Book Review: Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

To discuss this book, I feel like I have to separate my experience of reading the novel and the objective aesthetics of the novel. I get the impression from reading reviews and literary scholarship that fans of the book find their reading experience is influenced by the aesthetics of the novel—that the writing style and the flair of diction made the reading experience enjoyable and threatened to make them (or did make them) sympathetic to our narrator, Humbert—but I didn’t find Humbert to be a seductive narrator at all. And frankly, I didn’t enjoy reading the novel. The aesthetic writing did not overpower the plot for me and certainly did not provide me with “aesthetic bliss” as Nabokov claimed it would. 

I retrospectively appreciate the novel much more than I did when I was actually reading it, because while I didn’t enjoy reading it, I can now grant the author some masterful construction. I went into the novel with expectations framed by nonsensical snippets like the one on the front cover “The only convincing love story of our century” or by references to the novel being a hilarious comedy. 

First of all, I was intrigued how a pedophilic relationship could be considered a love story, and upon reading it, am appalled by the appropriated term. A “love story” implies reciprocity, and it directly states “love.” Lolita was a victim of statutory rape; there is nothing even in the novel itself (if you read between the lines) to suggest a mutual romantic relationship except for the occasional ramblings of a desperately repentant pedophile, and there was absolutely no love on Humbert’s part: it was fascination and lust directed towards a projection of a girl living inside his head. 

Secondly, I don’t find this book comedic at all. In the first chapter, Nabokov wrote a sentence that made me laugh, but I didn’t laugh again until the end of the novel when *SPOILER* Humbert commits the murder. The fact that the murder is the funniest part of the novel might say all I need to about the assertion that Lolita is a comedy. *END OF SPOILER* But overall, I found Nabokov’s writing style interesting, sometimes thought-provoking, at times cumbersome; and Humbert’s narration occasionally ridiculous. If satire is at play here, it seems to me that it is supposed to induce a cynically mocking laughter rather than a lighthearted take on human nature that can provoke thought, which I didn’t feel mixed with the plot altogether well.

These snippet reviews gave me the impression that Lolita would be a Dostoevskian deep delve into the psychology of a criminal and his victim that’s ironically written with heartbreaking insights into human nature and society as a whole. But Lolita is only a masterful psychological exploration in retrospect. For the majority of the novel, I felt like I was just reading about a man’s surface-level lust for a young girl. I’m not a reader who requires a moral, or even feels like a book can be “moral” or “immoral,” but I do want depth, and for the longest time, I was desperately seeking depth in the novel. It was only at the end of the book that Nabokov subtly reveals the intentionality behind his unreliable narrator. In short, it read like surface-level lust because that was positively consuming Humbert, and Nabokov was just staying true to his character. 

I enjoyed the last third of the novel far more than the rest of the novel, mostly because it finally went beyond Humbert’s surface-level lust. During the first part, our unreliable narrator paints Lolita only vaguely, mainly as an object of desire, and layers upon her pounds of culpability. He transforms a child into a seductress, and only in the last third of the novel does he reveal Lolita’s pain and suffering. In fact, the only chapter that truly shows awareness of Lolita as a traumatized child is chapter 32—also the only chapter I truly enjoyed—which took up only four full pages. When I was reading the novel, I basically annotated the entire chapter, asterisked the chapter number, and felt utterly relieved that I found something intriguing in the book.

But I have to give Nabokov credit for his intentionality. Lolita’s lack of character depth, particularly during the first half of the novel, was very purposeful. She existed in our narrator’s mind as a purely aesthetic, solipsized being, so that was how she presented on the page. Early on, Humbert separated his Lolita from the real Dolores Haze, and ignored the latter while fantasizing about the first; harmed the latter while cavorting with the former. Perhaps Nabokov is an artistic genius, which I can objectively appreciate, but I still didn’t enjoy the reading experience. It was uncomfortable for me to read from the perspective of a criminal without a window into the victim’s emotions or inner turmoil—and even a tad boring. 

I’ve said before in an Instagram update of my reading the novel that the unreliable narration is the most interesting thing of the novel—and that perhaps remains my consensus. Nabokov’s narrator is writing from a jail cell, and both Humbert and Nabokov take into constant consideration “retrospective verisimilitude.” Although both Humbert and Nabokov at the time of writing (Humbert’s memoir/confession and Nabokov’s novel) are disgusted by younger Humbert’s behavior and recognize the harm done to Dolores, neither one inserts those retrospective insights into the novel as we chronologically experience it for the sake of verisimilitude. 

I feel like to fully understand the nuances of the book, I would have to reread it knowing what I’m getting into… but I have no real desire to do that.

But I do want to call attention to what Nabokov’s wife, Vera, also wanted readers to pay attention to. Because while people focus on the monstrosity of Humbert, they can also forget about the victimization of Lolita. The novel is named after her, but she is by no means the star of the show, and that is the fault of the self-absorbed Humbert. As I’ve discussed, Lolita’s lack of character depth or casting in the book was intentional on Nabokov’s part, but that should only make the rare parts of Lolita more outstanding, and it often doesn’t. So in cahoots with Vera, I’m going to share some of her quotes:

“[Lolita] cries every night and the critics are deaf to her sobs.”

“I wish … somebody would notice the tender description of the child’s helplessness, her pathetic dependence on monstrous HH, and her heartrending courage all along culminating in that squalid but essentially pure and healthy marriage, and her letter, and her dog.”

I want to leave you with a question. In the afterword, Nabokov claims his “initial shiver of inspiration” was coming across the first sketch from an ape that “showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage.” Who did Nabokov imagine looking from the bars of a cage: Lolita or Humbert?

I automatically assumed it to be Lolita based on my self-evident, albeit biased perception of good and evil that I projected onto the author. But I read a scholarly article that assumed the opposite—that Humbert was the one in the cage, unable to live the life he would prefer to lead. This reading would assume that Nabokov was “critiquing a schematic approach to good and evil—an approach which reduces them to mere social norms,” and making us question why we morally protested the relationship in the novel, rather than simply protesting blindly. It applies a Nietzschean approach to morality, which is interesting. While I reject the idea of applying the sympathetic impulse I naturally feel for the ape to Humbert, analyzing the image from a Nietzschean viewpoint is definitely thought-provoking…