By Vladimir Nabokov
It has been a while since I posted because this book was hard to read. I originally sought it out because My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell just came out, and the author had stated she referenced this work in that one. Lolita is a “classic”, referenced often in pop culture, and I thought to stay “well-read” I needed to dive in.
Better to have stayed in the shallow end, because this book is awful. It is insensitive, dehumanizing, and most importantly criminal. Touted as a “love story”, this tale is one of self-justification and pedophilia. For the bulk of the story, the narrator, a grown man who constantly tells us how handsome he is, takes his step-daughter all over the country from motel to motel. During this two years of meandering he rapes her repeatedly and systematically, all while citing self-aggrandizing “reasons” he was compelled to do it.
He removes her identity, calling her instead variations on Lolita rather than her actual name. She is also referred to as something other than human, a “nymphet”, which in the narrator’s frame of mind is evidence to his case. I think it is more logical that predators have to dehumanize their victims in order to still sleep at night.
Whoever elected this book into the canon of literature should be arrested. The author has repeatedly stated it is not an allegory of any kind, and any pretense that it is somehow an illustration of love in the extreme is laughable. Normally I am very anti-book burning, but this one comes close.
