The Bottom Line: This book is widely regarded as one of the great works of Twentieth Century English literature and is a must read for any lover of prose and fiction.
I don't read a lot of fiction, but I decided to read LOLITA after several of my friends sang its praises. When a professional dominatrix friend of mine told me she had read this masterpiece four times, I immediately placed LOLITA at the top of my reading list. Just finding the book was no easy task. Penn State's Pattee Library is the largest library in Pennsylvania, but even it did not have an available copy. The State College library had its copy stolen. Finally, I broke down and bought my own copy at Barnes and Noble's and I was not disappointed in the least. LOLITA is one of the best work's of Twentieth Century English literature, which is quite an accomplishment for an author whose native language was Russian.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV'S most famous work centers around French born narrator Humbert Humbert's obsession with what he calls "nymphets." A nymphet is a sexually precocious girl between the ages of nine and fourteen who uses her sexual charm to put an adult male under her spell. Humbert points out that very few girls in this age group have the demonic power to be considered nymphets. Believe it or not, Humbert's colourful descriptions of his lust for nymphets come across as actually more humourous than perverse.
Humbert falls under the spell of a certain nymphet named Dolores Haze (nicknamed Lolita), and embarks with her on a long road trip across late 1940's America. I will not reveal how Humbert and Lolita develop their perverse stepfather-daughter sexual relationship, as this would spoil the book for anyone who has yet to read it.
Humbert writes LOLITA while incarcerated and awaiting trial for murder, but the reader never knows whom he has killed until late in the book. In this sense, there is a reverse murder mystery element to LOLITA. In the traditional murder mystery, we know at the beginning of the book who the victim is and spend the rest of the book trying to figure out "who done it." In LOLITA we know the identity of the killer, but not the victim.
While Humbert builds to the climactic murderous scene, he describes in great detail his trips across the country with Lolita and their lives together. The long road trips and stream of conscious writing style are reminiscent of ON THE ROAD. The intellectual, European Humbert reflects about the banality of post-war American consumer culture which his beloved Lolita swallows hook, line and sinker. Humbert correctly notes that children Lolita's age are the perfect consumers, as they lack the sophistication or life experiences to challenge the validity of ad campaigns and messages fed to them by the media and entertainment industry.
Those unfamiliar with specific terms for sexual deviance usually mislabel Humbert's obsession with nymphets as pedophilia. In actuality, he is a hebephile, and more specifically a nymphophile. Hebephiles are adults with a sexual attraction to young adolescents, nymphophiles are adults with an attraction to young adolescent girls, while pedophiles are attracted to prepubescent children. The key distinction is that nymphophiles are attracted to girls who have begun to mature sexually, but are not yet fully grown, while pedophiles prefer children who have not begun to sexually mature.
Psychologists agree it is normal for young adolescents between the ages of eleven and fourteen to be sexually attracted to members of the opposite sex in their own age group. This is something we adults can all relate to when looking back at our middle school and junior high crushes. Of course, most people lose an attraction to children in this age group when they themselves reach adulthood. The male hebephile, on the other hand, remains attracted to middle school aged girls even after reaching adulthood. His sexual maturity is stuck in adolescence, never developing with his chronological age.
Like many hebephiles, Humbert's first sexual experiences were with girls in this age group, while he himself was what he calls a mere "faunlet." Humbert has no sexual attraction to adult women, even going so far as to find college girls hideous, if for no other reason than he can see beautiful nymphets trapped inside the flesh of their voluptuous adult bodies.
While on the subject of nymphets and hebephiles, I would like to point out the mis-use of the term "Lolita" in reference to AMY FISHER. AMY FISHER was 17 years old when she had an affair with an adult man. A 17 year old girl is fully developed and sexually mature. A man sexually attracted to 17 year old girls is considered "sexually normal" by psychologists. Lolita, on the other hand, was a mere 12 years old and just entering puberty when she began her affair with Humbert.
While reading LOLITA I could not help noticing the similarities to THOMAS MANN's DEATH IN VENICE (TOD IN VENEDIG). Gustav Aschenbach, the protagonist in DEATH IN VENICE, is, like Humbert, an intellectual, highly educated, middle aged, European writer affluent enough to take long trips, spend all day reading and never hold down a job. While, Humbert is obsessed with nymphets, Aschenbach is obsessed with a young adolescent boy staying with his family in the same Venice hotel as Aschenbach. Aschenbach merely admires the young Adonis, Tadzio, from afar, never getting the nerve to actually approach him. On the other hand, his heterosexual hebephile counterpart manages to take the object of his affections as his child-lover.
I recommend LOLITA to any lover of great prose. The writing style may seem verbose to some, but I believe it is at times beautiful and poetic. This book is a must read for any bibliophile.
When it was published in 1955, Lolita immediately became a cause celebre because of the freedom and sophistication with which it handled the unusual e...More at Audible.com
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