If you have run through my blog before, you would know that I've already published a book review on Lolita. Well, here is another take on Lolita - an article I re worked for The Incisive Journal. Though the base review remains the same, it is a much deeper dive into the book and the characters. Enjoy it below.
“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.
Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate
to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the
morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was
Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms, she was
always Lolita.”
Disgustingly brilliant. Pure perversion. One of the best books in
modern literature. These are a few among the thousand descriptions you’d find
for the book by Russian – American novelist Vladimir Nabokov, among reading
circles. As a reader who relies heavily on reviews before picking up a book,
the social cataloging website I frequently use for the same, bombarded me with
mixed reviews, including one that said, “I never understood when an old friend
used to say ‘Ulysses’ was a good book to read but not a good book to “read”.
Lolita changed that.”
And Lolita was all that and much more than it promised to be. It has been one of the most strenuous reads
of my life. A book that never let me lay back in peace, but rather had me cringing at the edge of my seat, worried if I was sinning against the “nymphet” Lolita or Dolores, 12 years, by lending ears to Humbert Humbert, an English professor is driven by desire, wanting his Lolita so badly that it never occurs to him to cum pedophile cum stepfather to the title character. “Humbert is every man who consider her as a human being, or as anything but a dream figment made flesh.”
Yes. Lolita is not human. Lolita is not Dolores. Lolita is Humbert’s desire, his obsession, his vulnerability, his inhumane passion, his excuses. Lolita is an explanation that the protagonist offers not to the reader but himself, desperately trying to a person. Proffered with such passion, it is terrifyingly poignant and untangle himself from the heinous crime of destroying a childhood and thereby, unnerving making you want to constantly remind yourself that it’s all a farce.
Humbert, the unreliable narrator here, overtly uses quite a few tools in the process, including a long dead childhood love he could never possess, intentional misinterpretation of Lolita’s helplessness as participation, his vehement attempts in conveying to the reader his good looks and desirability, the reason he believes Lo fell in in love with him just as he did for her. Yes. Above all, he tries to believe he was in love.
Lo isn’t portrayed as a child, but a rather glossy remnant of the paedophile’s memory. But once in a while,
the narrator cannot but help l0ok at Dolores as a child he wronged, looking at her suffer and winch in his arms but he quickly tries to shake it off as her mood swing, a tease, Lolita used, to torture him with. His little monster. This is where Nabokov succeeds in making the smartest choice of employing solipsism
or less technically put, simply the irrelevance of anything other than oneself. In the narrative, Dolores the 12 year old child is absent. What is offered is only the Lolita he carved out of her, his seducer.
Initially branded an erotic novel, Nabokov observes himself in his afterword that the few initial pages does mislead some readers (I believe, intentionally) into assuming this was going to be a lewd book expecting the rising succession of erotic moments but they are soon consumed by disappointment as the narrative changes form and starts barely mentioning the sexual encounters while focusing rather on the emotional consequences of his actions on Lolita but mostly on himself.
Published originally in English by a writer for whom the language isn’t even his first language, there is
undeniable beauty and a concrete imprint left on the reader. As Humbert walks out bloody after murdering Quilty, Lolita’s wrongdoer and drives into the arms of the police, consumed by the guilt of what he had himself done to the child that she had been, one of the rare moments when Lolita is humanized, Nabokov
has already drilled a hole in your heart but the head is exploding with compliments for the roller-coaster ride the writer created for you between the pages of this book.
Falling in the category of cult classics and path changers like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, born much ahead of its time, Lolita is that treasure of a book waiting to be savoured by you, if you can handle strain and are not easily rattled.
Ardhra Prakash
(26th October 2017)
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