Thoughts on Lolita

Lolita is an interesting book because it deals with something that crosses far beyond the threshold of taboo, and yet it does it so skillfully and eloquently that the reader often forgets exactly what the book is about, which is a somewhat psychotic pedophile who is also a pathological liar. The only problem is, he’s really good at what he does—so good that the reader, if not primed to mistrust this man, may not realize that the contents of his “journal” are not coming from a trustworthy source. Of course, I’m talking about Humbert, in this case, not the author.

The narrator goes to such lengths to try to prove his innocence, but then he says things like, “I did not plan to marry poor Charlotte in order to eliminate her in some vulgar, gruesome and dangerous manner such as killing her by placing five bichloride-of-mercury tablets in her preprandial sherry or anything like that…” It completely throws the reader off and he’s slowly comes to realize that this narrator is either toying with us as he does with the psychiatrists, or he really does have a mental problem that can make him quite dangerous. It’s an amusing little dance he does between revealing what I imagine is his true self, and a masked version of his character that he uses to stay as presentable as possible for an audience that may be responsible for his fate.

What I really found quite unique to this book was that as I read it, I registered that the narrator was a little insane and had serious problems, but it was only when I started listening to the audiobook that I realized just how deep Humbert’s issues are. There was something about the way the voice actor talked that made it sound like he sincerely believed and agreed with the things he was saying—especially the parts where he laboriously pronounces Dolores’s pet name, “Lo-lee-ta.” I actually liked the story more when I was listening to it than when I was reading it. As I was reading, it just seemed like I was a passive observer—not even an observer, more like a secondhand listener being told a story from someone who heard it from someone else. When I listened to the audiobook, It felt like I was right there in the room with Humbert as he told me about his fetish for little girls and of his adopted daughter whom he has sex with repeatedly. It’s so much more visceral and it makes the detailed a thousand times more difficult to ignore.

            I like that Humbert really tries to justify his actions. He does not deny them. Instead, he reasons that he does not do any harm with his lust for nymphets. Also, according to Humbert, why does it even matter when the romans would molest twelve-year-old boys and holy figures would be wed to wives who had not even hit puberty yet? To him, there was nothing wrong with what he did, and that’s what made the book so interesting—it was from a perspective so utterly unlike my own, I have to suspend my disbelief to unprecedented levels just to get through it.