Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, published in 1955, is one of the most controversial novels to ever exist. The subject matter is of the late-thirties man under the pseudonym of “Humbert Humbert” being entirely infatuated with the “Nymphet” Dolores (Lolita) Haze. A “Nymphet” as Humbert so “pleasantly” calls his subjects are girls between nine and fourteen years of age. This kind of tale may sound utterly ridiculous and appalling to a viewer from afar, but Nabokov’s writing saves the story. As a side note, the cover of this novel’s 50th anniversary edition is absolutely the most enthralling I have ever seen. I was first attracted to the novel because of how captivating the cover was when I saw it on social media. It is so simple, yet so intimate, it draws one in like a famous painting, or more in tune with the novel’s themes, a tragedy one cannot look away from.
There are many instances of disgusting pedophilia in this novel, but the prose of how it is written makes each sentence flow like poetry. Nabokov purposely incorporates alliterations into the descriptions as well as “unprofessional” words that make the story almost fairytale-like. This can make some portions hard to understand on the first read through and I had to reread multiple sections a few times to really understand what Nabokov was trying to say. This can make one paragraph feel like multiple pages, but to be honest, this does not feel like a negative to me. It felt very rewarding to work through the poetry of Nabokov’s sick protagonist, though (as one may imagine) some scenes are descriptive in horrible ways between the two main characters, but only if one pays attention to the clever wording that indicates it.
The way Nabokov has Humbert list off a character’s features is sensual and dreamy in the best ways. It is a little less creepy when he talks about Humbert’s relationship with his first love, Annabel, who sadly dies when they are both 13. This death is definitely the defining reason for why Humbert is stuck with his fetish; he longs for another Annabel, and in his mind, he is stuck envisioning a young girl as his lover, even when he gets older. This is where Lolita comes in. Humbert is infatuated at first sight of her, but mostly because she resembles Annabel very closely. I wonder what could have become of Humbert if he and Annabel were able to be together for longer.
Before Lolita goes to summer camp, she and Humbert have a few flirtatious interactions while he is lodging with her and her mother, Charlotte. It can clearly be seen that Lolita is in her pubescent development at this age of twelve, and Humbert takes advantage of this. She will playfully touch and kiss Humbert, but he takes it too far and manipulates these teases toward her thinking it is allowed for her to do these things with an older man. Having someone care for her and her rebellious nature makes sense for Lolita as her mother seems to despise her. I feel like Lolita wants to be heard and appreciated for her wit and humor, and Humbert most eagerly obliges.
After Lolita is forced to go to summer camp so that Charlotte doesn’t have to deal with her for a bit, Humbert receives a note from Charlotte saying that she loves him and he should marry her or leave. Not wanting to ever be away from Lolita permanently, Humbert reluctantly agrees to marry her and puts on a façade of a personality to make Charlotte happy. Humbert is okay with this life for a few weeks until he can’t stand Charlotte and plans to kill her to then have Lolita all to himself. Thankfully, he cannot bring himself to do it, but fate brings upon a situation that does in fact kill her, which I always think is interesting when an author brings in “luck” to help the main character.
Humbert then pulls Lolita out of summer camp early and takes her to a hotel; however, he just tells her that her mother is very sick and in the hospital. The sequences of Humbert’s and Charlotte’s marriage and up to the hotel did not drive me into the story as the first quarter did. I found myself reading a chapter and then putting the book down until the next day a lot. The writing is still very beautiful and the sinisterness of Humbert is on full display, but the overall plot was not too interesting here; I guess I just felt like I had no hope for Lolita maybe.
Once Humbert has Lolita all to himself in the hotel, his schemes unfold in ways I had not imagined. He narrates that Lo herself began their intimacies by showing Humbert what she learned from summer camp; Humbert knows this because when they kiss, he notices that she has improved. There, she says, she learned about sex from the only boy at the camp. Humbert listens with gleeful jealousy and explains in his non-direct, poetic fashion how they have sex themselves, leaving out the visceral imagery in most romance novels. I admit I did not pick up that they had done the act upon my first reading, but upon noticing, I audibly gasped in surprise.
