‘Lolita’ by Vladimir Nabokov

There are many classic novels that I have yet to read and I am trying steadily to get to. This one was first published seventy years ago this autumn, so it seemed like a good time finally to get to it.

I guess, like most, I had mixed experiences with it. The writing is, of course, sublime. It is extraordinary that Nabokov was able to write with such depth, subtlety and panache in English, having been brought up in Russia. He had British and French governesses I believe and so was trilingual from an early age.

Lolita has a reputation as being an obscene book, and it was only published in the UK after the law changed in 1959. In truth though, while the subject matter is unquestionably obscene, the writing is not. There is nothing explicit here at all.

It is written in the first person, the narrator who calls himself Humbert Humbert supposedly writing a memoir from his prison cell. So we know from the start that things are not going to end well for him, which is just as well given that he describes a lengthy sexual relationship with a girl who he first meets when she is twelve and who becomes his step-daughter. They travel around the USA together quite a lot after her mother dies, she goes to school after a fashion, then runs away from him.

It is all highly sordid and uncomfortable to read. But it is undeniably just superbly written. A quite original and brilliant piece of literature. The narrator is a monstrous man, but is wholly unapologetic and is as arrogant as he is unreliable in the telling of his tale.

The big problem with it is that it does rather make light of a the very worst type of situation and the very worst of humanity. Humbert Humbert is not a serial killer, but is only one rung beneath in the pantheon of evil. It is too amusingly written given the subject matter.