A Leisurely Stroll Through "Lolita," the Greatest Novel Ever Written
Nabakov, in "Lolita," does not waste a single word. Even the title is a trick. He is not in love or even in lust with Lolita. He is in love with language; with words.
John Ray, Jr. (Nabakov in disguise) lays out some important facts right in the foreward of the book, warning those that picked up the book due to its scandalous reputation that they might be disappointed. In fact, Nabakov plays a great trick on all unsuspecting readers.
"True, not a single obscene term is to be found in the whole work; indeed, the robust philistine who is conditioned by modern conventions into accepting without qualms a lavish array of four-letter words in a banal novel, will be quite shocked by their absence here."
Indeed, Nabakov loves words too much, has too many games to play with them, to waste time "dropping F-bombs" and other ineffectual lazy gimmicks.
But no, it is more delicious than even that. Nabakov is behind the joke; he is the true writer of the foreward, disguised as "real." It is enchanting the way he is able to pull off this hoax with such elan:
"...had out demented diarist gone, in the fatal summer of 1947, to a competent pyschopathologist (what is this?), there would have been no disaster; but then, neither would there have been this book. This commentator may be excused for repeating what he has stressed in his own books and lectures, namely that "offensive" is frequently but a synonym for "unusual" and a great work of art is of course always original, and thus by its very nature should come as more or less shocking surprise."
"I have no intention to glorify "H.H." No doubt, he is horrible, he is abject, he is a shining example of moral leprosy, a mixture of ferocity and jocularity that betrays supreme misery perhaps, but is not conducive to attractiveness."
"A desperate honesty that throbs through his confession does not absolve him from sins of diabolical cunning. He is abnormal. He is not a gentleman."
This is typical of the style; dry, comical, self-deprecating, hilarious, pretending to be serious.
Nabakov wastes no time, and hits us with this zinger in the first page:
"You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style."
He describes his early love, Annabel, in the most beautiful of passionate terms:
"All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other's soul and flesh..."
And then later...
"I am convinced, however, that in a certain magic and fateful way Lolita began with Annabel."
One of the central themes of the book is his yearning not only for the young love he never consummated, but with the youth, and very life he had before. Who has not felt this way at some time in their life? But he personifies with Lolita. And Lolita becomes dirty and soiled, and imperfect and rotten, just like real life can be, making it clear that we just can never go back.
Nabakov's prose is lyrical. It is thrilling and mouthwatering and a delight to readers. The beauty interspersed with the taboo topic only adds to its ferocious perfection. For example:
"...that vibrant sky seemed as naked as she was under her light frock. I saw her face in the sky, strangely distinct, as if it emitted a faint radiance of its own. Her legs, her lovely live legs, were not too close together, and when my hand located what it sought, a dreamy and eerie expression, half-pleasure, half-pain, came over those childish features."
Stunning.
And then...
"But that mimosa grove- the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honeydew, and the ache remained with me, and that girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since- until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another."
To dance with words with such beauty into such a twisted sick act is thrilling.
He describes "nymphets:"
"...the elusive, shifty, soul-shattering, insidious charm..."
And the way he describes "himself" is just so vivid and lyrical:
"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..."
And this:
"The dimmest of my pollutive dreams was a thousand times more dazzling than all the adultery the most virile writer of genius or the most talented impotent might imagine."
But he is so self-deprecating and playful with words that he can downplay the depravity with this pretty sentence:
"I daresay you see me already frothing at the mouth in a fit; but no, I am not; I am just winking happy thoughts into a little tiddle cup."
Beyond the lust for Lo is something deeper, a lust for life, especially his youth:
"Ah, leave me alone in my pubescent park, in my mossy garden." This sentence with "mossy garden" is so delicious with double entendre, yet not dirty or direct enough to for him to be caught.
