I chose Lolita as my first book of this project for a reason: it was the one I perhaps resisted the most, it was the one I knew least about, and it was the one that, in a sense, I was scared to conquer. Would it make me feel uncomfortable? Would I have to stop reading it because of its "pornographic" nature? Would I even be able to look at it from an artist's point of view? But I was excited to start this project, and I knew the first book I read had to be something challenging, had to be something that was just as arresting as it was monumental. After finishing it, I am glad I saved it for first, because it was exactly what I needed.
For those who haven't read it, I should set you up with some context: our narrator, Humbert Humbert, goes to live with a widow and her only daughter in Ramsdale, a small New England town, where he falls in love (lust?) with the young girl, Lolita (a "nymphet"). He marries the widow in order to be near Lolita, and continues to be obsessed with her throughout her girl-childhood.
To reiterate, this is not a book-club for one; this is not a forum where I cast judgements on the book and say whether I liked it or not. This is where I study it, this is where I see what the author was up to, this is where I answer my question of why it's become the status it has become.
First things first: the style of this book is ingenious. Not only does it have a fictional foreword (much like Lauren Slater's Lying, which certainly must have been inspired by this), but it becomes this metaphysical novel, a "memoir," as it is so often referred throughout the book, even though it is labeled as "fiction/literature." I found myself falling in love with that style, and Nabokov did it successfully because he took it further than the manuscript's end--he penned a foreword by a fictional character, even dating it, totally setting up the reader.
Humbert also makes mention of making things up, which, in a weird way, is proving his reliability by admitting his unreliability. When he says that he was so handsome that every single woman his age would flock to him, marvel and drool over him, should I believe it when, in the same voice, he says that he's making up something somebody says? And, most importantly--does it really matter if he's telling the truth or not? In this case, I don't think it really matters.
Oftentimes I found myself completely mystified by Humbert Humbert. I was aware early on how incredibly unreliable he was, yet I could not doubt his feelings, his thought processes, his never-ending obsessions. He knew he was grotesque, often referring to himself as a monster, and I knew he was grotesque. I knew that what he was doing to and with Lolita was morally wrong, and he knew it, to some extent, but--and this is where this book succeeds so fantastically--I at times felt compassion for such a lewd man. Now that, my friends, is an artist at work.
Another thing that compelled me about this book was the language, the sentence-level beauty that makes all writers tingle in jealously because we did not think of it first. Here are a few of my favorite, for simply talking about them will not do them justice: "...like pain in a fatal disease that comes back as the drug and hope wear off, there it was again behind us, that glossy red beast." "We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night--every night, every night--the moment I feigned sleep." "The Park was as black as the sins it concealed."
This book is a classic not only because of the subject matter it tackled (and no, it is not pornographic in any way, I'd argue--people who have said that just didn't read it) at a time when this subject was completely taboo for publishers, but because of its innovative style and voice, because of the very fact that Nabokov was playing with us this whole time, being constantly one step ahead of the reader. I don't understand every aspect of this book--there are some parts where I'm confused and would like some explanation, and some parts where I admittedly skimmed--but I do know that this book has gone places other books have not, and it has allowed its successors to go there as well. People haven't forgotten this book 56 years later because it uses its masterful prose style to transcend generations, leaving each reader with something, something that they've connected with, no matter what age or era they read it.
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