Book 27 - Vladimir Nabokov "Lolita"
Mar. 29th, 2016 04:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzy_daveVladimir Nabokov "Lolita" (Penguin Modern Classics)
This is more of a re-read as i once read this novel way back in the eighties. In many ways, this is still a controversial book due its subject of nymphets and pedophilia Hence, the feeling of unease whilst reading it.
Lolita is narrated by Humbert Humbert, a literary scholar born in 1910 in Paris, who is obsessed with what he refers to as "nymphets". This obsession with young girls appears to have been a result of his failure to consummate an affair with a childhood sweetheart, Annabel Leigh, before her premature death from typhus. Shortly before the start of World War II, Humbert leaves Paris for New York. In 1947, he moves to Ramsdale, a small New England town, to write. When the house he was promised burns down, he ends up at the door of Charlotte Haze, a widow, who has a sexually charged interpretation of taking in a lodger. As the two make their way through Mrs. Haze's tour of the house, Humbert rehearses different ways of turning her down, but then, after being led out into the garden, he spies Haze's 12-year-old daughter Dolores (variously referred to in the novel as Dolores, Dolly, Lolita, Lola, Lo, and L) sunbathing in the garden. Humbert, seeing Annabel Leigh in her, is instantly smitten with her and eagerly agrees to rent the room.
When Lolita is at summer camp, Mrs. Haze gives Humbert an ultimatum by letter that he must marry her (for she has fallen madly in love with him) or move out. He is horrified at first, but sees living with Lolita as his stepdaughter as a way to make her part of his living fantasy. Charlotte appears oblivious to Humbert's distaste for her and his lust for Lolita until she reads his diary. Horrified and humiliated, Charlotte decides to flee with her daughter, writing letters to Humbert, Lolita, and a strict boarding school for young ladies to which she apparently intends to send her daughter. Charlotte confronts Humbert when he returns home, ignoring his protests that the diary entries are just notes for a novel, and bolts from the house to post the letters. But upon crossing the street, she is struck and killed by a passing motorist. A child retrieves the letters and gives them to Humbert, who destroys them.
Humbert picks Lolita up from camp, telling her that her mother is desperately ill in a hospital, and takes her to The Enchanted Hunters, a hotel of regional repute, where he meets a strange man (later revealed to be Clare Quilty), who seems to know who he is. Humbert intends to use sleeping pills on Lolita, but they have little effect. Instead, she seduces Humbert, and he discovers that he is not her first lover, as she has had a sexual affair at summer camp. After leaving the hotel, Humbert tells the now-troublesome Lolita that her mother is dead. Alone and frightened, Lolita has no choice but to accept Humbert into her life on his terms.
Driving Lolita around the country in Charlotte's car, moving from state to state and motel to motel, Humbert bribes the girl for sexual favors; he falls genuinely in love with her, but is conscious that she is not attracted to him and shares none of his interests. Eventually, the two settle down in another New England town, Beardsley, with Humbert posing as Lolita's father and Lolita enrolled in a private girls' school where the headmistress views Humbert's possessive supervision as that of a strict, old-world European parent.
Humbert nevertheless is persuaded to allow Lolita to take part in a school theatrical club (extracting additional sexual favors from her in exchange for his permission). Ominously, the title of the play — The Hunted Enchanters — is an inversion of the name of the hotel where he first molested her. Lolita is enthusiastic about the play and is said to have impressed the playwright, who attended a rehearsal. But before opening night, she and Humbert have a ferocious argument, and she bolts from the house. Found by Humbert a few minutes later, Lolita declares that she wants to immediately leave town and resume their travels. Humbert is delighted, but increasingly guarded as they again drive westward, nagged by a feeling that they are being followed and that Lolita knows who the follower is. He is right. Clare Quilty, an acquaintance of Charlotte's, the nephew of the local dentist in Ramsdale, and the author of the play being performed at Lolita's school, is himself a pedophile and amateur pornographer. He is tailing the couple in accordance with a secret plan of escape devised with Lolita. While Humbert becomes increasingly paranoid, Lolita becomes ill and recuperates in a nearby hospital. One night, she checks out with her "uncle", who has paid the hospital bill. Humbert, still clueless about the identity of Lolita's "abductor," makes farcical and frantic attempts to find them by inspecting various motel-register aliases, which have been laced by Quilty with insults and jokes flavored with literary allusions.
During this period, Humbert has a chaotic, two-year love-affair with a petite alcoholic named Rita who, at 30, is 10 years younger than he and a passable physical substitute for Lolita. By 1952, Humbert has settled down as a scholar at a small academic institute. One day, he receives a letter from Lolita, now 17, who tells him that she is married, pregnant, and in desperate need of funds. Armed with a gun, Humbert, still driving Charlotte's car, visits his young obsession and gives her the money she was due from her mother's estate. He also asks her to leave with him, but she refuses. During their conversation, Lolita explains that her husband, a nearly deaf war-veteran and the father of her unborn child, was not her abductor, whereupon Humbert offers to give her all the money he has if she will reveal the man's identity. Lolita complies, saying that she had really loved Clare Quilty, but that he threw her out after she refused to perform in a pornographic film he was making.