Humbert has deceived this young girl in the most monstrous ways. He knows that she believes sex to be just some activity that young people do and not an intimate, exploratory, and emotion-filled act of love. He does love her, and maybe her to him, but he takes advantage of her innocence and naivety to please the pleasures that all young people desire while not informing her of the actual implications of what it means to have sex, especially with someone decades older. Lolita does not really know what rape is, and she is being raped even though she does seem to like her new relationship with Humbert. It may be “consensual” but it is not right. Lolita has nowhere else to go, and Humbert makes sure she realizes this 1. To keep her for himself and 2. To make sure he does not get caught. While they begin to travel the United States so that Humbert can keep Lo distracted and willing to please him, he explains how if she tells someone of their relationship, yes he will go to jail, but she will go to some orphanage that will be “worse” than what she has now.
As a teenager, Lo has outbursts and desires that Humbert allows her to have such as candy, magazines, movies, etc. He will do anything to please her so that she remains his. He psychologically manipulates her to his very will to make sure she needs him as much as he needs her. Later, however, Lo tries herself to manipulate Humbert into letting her hang out with people actually her age. Humbert does not mind if it is with girls, it is the boys that he is worried about. This comes to a greater concern for him once they decide to settle down in the New England area for some actual consistency a year after their mobile travels. Humbert works at the nearby Beardsley college while Lo attends the Beardsley Girl’s school. Humbert also has to keep a watchful eye out for his new neighbors who could potentially find out his secret. I greatly appall the strictness that Humbert puts on Lolita; he is extremely jealous and wants her all to himself. He disallows her a real childhood by moving her too fast through sexual experiences, but also too slow by limiting her social contact; later on, he even says that he believes she could have been a tennis champion because of her amazing skills had not he interfered with her life. All of this makes me incredibly sad and guilty for Lolita even though she is fictional which greatly shows how this novel proves to be a work of art.
Some pivotal moments occur next where even though Humbert keeps limiting Lo, she finds in between ways to gain some freedom. She starts making him pay for sexual experiences, she convinces him that she can be in the school play made by her favorite playwright, she is eventually able to throw a small party (with boys, even though she is unimpressed by them), she tricks him into thinking she is going to piano practice when in reality she sneaks off with her friend, and most pivotally, she renounces the play and the school and makes him take her on another road trip, but this time she gets to make all the choices. I find this all very fascinating as the roles have largely switched for manipulation. Lo has figured out that she can use his obsession with her to control his actions with rewards of sexual behavior and she can use his fear of losing her to control his emotions even more. As the novel progresses, Lolita earns some respect and independence that she always deserved.
On the next road trip, Lolita is able to disappear from Humbert’s notice a few times such as when he is distracted with a letter or is in need to make an urgent phone call. At other times during their travels, Humbert becomes increasingly paranoid that someone is following them. He is able to evade him numerous times, but he is able to seemingly find his way to them every time. During the previously mentioned phone call, when Humbert returns to the tennis game he and Lo were playing, a doubles match has ensued with the familiar stranger taking his place. As Humbert tries to go after him, he flees and Lo will not reveal anything about him. Later that day, he sees someone eerily similar to the man watching Lolita at the hotel pool to which Lo is silently flirting with him from a distance. These scenes cause a great deal of discomfort in me. Even though Lolita is in a horrible situation with Humbert, to think that she is planning to run off with someone else who seems to be in on some elaborate scheme she has concocted leads to feelings of uncertainty and dread. I know what Humbert is capable of in his malice, but I also know that he really does love her. Who can this other man be and what are his intentions? He seems to want more than to just rescue her; Lo also looks to finally find some happiness by manipulating the jealous Humbert as well as creating a possible opportunity for an escape after over two years.
This plan comes to fruition when Lolita gets sick and has to go to a hospital. Humbert can only visit sparingly as the visiting hours are limited and the nurse seems to think something suspicious of him, with also possible indications that Lo has let her in on some limited amount of information. Humbert gets sick as well and stays bedridden for a couple of days, unable to see his love. And when the day comes for her check-out, it is revealed that Lo’s “uncle” has departed with her. Humbert, enraged, leaves the hospital with a vow to kill the man. Humbert’s narration in this section of the novel is perfect as he is now viewed as the victim of the novel whose love was stolen from him unjustly, making the audience more sympathetic to his cause; the genius of Nabokov shines ever more presently.
