Love is Forbidden... Wider Reading 2: Lolita

"You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style" opines Humbert Humbert, erstwhile college professor, aesthete and tortured romantic. Establishing him as one of the greatest writers in the English language, Lolita is Vladimir Nabokov's impossibly funny and rapturously beautiful story of Humbert's total, catastrophic obsession with twelve-year-old Lolita Haze. At once prim and predatory, Humbert will stop at nothing in his frenzy to possess his "nymphet," first marrying her mother and then embarking with Lolita on a journey across the American landscape, through roadside diners and five-dollar-a-night motels. A once sublime and awful, cruel and irresistible, Lolita is a triumphant masterpiece of twentieth century literature.

"Lolita" has often been described as "the only convincing love story of the twentieth century." Although the novel was banned on publication on the grounds that it was pornographic, Lolita is most definitely a story about love, not lust. Indeed, many types of love are explored within the novel, and all are experienced by one man. While Humbert's love for Lolita borders on the obsessive, it is also unrequited, despite the duo's spending upwards of three years together. The emphasis on "forbidden" love is questionable, however, as the taboo element of the novel changes with the time in which it is read.

As I mentioned before, most contemporary readers dismissed the novel as too explicit and shocking, with a level of public outrage not seen since "Lady Chatterley's Lover." However, to the modern twenty-first century reader, the actual words and scenes within the novel itself are fairly harmless, compared with the level of candidness now popular in fiction. The subject matter, however, remains just as shocking in its dealing with underage sex and paedophilia, though this is up to the opinions of the reader.

I personally find the novel both appalling and enlightening, and it is one of my favourite books. The sophisticated language used by Nabokov is untouchable, and exactly mirrors the conflict of the protagonist.

Lolita - Quotations