Review: Lolita

Title: Lolita
Author: Vladimir Nabokov
Nationality: Russian
Year: 1955
Publisher: Odyssey Editions
Length: 300+ pages
Rating: 9/10
Summary: The inner workings of the criminal mind

The outline

One of a rare group of books in world literature which is famous (or infamous) enough to need no introduction.

Sample

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee Ta.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

The verdict

Everyone knows that Lolita takes the reader inside the mind of a paedophile, the psyche of a criminal who kidnaps a young girl and takes her on a debauched road trip across the United States. But the novel itself is about so much more than that.

Humbert Humbert’s witty and lyrical, yet snobbish and evasive, narrative forces the reader to reconsider the nature of evil. Humbert is both likeable and monstrous creating a more complex and probably more realistic portrait of a depraved mind than you will find in most works of fiction. This is a difficult book, not only in terms of content but also in style. Humbert’s intellectual flourishes give a crucial insight into his character, but there will be few readers who can pick up on more than a fraction of his cross-references, puns, in-jokes and verbal gymnastics.

Humbert is the archetypal unreliable narrator and the reader is never sure when he is lying, deluding himself or succumbing to the madness that has plagued him for most of his life. This is most crucial in the depiction of Lolita, a poor Dolly who we only ever see through Humbert’s eyes and who never gets to speak for herself. Readers are left to decide for themselves how much Humbert says about her is true. This is not a love story as some people have claimed. This is a story about possession.

The subject matter means that Lolita is not a book for the squeamish or easily offended reader, or anyone who will take Humbert’s narration at face value. But for the more mature reader who can cope with the incongruity between Humbert’s wit and his crimes it is an undoubted classic.