A revenge-sicken and delirious Humbert retraces the over 300 hotels they had stayed in this past trip all the way back to Beardsley. By confronting a lot of the hotel clerks on wanting to double-check his staying there, he found an obvious trail of odd names also in the registrar, with some even harping back to Lolita’s past. This reveals that Lolita’s new lover had been tracking them ever since they started, that Lolita was in on the scheme the whole time in corroboration, and that the “captor” has a sense of humor to know that the obsessed Humbert would look back at every single place they stayed. Enraged, but somewhat impressed to be duped into this game, Humbert scours back to Beardsley in an attempt to find the seducer. Upon arriving he realizes whoever it was would not come back and that now he had no further clues. After three progressing years, Humbert finds himself without Lolita and thoroughly depressed, yet still has the glimmer of revenge in him. I greatly enjoyed the sequence of the hotel searches, Nabokov has a great play on words for his pseudonyms, and the clever setup revealed to have been right within Humbert’s grasp, but shielded by his last hopes for Lolita to love him, is tragic but also invigorating for Lolita’s side.
At the end of the three insignificant years, Humbert receives a letter from Lolita, telling him that she is married and pregnant and in need of money so that she and her new husband can go to Alaska where they are guaranteed a big job. Humbert’s obsession at this point returns in full force and is quite fascinating to read. He manages to track down the town where the newlywed “Schillers” live even though Lo did not leave a complete return address and so he asks the locals for clues on where the exact house is. He is soon informed and dresses in professional attire for the duel to come. Hearing of Lolita’s condition brings great sadness to me. She is seventeen at this point and already married and pregnant. It truly seems that she is in a worse position with Schiller than Humbert, but perhaps that is just my bias from reading it from Humbert’s perspective the whole time. I can only assume that this job in Alaska is far from stable living and the fact of her asking Humbert for money shows just how desperate she is. Perhaps she misses him and knows that he will find her if given a semblance of a clue. Either way, Lolita’s life has been a continuous fall of previous potential as soon as Humbert entered her life.
The twist has come. The kidnapper isn’t present. When Humbert arrives at the small shack that is now Lolita’s home, he finds her married to a different man (named Dick) than he thought, and certainly not the one she left him with. Dick is an almost deaf simple-working kind of guy and knows nothing about her past. The important part, however, is when Humbert sees Lolita again. Now at seventeen, she is taller, wears glasses, is paler, fully pregnant, and to Humbert’s dismay, no longer a nymphet anymore. Eager for the whole story, Humbert questions her to which she reveals that she ran off with the “great love of her life,” Clare Quilty, the playwright who wrote the play Lo was going to perform and who visited her hometown a few years before Humbert arrived. After she ran away with him, he brought her to a secret ranch where he wanted her to engage in strange sexual practices with his “friends.” Lolita did not want to participate, claiming that she only loved Quilty, but he kicked her out anyway. She then got a job as a waitress and met Dick and later got married. Humbert recognizes that he still loves Lolita and will until he dies, so he asks her once and for all to run away with him, but she declines, stating if she were to run off, it would be with Quilty. Defeated and dejected, Humbert gives her $4,000 (1952 money) and they part ways. Humbert cries as he leaves, but is ready to kill the man who ruined his life. This chapter really surprised me. I never expected that the one to take Lolita away would be one who seems to be an even worse human being than Humbert, with Lo saying he had an interest in her all the way back when she was ten. This hurts even more to hear that she admits that she would rather be with Quilty more than Humbert if ever given the chance, even when it is clear that Humbert loves her and Quilty seems indifferent. It is also sad to see Lolita and such a horrible living condition. Dick seems like a decent husband, but their living conditions are poor and Lo’s health has taken a turn; she has taken up smoking as well, even while pregnant. This is a clear contrast to when she was with Humbert where she was in prime physique for her age, but with a damaged mind from all the injustices done to her. I can only hope now that she will be able to find peace in Alaska with the $4,000 and her new family. To see Humbert in such a broken state is saddening; he has and will always love Lolita and want the best for her, even when she never really loved him. To let her go is a powerful step and shows that he isn’t a pure monster all the way through.
