Lolita Vladimir Nabakov ( A Review )

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Lolita, written by Vladimir Nabakov, the Russian-English author, is considered one of the best
novels ever written. It has been in various best novels lists for almost hundred years. It was
seeing this novel in many such lists, that made me pick this book many years ago and I
eventually read it, recently. Written on a subject considered taboo, the narrator,
Humbert Humberts wry humour, subtle descriptions at sex with his obsessive nymphets using
ironically the most decorous language imaginable, certainly makes for a treat for the lover of
literature. It was a slow read for me, as I went through, grinning at the wry humour at times,
shocked at the disclosures at others, the rigmarole of justifications at times of his actions, at
certain others. Here are a few excerpts; the first of which is his identification of one of his
precious nymphets:
You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot
poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine (oh,
how you have to cringe and hide!), in order to discern at once, by ineffable signsthe slightly
feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limbs, and other indices which
despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulatethe little deadly demon
among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of
her fantastic power.
I am sure this excerpt is enough to ignite in those who love the finely written word, of what the
reader may expect within these pages.
Here is another excerpt which hints at what the narrator may have been up to, unknown to the
fantasized , in a chance encounter. The sheer finesse with which the dirty is narrated, is
amazing.
"I felt proud of myself. I had stolen the honey of a spasm without impairing the morals of a
minor. Absolutely no harm done. The conjurer had poured milk, molasses, foaming champagne
into a young lady's new white purse; and lo, the purse was intact."
If one analyses the characters created and presented in this work, although all of them are
presented from the point of view of Humbert, with his impression of them serving as a
modulator, the reader gets the impression that the man is a fair judge of characters. But then he
has to be, given how closely his observes, as the example of his detection of a nymphet
extracted and presented here prove. For example heres how he sees Jean, a character of little
consequence in the book:
She was very tall, wore either slacks with sandals or billowing skirts with ballet slippers, drank
any strong liquor in any amount, had had two miscarriages, wrote stories about animals,

painted, as the reader knows, lakescapes, was already nursing the cancer that was to kill her at
thirty-three, and was hopelessly unattractive to me.
The way he describes his wife, a union of opportunity is further proof of this.
The narrator successfully paints himself most absurd , at times most incompetent ( i.e. the finale
of the book, where he has his revenge, and how difficult it was to achieve it, even when his
target was a sitting duck ) and the intellectual depth he immerses to justify his orientation yet,
the guilt raising its head every now and again, at which times the narrator almost implores the
readers to look at his case his with just eyes, with a little flexibility maybe more than a little
thrown in for good measure.
This is, to a certain degree a road trip novel, and to a larger level it deals with the psychological
makeup how a pedophile would go about reaching towards his goals. The fact that the man in
question is an intellectual, and describes the details of his conquest, his loss, his revenge and
his fall without an iota of crudity, and from start to end is narrated in a language of such
exquisite finesse, which I felt was almost beyond a non-native speaker of the language, makes
this an all important book in many fronts. The main point is the taboo subject no doubt but this
book has much, much more to offer than that controversial subject.
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Naleendra Weeapitiya