I have found Lolita again. Predictably, she was on the shelf I searched multiple times in August after I lost her to our house sprite. And since she was contemptuously staring me down, knowing only too well she had won the game of hide and seek, I decided to give her a try.

Sixty pages in I am asking myself why I have done so. It may not help her case that I know exactly who from amongst my acquaintances is my mind’s image for Humbert Humbert (his initials are also HH and also not his proper name). Lolita seems like a nice enough girl but the book is not at all about her now, is it? It is all about HH, egocentric, self-absorbed, twisted, sleazy, disgusting, deluded - I could go on. I know that that is the point (or I am guessing that it is, otherwise, why bother at all?), I am just not sure that it is good enough a point for me. I am not done with it, I am expecting something to happen that will make it more worthwhile although, that may just sound completely wrong in the context of the story.

Maybe I should also come clean and admit to knowing next to nothing about the book itself apart from it being a story of a paedophile and the book being banned in a number of countries for a while. I have not even seen the film with Jeremy Irons. So, I am approaching it with assumptions based on the above scant information. I think I can see what Nabokov was trying to do and the language is literary and complex but somehow it does not in the least dampens the thick muck we are wading in.

Maybe it works as a case study, maybe Nabokov gets the inner thoughts and processes of a paedophile just right and that may be considered as something that will broaden my horizons but I am just not sure. Further pages will tell….

UPDATE:

I finished Lolita almost three weeks ago now and it was a great relief. I did not manage to settle into the story or accept a position of a disinterested observer. In my opinion, it did not get better and I failed to discover any redeeming qualities. I know the book has been praised for its language and style but it did not work for me, the language did not speak to me as it came out of Humbert Humbert (yet, I can still listen to Michael Jackson).

What finished it off was Vladimir Nabokov’s On A Book Entitled Lolita that was included as an afterword and where he says: For me a work of fiction exists only in so far as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss… First of all, Mr Nabokov and I do not share the same criteria for the existence of work of fictions and second of all, Lolita had definitely failed to afford me any kind of bliss.