Lolita

The book is the pseudonymous author Humbert Humbert’s recollection of his abduction of the young girl Dolores Haze, and it is a sirenic work of beautiful words concealing an unbeautiful reality. There’s been so much said about the plot and topic itself but I think there are more important aspects. You can read this kind of plot in crime reports with more ease, but the book presents the psychology of an antihero which is far more interesting and its literary style is often overshadowed by the incendiary plot. Contrary to what you might be initially think, Humbert doesn’t have the face of a shady crook; he seems to be the charming, educated professor and family man, and his unraveling due to his pedophilic Achilles heel is even more interesting as a result. In fact, the novel itself is a parody on many topics, the whole plot being hinted as a setup crafted by the main villain, or alternatively the hero to the antihero Humbert.

From the outset, it’s easy to instinctively judge Humbert, but as the novel progresses it becomes increasingly hard to maintain the original judgment. If anything in the novel spoke to me, it was that judging people even if you know about them is a rigged game that people rarely win, that it’s sometimes impossible to get to the truth of the person since their truth is too often incoherent, contradictory, paradoxical and as Humbert notes for himself, a “tangle of thorns”. Nabokov presents a pretty standard but adequate Freudian account on how Humbert developed his pedophilia in an anecdote early in the story, and from that point I started to view Humbert through a lens of resigned pity, a pity at the fact that he was trapped within his own mind and had to follow his psychological abnormality to its dismal ends of madness while dooming other innocent lives in the process. There are those who vehemently and singularly hate Humbert purely for his crime, and I think they missed a large portion of the book, as it would take an inhuman amount of apathy not to see the human behind the criminal’s face.