than anything I have ever read in my life. Taxing to read, yes. But magnificent, nevertheless. The wit, the wonder, the yearning, the all-consuming love, the hopelessness, the madness… The central theme is sexual in nature but the book has not one risqué word in it, from start to end. Also, as I have maintained, a story/ a writer is effective only if it/ they make the reader feel everything the protagonist does. And here, Nabokov is a fucking master like no other – because he nearly had me sympathizing with H.H. Nearly.
I have two points to make:
1) I would absolutely love to hear Dolores Haze’s side of the story. What was she thinking? Feeling? Was she complicit, as he claimed? Or was it helplessness of seemingly not having anyone else to turn to (under the duress of child-like innocence) that cowed her? Was she ever cowed, indeed? How much damage did he manage to wreak upon her young mind? How did the year on the road change her? Why did she not cast for more solid support from her mother, how damaged did that relationship have to be for her to accept what was given to her the way she did? Unless Nabokov returns from the grave to pen down a sequel, or a parallel rather, we will never know.
2) How does Nabokov manage to capture such a detailed picture of a deranged man’s mind? Is he an author of that calibre (in which case, all the highest felicitations offered to writers in this world, past, present, and future are deemed useless at the altar of his genius). Or, is the more sinister probability that dances at the edges of my logic true? This, also, is a question that can never truly be answered in a satisfactory manner.
And therefore, I'm left with a sense of incompleteness that, I suspect, is going to haunt me for the rest of my life.
It is a classic for a reason; the prose, if read patiently and with complete understanding, is more beautiful than anything I have ever read in my life. Taxing to read, yes. But magnificent, nevertheless. The wit, the wonder, the yearning, the all-consuming love, the hopelessness, the madness… The central theme is sexual in nature but the book has not one risqué word in it, from start to end. Also, as I have maintained, a story/ a writer is effective only if it/ they make the reader feel everything the protagonist does. And here, Nabokov is a fucking master like no other – because he nearly had me sympathizing with H.H. Nearly.
I have two points to make:
1) I would absolutely love to hear Dolores Haze’s side of the story. What was she thinking? Feeling? Was she complicit, as he claimed? Or was it helplessness of seemingly not having anyone else to turn to (under the duress of child-like innocence) that cowed her? Was she ever cowed, indeed? How much damage did he manage to wreak upon her young mind? How did the year on the road change her? Why did she not cast for more solid support from her mother, how damaged did that relationship have to be for her to accept what was given to her the way she did? Unless Nabokov returns from the grave to pen down a sequel, or a parallel rather, we will never know.
2) How does Nabokov manage to capture such a detailed picture of a deranged man’s mind? Is he an author of that calibre (in which case, all the highest felicitations offered to writers in this world, past, present, and future are deemed useless at the altar of his genius). Or, is the more sinister probability that dances at the edges of my logic true? This, also, is a question that can never truly be answered in a satisfactory manner.
And therefore, I'm left with a sense of incompleteness that, I suspect, is going to haunt me for the rest of my life.