Lolita

LOLITA (Vladimir Nabokov) - One Star

My perception of a "Lolita" is of a sexually precocious and savvy young teen girl, one who is jaded (perhaps) beyond her years and is already well-versed at using her feminine wiles to seduce helpless (hopeless) older men. I think of "Iris" from "Taxi Driver," perhaps, or one of the young neighborhood hoochies-in-training I see walking to school each morning on my way to work. I do not think of Dolores Haze from Lolita.

Let's be frank: Nabokov's Lolita is not a story about a devious young girl seducing an infatuated older man. The story is of an infatuated older man who kidnaps a young girl on the brink of pubescense and drives across the country, raping her repeatedly and plying her with gifts in change for sexual favors. I assure you that any of the harsh things I say in this review are not due to any sense of offended morals or outrage. If Nabokov wants to write a story about a mentally ill pervert ruining the life of a young girl, that's fine with me as a literary topic (everything is fair game as a literary topic, in my book: taboo only applies to certain aspects of reality, not literary fantasy).

My problem with Lolita is that it's boring.

I mean boring, boring, boring, BORING, BORING!

It is possibly the dullest, most repetitious, uninteresting story I've ever trudged through.

A huge problem with the story is that I never became sympathetic towards either of the main characters. Humbert, despite his educated loquaciousness, is a loathsome individual; I feel no pity for his mental anguish in light of the harm he causes the people around him. Dolores Haze, the young Lolita, you never really get to know: the story is told from Humbert's point of view, so every image of Lolita is filtered through his warped obsession. You glean enough to realize that she is (mostly) miserably unhappy with Humbert but trying to make the best of it. She is clever, and partially aware of her burgeoning sexuality; which she uses half-heartedly in various clumsy attempts, much like any other young teen who is just discovering the powers of beauty and seduction. In the early stages of the novel, she has a pre-teen crush on the handsome Humbert and does submit willingly. (I don't think it's fair to say she "seduces" him; how do you seduce someone who's already lusting after you like wildfire?) She is not a twelve-year-old nymphet, she is just an ordinary girl. But other than some fairly basic adolescent interests and mood swings, you never really get into her mind.

Nabokov's play with the English language is entertaining enough to carry the novel through Part I and into Part II (his skill with English is especailly astonishing when you read his lament in the afterword that his "secondhand" English is vastly inferior to his skill with his native Russian tongue). Eventually, however, it just seems like Nabokov is playing a game called "never use the same adjective twice," and the long-windedness and inability to make even the smallest points in short order get increasingly frustrating to the reader.

Here's a prime example: on page 264 there's the last half of a paragraph. I've cut out all the extraneous descriptions to give you the point of the paragraph, which is as follows:

I used to be misled by a window [where I] would make out a half-naked nymphet combing her hair. [Then] the image would move, and there would be nothing in the window but a man reading the paper.

Not very eloquent, admitted, but that's the base point of the thought.

See now, how burdened down it is with description, as a simple 40-word thought is bloated by Nabokov into several hundred words:

I used to recollect, with anguished amusement, the times in my trustful, pre-dolorian past when I would be misled by a jewel-bright window opposite wherein my lurking eye, the ever alert periscope of my shameful vice, would make out from afar a half-naked nymphet stilled in the act of combing her Alice-in-Wonderland hair. There was in the fiery phantasm a perfection which made my wild delight also perfect, just because the vision was out of reach, with no possibility of attainment to spoil it by the awareness of an appended taboo; indeed, it may well be that the very attraction immaturity has for me lies not so much in the limpidity of pure young forbidden fairy child beauty as in the security of a situation where infinite perfections fill the gap between the little given and the grat promised—the great rosegray never-to-be-had. Mes fenêtres! Hanging above blotched sunset and welling night, grinding my teeth, I would crowd all the demons of my desire against the railing of a throbbing balcony: it would be ready to take off in the apricot and black humid evening; did take off—whereupon the lighted image would move and Eve would revert to a rib, and there would be nothing in the window but an obese partly clad man reading the paper.

Beautifully written, yes, but get to the fuckin' point already!! Every paragraph, for 300+ pages, is written like this. And yes, even gorgeous prose like this gets old when there's only a threadbare story supporting it.

It's worth noting that in the afterword Nabokov relates that the "first" version of Lolita was a thirty page short story written circa 1940 in Paris (and discarded), but that the full novel version wasn't started until some ten years later. Indeed, Lolita feels like a thirty page short story that has put on every coat in the closet until it looks like a three hundred page novel, and a tedious one at that.