This is sooooooooooooooooo much more than what it appears to be. Love how it was crafted.

I don’t like writing reviews on well-known, oft-reviewed books. So I’ll keep this one short. Lolita is great. Nabokov crafts his words with great care and skill, making warm, enveloping sentences and clever word games. He has an uncanny ability to make Humbert Humbert both monstrous and sympathetic, which creates a sense of unease in the reader. And the story is simple but profound. It is not an easy book to read, but it is definitely a great book. Like the title character herself, Lolita the book is both difficult and beautiful. More people should read it, because it’s not the book a lot of people think it is.

(And as a comment specifically on the audiobook version: Jeremy Irons is a perfect choice to read this book. He’s got the range to convey all of Humbert’s emotions, and a very pleasant voice. The production is top-notch.)

Some people read this story and feel it is a love story. Others read it and feel it is a story about a monster rationalizing his sexual abuse of a twelve year old girl. The mastery of this novel is that it is both. While I would never say this is one of my favorite works, it is unique, it shows us something we do not often see, and the prose is amazingly lyrical.

In the end, the author is able to do something amazing with Humbert. He has charmed many people in the book, and in the end he works the same charisma on the reader. That’s what makes this book a classic, and why it will remain so.

One thing I found interesting outside of the book is the idea of Lolita. What is Humbert’s idea of Lolita? She is not yet a twelve year old girl; she’s also spilling over with a sexual “newness” that he feels teased by. And what do most people thing of the idea of Lolita? The same thing. Although the story, largely, is about a man victimzing a child, most people adopt the pedophile’s perspective. There is a sense of blame in the term Lolita—when found in popular culture—not toward the man, but toward the girl.

It took me a long time to finish this book. I found it a very difficult read. Not so much because of the subject: the book is written in the first person thus giving a fascinating insight into the distorted mind of the main character, Humbert; but because of the narrative style of this same Humbert.

Lolita will make you smile, cry, shudder, will make your skin crawl and leave a sour taste in your mouth but you can’t stay indifferent to it. If the key to dealing with criminals is to understand how their brain works, then Nabokov did a brilliant job in exploring the thought process of a pedophile.

I am consuming this solely because it is on the list of Classics that I’m reading. I am attempting to get over the fact that this book is trying to portray sympathetically the desires of a pedophile to fuck a 12 year old girl and instead focus on the style of writing. I’m only halfway through, though, so I am still holding on to the hope that he gets drawn and quartered…