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Is there a character full of as much shit as Humbert Humbert? If you’ve never read (or listened to a reading of) Lolita, it’s easy to be dismissive. It is, after all, the memoir of a manipulative, self-aggrandizing pedophile who kidnaps and serially rapes his 12 year old step daughter. Lolita is, also, a gorgeous piece of writing. The story itself is supposed to be as difficult and impossible and exactly as off-putting as it is. Humbert Humbert is an unreliable narrator at best; a weak, delusional, loathsome, narcissistic character in reality. That Nabokov is able to pull this book off is a wonder and feat of creative and technical genius.
Nabakov illuminates the hateful, selfish, sinister Humbert using language and prose that Humbert thinks is a testament of his love for young Dolores Haze (aka Dolly, Lo, Lolita). I was simultaneously repelled and enthralled. The technical skill and execution lays out an impossibly disgusting tale of blind, unrepentant, obsession. Nabakov uses language and word play and builds a tyrant of a character who controls the entire narrative. We can’t believe anything that Humbert says because Humbert is telling the story and is completely incapable of seeing beyond himself. But Nabakov writes in such a way that it becomes very obvious, very early on, that Humbert isn’t what he seems and that all the ways that he wants the reader to be sympathetic are exactly the ways that we readers will come to loathe and despise him.
The only insight that we get into the other characters, Dolly/Lolita being the most important and most obscured, are through small, marked moments that Humbert is incapable of dissecting in any way that is negative to himself or self-revelatory to the kind of person that he really is. Of course, Nabakov sets the reader up to see exactly those things. Of course, and as some of the reviews indicate, there are still some people who are completely unaware of how the novel works. And that it is intentionally as distancing as it is. Let me say emphatically: Lolita is NOT a love story. Humbert Humbert is NOT a character to be sympathized with and the author does NOT intend that you do so. To feel sympathy for Humbert is to ignore all the clues and cues left behind. That he kidnapped and raped a 12 year old child and proceeded to hold her hostage and manipulate her for two years. There is nothing redeeming about Humbert, not even the empty murder of Claire Quilty at the novel’s close. Quilty’s murder, as per usual, has everything to do with Humbert and the loss of what he felt was his own possession, his Lolita. It’s about jealousy, pure and simple. And in the only glimmer of real insight, it is sometime before he heads off in search of Quilty that Humbert realizes and admits that he knows next to nothing about Dolores Haze and that in the course of relaying the events of the last five years he has conveniently forgotten or left out parts of the story.
It is amazing to me that the term Lolita has gained any real traction in modern usages because the Lolita, as defined and articulated by Humbert, is a fiction. She does not exist. Humbert has made her completely up. It’s very clear to the reader, but to Humbert, well, he is as clueless as they come.
I don’t think I would have made it through this novel if anyone else besides Jeremy Irons had been reading it. It was artistically, a gorgeous affair; however, the actual content of the story (its technical genius notwithstanding) is quite unsavory and very disturbing. Still, Irons made it a compelling read and he performed Humbert so well that it set my teeth, very often, on edge. I pulled one star for no other reason than that Humbert, who loves to hear himself ramble, drove me out of my tree quite a few times spouting pointless drivel and nonsense. I suppose I should add that star back because, really, that’s quite the point of who this character is. No one else matters except himself. Even the demented illusion of love that he claims to feel for Dolly has nothing to do with her and everything to do with his fantasy of the Lolita.
Nabakov illuminates the hateful, selfish, sinister Humbert using language and prose that Humbert thinks is a testament of his love for young Dolores Haze (aka Dolly, Lo, Lolita). I was simultaneously repelled and enthralled. The technical skill and execution lays out an impossibly disgusting tale of blind, unrepentant, obsession. Nabakov uses language and word play and builds a tyrant of a character who controls the entire narrative. We can’t believe anything that Humbert says because Humbert is telling the story and is completely incapable of seeing beyond himself. But Nabakov writes in such a way that it becomes very obvious, very early on, that Humbert isn’t what he seems and that all the ways that he wants the reader to be sympathetic are exactly the ways that we readers will come to loathe and despise him.
The only insight that we get into the other characters, Dolly/Lolita being the most important and most obscured, are through small, marked moments that Humbert is incapable of dissecting in any way that is negative to himself or self-revelatory to the kind of person that he really is. Of course, Nabakov sets the reader up to see exactly those things. Of course, and as some of the reviews indicate, there are still some people who are completely unaware of how the novel works. And that it is intentionally as distancing as it is. Let me say emphatically: Lolita is NOT a love story. Humbert Humbert is NOT a character to be sympathized with and the author does NOT intend that you do so. To feel sympathy for Humbert is to ignore all the clues and cues left behind. That he kidnapped and raped a 12 year old child and proceeded to hold her hostage and manipulate her for two years. There is nothing redeeming about Humbert, not even the empty murder of Claire Quilty at the novel’s close. Quilty’s murder, as per usual, has everything to do with Humbert and the loss of what he felt was his own possession, his Lolita. It’s about jealousy, pure and simple. And in the only glimmer of real insight, it is sometime before he heads off in search of Quilty that Humbert realizes and admits that he knows next to nothing about Dolores Haze and that in the course of relaying the events of the last five years he has conveniently forgotten or left out parts of the story.
It is amazing to me that the term Lolita has gained any real traction in modern usages because the Lolita, as defined and articulated by Humbert, is a fiction. She does not exist. Humbert has made her completely up. It’s very clear to the reader, but to Humbert, well, he is as clueless as they come.
I don’t think I would have made it through this novel if anyone else besides Jeremy Irons had been reading it. It was artistically, a gorgeous affair; however, the actual content of the story (its technical genius notwithstanding) is quite unsavory and very disturbing. Still, Irons made it a compelling read and he performed Humbert so well that it set my teeth, very often, on edge. I pulled one star for no other reason than that Humbert, who loves to hear himself ramble, drove me out of my tree quite a few times spouting pointless drivel and nonsense. I suppose I should add that star back because, really, that’s quite the point of who this character is. No one else matters except himself. Even the demented illusion of love that he claims to feel for Dolly has nothing to do with her and everything to do with his fantasy of the Lolita.