Leaving Lolita forever, Humbert surprises Quilty at his mansion. Quilty goes mad when he sees Humbert's gun. After a mutually exhausting struggle for it, Quilty, now insane with fear, merely responds politely as Humbert repeatedly shoots him. He finally dies with a comical lack of interest, expressing his slight concern in an affected English accent. Humbert is left exhausted and disoriented. Arrested for murder, he writes the book he entitles Lolita or, The Confessions of a White Widowed Male, while awaiting trial. According to the novel's fictional "Foreword", Humbert dies of coronary thrombosis upon finishing his manuscript. Lolita dies, during childbirth, on Christmas Day, 1952.
This is more of a re-read as i once read this novel way back in the eighties. In many ways, this is still a controversial book due its subject of nymphets and pedophilia Hence, the feeling of unease whilst reading it.
Lolita is narrated by Humbert Humbert, a literary scholar born in 1910 in Paris, who is obsessed with what he refers to as "nymphets". This obsession with young girls appears to have been a result of his failure to consummate an affair with a childhood sweetheart, Annabel Leigh, before her premature death from typhus. Shortly before the start of World War II, Humbert leaves Paris for New York. In 1947, he moves to Ramsdale, a small New England town, to write. When the house he was promised burns down, he ends up at the door of Charlotte Haze, a widow, who has a sexually charged interpretation of taking in a lodger. As the two make their way through Mrs. Haze's tour of the house, Humbert rehearses different ways of turning her down, but then, after being led out into the garden, he spies Haze's 12-year-old daughter Dolores (variously referred to in the novel as Dolores, Dolly, Lolita, Lola, Lo, and L) sunbathing in the garden. Humbert, seeing Annabel Leigh in her, is instantly smitten with her and eagerly agrees to rent the room.
When Lolita is at summer camp, Mrs. Haze gives Humbert an ultimatum by letter that he must marry her (for she has fallen madly in love with him) or move out. He is horrified at first, but sees living with Lolita as his stepdaughter as a way to make her part of his living fantasy. Charlotte appears oblivious to Humbert's distaste for her and his lust for Lolita until she reads his diary. Horrified and humiliated, Charlotte decides to flee with her daughter, writing letters to Humbert, Lolita, and a strict boarding school for young ladies to which she apparently intends to send her daughter. Charlotte confronts Humbert when he returns home, ignoring his protests that the diary entries are just notes for a novel, and bolts from the house to post the letters. But upon crossing the street, she is struck and killed by a passing motorist. A child retrieves the letters and gives them to Humbert, who destroys them.
Humbert picks Lolita up from camp, telling her that her mother is desperately ill in a hospital, and takes her to The Enchanted Hunters, a hotel of regional repute, where he meets a strange man (later revealed to be Clare Quilty), who seems to know who he is. Humbert intends to use sleeping pills on Lolita, but they have little effect. Instead, she seduces Humbert, and he discovers that he is not her first lover, as she has had a sexual affair at summer camp. After leaving the hotel, Humbert tells the now-troublesome Lolita that her mother is dead. Alone and frightened, Lolita has no choice but to accept Humbert into her life on his terms.
Driving Lolita around the country in Charlotte's car, moving from state to state and motel to motel, Humbert bribes the girl for sexual favors; he falls genuinely in love with her, but is conscious that she is not attracted to him and shares none of his interests. Eventually, the two settle down in another New England town, Beardsley, with Humbert posing as Lolita's father and Lolita enrolled in a private girls' school where the headmistress views Humbert's possessive supervision as that of a strict, old-world European parent.
Humbert nevertheless is persuaded to allow Lolita to take part in a school theatrical club (extracting additional sexual favors from her in exchange for his permission). Ominously, the title of the play — The Hunted Enchanters — is an inversion of the name of the hotel where he first molested her. Lolita is enthusiastic about the play and is said to have impressed the playwright, who attended a rehearsal. But before opening night, she and Humbert have a ferocious argument, and she bolts from the house. Found by Humbert a few minutes later, Lolita declares that she wants to immediately leave town and resume their travels. Humbert is delighted, but increasingly guarded as they again drive westward, nagged by a feeling that they are being followed and that Lolita knows who the follower is. He is right. Clare Quilty, an acquaintance of Charlotte's, the nephew of the local dentist in Ramsdale, and the author of the play being performed at Lolita's school, is himself a pedophile and amateur pornographer. He is tailing the couple in accordance with a secret plan of escape devised with Lolita. While Humbert becomes increasingly paranoid, Lolita becomes ill and recuperates in a nearby hospital. One night, she checks out with her "uncle", who has paid the hospital bill. Humbert, still clueless about the identity of Lolita's "abductor," makes farcical and frantic attempts to find them by inspecting various motel-register aliases, which have been laced by Quilty with insults and jokes flavored with literary allusions.