Humbert then produces a chapter about his guilt. He is one who can never be redeemed from his sins because he took a girl’s childhood away from her forever. He never could fully engage in real, deep, or meaningful conversations that a father and daughter regularly have. He caused her fear to the brink of numbness and helplessness. He made her be able to compare her life of nothingness to her friends’ lives of excitement, possibility, romance, desire, care, fun, comfort, understanding, hope… being a teenager, being a daughter who could be loved and cherished, not used for sexual desires. Lolita is a tragedy that makes it difficult to think straight, that makes me want to save her more and more as every page turns, that makes me want to turn the pages back and start again hoping the story will be different this time, that Lolita will be okay; but no, Lolita, as she is, remains.
Humbert returns to Lolita’s childhood home where Quilty’s uncle lives next door and he gets the information about Quilty’s residence from him. After a scope of the property at night lended the too many witnesses of a party, Humbert decides to return in the morning with his gun. Upon his arrival, Humbert is able to enter the house with ease as the door was unlocked. Inside, he decides to collect the keys for each room to prevent any possibility of Quilty locking himself up. Eventually, Quilty appears in some drug-like state and barely even notices Humbert. Cautiously following, Quilty finally addresses him but thinks he is someone else. Humbert tells him who he is and asks for the reasonings for kidnapping Lolita, but Quilty merely engages in indifferent conversation about superficial topics. Humbert continually attempts to convince Quilty of the seriousness of the situation, even pulling out his gun and telling him that he is to die. Quilty still remains unserious about the whole thing and half-heartedly engages in Humbert’s demands to sit still and talk. Perhaps this was all just clever wordplay as soon Quilty lunges at Humbert, causing him to lose the gun and a scuffle occurs. Humbert retrieves the weapon and starts shooting at Quilty while he runs away. A sad chase completely the opposite of any movie murder ensues as Quilty is shot multiple times up to his bedroom, even across the face and at near point-blank range in his bed as he begged for his life. Humbert feels no remorse, but also doesn’t quite feel as satisfied as he thought he would. Leaving the house, Humbert finds that some of Quilty’s friends have arrived and are making drinks. Humbert tells them that he killed Quilty, but they don’t seem to care at all, even offering Humbert a drink. Astonishingly, Quilty emerges from the room, covered in blood and dying agonizingly, yet no one cares. Humbert leaves without issue. I greatly enjoyed this confrontation because it really surprised my expectations. We were told to believe that Quilty was this mastermind who swindled Lolita from Humbert, but really it’s true that Lo pretty much orchestrated her own freedom, using the talented but bumbling playwright just as much as Humbert, even though she loved Quilty. Everything ended up being more anticlimactic than what Humbert and the reader expected and those surprise endings are always enjoyable to me. The character of Quilty and his friends really reminded me of the hedonistic, superficial, and uncaring characters of a Bret Easton Ellis novel, and I loved every bit of it.
At the end, Humbert, feeling rebellious, drives on the wrong side of the road and through a red light into a meadow where he is arrested. As the paragraphs finish, he stops addressing the reader and sends his attention solely to Lolita, wishing her and her family well, and letting her know that because of this artwork, they themselves and their past relationship will last forever. The ending is powerful and personal. A good artwork reflects a meaning from the creator, and a great artwork lasts long enough for others to take in that meaning for their own lives. This novel is both of those and more; in the end, it is the purest love story I have ever read.
This last third of the novel makes me feel a deep depression for the sake of Lolita. This poor girl of twelve at the start of the novel is brought through five long years of abuse, rape, discouragement, censorship, and more. Even though this was largely the case in the first two-thirds as well, the narrative shift of a darker enterprise is clearer at the end in my opinion. I like to imagine a Lolita older, happier, and without the tragedies she endured in the novel, one in college outwitting her professors, teasing the boys at parties, and making something great of herself on her own terms. This sadly was not possible; tragedy always strikes in the most awful ways. No person is a character in a novel and this makes the last statement even more true. Most of us are not as unlucky as Lolita, but some are, and even to us who aren’t, we can still use tragedy to fuel ourselves and make our own independent lives. This is what Lolita did in her own capacity, she became more powerful than Humbert and sought her own path. Each of us can do the same and hopefully come out of it with the charming spirit Lolita elicits even through the Hell she has endured.
Rating: 9.5/10