Love and Lolita

I always knew I'd fall in love with Vladimir Nabokov's controversial masterpiece Lolita. As a long time lover of fucked up literature [check out White Oleander, Fight Club, Disco Bloodbath] , I always thought of Lolita as the queen bee.

Last summer, I finally got around to ordering a copy of my long-awaited scandal novel, but didn't start reading it until around fall. It took me far too long to finish Lolita, much longer than the pace I had read books throughout the summer. A lot of that has to do with Nabokov's masterful writing style. He writes so richly, and ornately that I often went back and read passages several times over.
But this language also kept me caught in a trance. I would hang on to every word as I flipped through pages of devious, fantastical, and wildly passionate scenes.

The thing about Lolita is that while the relationship between main character Humbert Humbert and fantasy girl-child Dolores Haze (Lolita) is universally wrong and disturbing, make no doubt about it that this is a love story. Vanity Fair calls it "The only convincing love story of our century". And the deeper you fall into the story, the more you realize just how true it is.

Many passages struck my heart to the core.

• "Sometimes, while Lolita would be haphazardly preparing her homework, sucking a pencil, lolling sideways in an easy chair with both legs over its arm, I would shed all my pedagogic restraint, dismiss all our quarrels, forget all my masculine pride--and literally crawl on my knees to your chair my Lolita! You would give me one look--a gray furry question mark of a look: "Oh no, not again"; for you never deigned to believe that I could ever crave to bury my face in your plaid skirt, my darling!"

• "...there she was with her ruined looks and her adult, rope-veined narrow hands and her goose-flesh white arms, and her shallow ears, and her unkempt armpits, there she was, hopelessly worn at seventeen, with that baby, dreaming already in her of becoming a big shot and retiring around 2020 A.D.--and I looked and looked at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am going to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else."

Reading passages like these affected me even physically. Towards the end of Lolita, whenever I read in public I could feel the emotional toll the words were taking on my facial expressions and body language. I would feel like crying. Often, people in the streets would stop and ask me what was wrong or what I was reading.

I believe Nabokov really achieved something extraordinary. It's hard enough to write about love, but to make it so convincing that the words take a real, emotional toll on the reader takes magic. And he created this magic between a pedophile and a young girl.

Through all his passion, obsession, hopelessness, and insanity, the reader knows clearly of the love that Humbert Humbert has for little Lolita. The reader knows it, and they feel it. And most importantly, they believe it. How strange that one could read a novel with such a torrid, disturbed relationship and leave wishing that someone might one day feel the same way about them?