During this period, Humbert has a chaotic, two-year love-affair with a petite alcoholic named Rita who, at 30, is 10 years younger than he and a passable physical substitute for Lolita. By 1952, Humbert has settled down as a scholar at a small academic institute. One day, he receives a letter from Lolita, now 17, who tells him that she is married, pregnant, and in desperate need of funds. Armed with a gun, Humbert, still driving Charlotte's car, visits his young obsession and gives her the money she was due from her mother's estate. He also asks her to leave with him, but she refuses. During their conversation, Lolita explains that her husband, a nearly deaf war-veteran and the father of her unborn child, was not her abductor, whereupon Humbert offers to give her all the money he has if she will reveal the man's identity. Lolita complies, saying that she had really loved Clare Quilty, but that he threw her out after she refused to perform in a pornographic film he was making.
Leaving Lolita forever, Humbert surprises Quilty at his mansion. Quilty goes mad when he sees Humbert's gun. After a mutually exhausting struggle for it, Quilty, now insane with fear, merely responds politely as Humbert repeatedly shoots him. He finally dies with a comical lack of interest, expressing his slight concern in an affected English accent. Humbert is left exhausted and disoriented. Arrested for murder, he writes the book he entitles Lolita or, The Confessions of a White Widowed Male, while awaiting trial. According to the novel's fictional "Foreword", Humbert dies of coronary thrombosis upon finishing his manuscript. Lolita dies, during childbirth, on Christmas Day, 1952.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2016-03-29 04:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-29 07:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-29 09:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-29 10:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-29 06:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-29 10:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-29 06:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-29 10:00 pm (UTC)No one EVER makes that distinction. [In fact, it was a friend here on Livejournal who acquainted me with that term some years ago. I'd never heard it.]
no subject
Date: 2016-03-30 09:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-29 06:52 pm (UTC)Rather glad I skipped this novel. Big pile of 'whut?!' and trying to be apologetic-but-not-really sexual reuminations on under-age girls.
no subject
Date: 2016-03-29 07:13 pm (UTC)Exactly! And that she seduces Humbert, for no apparent reason, before he can dose her with pills and rape her.
I couldn't bring myself to ever read this-- just on the surface, it seems like an apologist trying to render unspeakable attraction as acceptable, by providing a context in which it is "not as bad as any regular person would assume."
Dave's summary of it was very good, though, and it seems to capture all of those angles.
Dave, how did you feel about the prose style? I tried to read a different Nabokov novel back around age 12 or so (it was in my parents' collection, probably a book-of-the-month offering), and was mainly struck by what seemed to be an experiment to construct the longest single sentence ever-- 1 1/2 pages! Which did not make the book any more interesting and certainly less readable.
I'm sure I didn't have much of a feel for prose style back then, but I loved the Nero Wolfe novels enough to read them at 11 or 12, and just looked up another favorite of my childhood: "The Fog Comes" (Mary Collins).
no subject
Date: 2016-03-29 07:24 pm (UTC)Gosh, yes. I write some...pretty awful stuff. But I would not stoop to this kind of apologetic, asinine, twisted nonsense. At least all of my characters darn well know what is going on and I make no bones about calling it what it is. And I never bring CHILDREN into the mix. UGH.
Dave did a damned good job here. Hell, technically, I've read the book - without ever having to flick a page (so that is one classic down :D)
BTW - hi! Long time no see!
*HUGS*
no subject
Date: 2016-03-29 07:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-29 08:07 pm (UTC)I guess it is the tone that gets me here. The author seemed to know it was..unwelcome, if not wrong. And considering it has become the champion novel of the future pedophile, it almost makes me wonder if he could see the future on this. I have no problem with putting aside my era's enlightment and seeing through the eyes of the day (a rare trait, I know - but I can watch 60's Who without being put off by the blatant sexism in it), but it seems that even in the novel's time, this was unacceptable - but a subject the 'enlightened' of the day hesitated to approach.
no subject
Date: 2016-03-29 08:22 pm (UTC)You are so right about the rampant sexism of the times and yet i wonder f we have moved on much at all with such detestable people as Trump et all.
no subject
Date: 2016-03-29 08:38 pm (UTC)Gahhhh, I know what you mean. We like to think we're enlightened, but I guess we have just stagnated. UGH.
no subject
Date: 2016-03-29 07:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-29 08:07 pm (UTC)Still - good to see you! :D
no subject
Date: 2016-03-29 07:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-29 08:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-29 08:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-29 08:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-29 08:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-30 12:46 am (UTC)Hugs, Jon
no subject
Date: 2016-03-30 09:19 am (UTC)