Culture

Lolita is Nabokov’s best-known novel. Written about 60 years ago, the novel now is being promoted in the Central Library’s showcases as a crucial modernist text. But what characterises modernist fiction? It appears, on the whole, that modernist authors explore styles and themes that engage in moral relativity, subjective distortions and ironic plots. Reality as a linear, predictable scenario is put into question. In the literature, modernists reproduced the alienation of the self and the depravation of society. Similarly, Nabokov reveals a new experience of fiction. The enigmatic writer, considered one of the greater novelists of the 20th Century, implicates the reader in a story where one’s inclinations and notions of good and bad get deeply intimate. Lolita is a story that questions ideas of perverseness and love corruption; it is definitely a striking and witty novel.

A sense of a different written-tone and a new approach to the reader are some of the main characteristics of the novel: there is something completely exquisite in how the story is told. Written in first-person, the principal character is telling you the story all along, a voice that is constantly and disturbingly talking to you. You feel the description of his sensations: what he sees and how he sees it. The story revolves around Humbert Humbert, a man who is obsessively and passionately desirous of twelve-year-old Lolita. Which, of course, is a problem; most readers are repulsed by paedophilia. Yet this novel compels the reader to seriously consider child-love. That makes us uncomfortable. As we get to know Lolita – Lo, the childish girl – through the eyes of Humbert, we are made to understand his obsession with her, his Lolita. Could this be love? We don’t want to know.

Regardless, as the story progresses, one can’t help but feel Humbert’s pain and frustration. You cannot escape his voice or, as Humbert can’t, ignore his sexual desire for Lolita. His sense of pain and erotic prohibition leads you into an intense personal exploration of what is depravation and common sense. At a certain point, the reader understands that you’re not going to find the author’s opinion on the matter. In Nabokov’s own words: “It is childish to study a work of fiction in order to gain information about […] a social class or about the author.” It seems that moral judgment may have to be put aside to fully immerse oneself in this novel – but will we allow ourselves to do that? Can we allow Humbert to be a maniac in love, or will we just condemn him as a monster? We probably all agree that, for Lolita, this story is a tragic one – that in her innocence and lack of agency she has been raped out of her childhood. But do we extend that recognition to Humbert?

One thing is for sure: Nabokov will blow your senses; will play with your feelings and morals; will penetrate your mind with its characters and will embrace you in a deep swallow of fiction and desire. Lo, Lola, my Lolita: an immensely provocative, painfully and uncomfortably wonderful story.