Even when he is self-deprecating, he does it out of extreme ego. But when he is egotistical, his writing is absolutely perfect:
"Well did I know, alas, that I could obtain at the snap of my fingers any adult female I chose; in fact, it had become quite a habit with me of not being too attentive to women lest they come toppling, bloodripe, into my cold lap." Who writes like this? "bloodripe?" What a perfect, made up word, full of meaning.
He makes the most pathetic or banal events hilarious, such as this incident in which he catches his first wife in the act with a Russian man:
"I noticed with a spasm of fierce disgust that the former Counselor of the Tsar, after thoroughly easing his bladder, had not flushed the toilet. That solemn pool of alien urine with a soggy, tawny cigarette butt disintegrating in it struck me as a crowning insult, and I wildly looked around for a weapon."
I love these flashes of brilliance that also expose his madness.
He manages to describe the absurdity of life, such as this description of an experiment conducted by a distinguished scientist:
"The experiment dealt with human and racial reactions to a diet of bananas and dates in a constant position on all fours. My informant, a doctor, swore he had seen with his own eyes obese Valechka and her colonel, by then gray-haired and also quite corpulent, diligently crawling about the well-swept floors of a brightly lit set of rooms, in the company of several other hired quadrupeds, selected from indigent and helpless groups. I tried to find the results of these tests in the Review of Anthropology; but they appear not to have been published yet."
This is the real title to the book. This entire novel could be the fantasies of a madman, a sequence of dreams, a dance with words. Would it matter if it was? Not in the least.
In the afterward, he says indirectly that Lolita was "his love affair with the English language." And amusingly, he implies that his books in Russian are much better, and says "I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses - the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions- which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way."
Imagine the joy in reading Nabakov, in Russian, as an educated native speaker!
And much later he writes:
"But really these are irrelevant matters; I am not concerned with so-called "sex" at all."
One of my favorite passages in the book is how he describes how much he enjoyed fooling around while he was in the sanatorium. He makes Randle Patrick McMurphy of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" seem like a rank amateur:
"I discovered there was an endless source of robust enjoyment in trifling with psychiatrists: cunningly leading them on; never letting them see that you know all the tricks of the trade; inventing for them elaborate dreams, pure classics in style (which make them, the dream-extortionists, dream and wake up shrieking); teasing them with fake "primal scenes"; and never allowing them the slightest glimpse of one's real sexual predicament. By bribing a nurse I won access to some files and discovered, with glee, cards calling me "potentially homosexual" and "totally impotent." The sport was so excellent, its results - in my case - so ruddy that I stayed on for a whole month after I was quite well (sleeping admirably and eating like a schoolgirl). And then I added another week just for the pleasure of taking on a powerful newcomer, a displaced (and, surely, deranged) celebrity, known for his knack of making patients believe they had witnessed their own conception."
More funny ways to say the serious:
"I exchanged letters with these people, satisfying them I was housebroken, and spent a fantastic night on the train, imagining in all possible detail the enigmatic nymphet I would coach in French and fondle in Humbertish."
Nabakov as more verbal weapons at his disposal than an army, but when he wants a better one, he just makes it up! And then:
"...his house had just burned down - possibly, owing to the synchronous conflagration that had been raging all night in my veins."
It's very clear, that at least in Humbert's mind, no nymphet is a pure, innocent child. That is not what he is attracted to. His desires are more subtle, more nuanced:
"What drives me insane is the twofold nature of this nymphet - of every nymphet, perhaps; this mixture in my Lolita of tender dreamy childishness and a kind of eerie vulgarity, stemming from the snub-nosed cuteness of ads and magazine pictures, (...) and from very young harlots disguised as children in provincial brothels;"
Even a list of students at Lo's school is fair game for Nabakov's word play. Almost every one has a subtle or not so subtle double entendre for a name:
"Angel, Grace
Buck, Daniel
Fantasia, Stella
Flashman, Irving
Fox, George
Falter, Ted"
And on and on. (In the afterward, Nabakov claims this is one of his favorite parts of the book that he "pick(s) out for special delectation.")
Not every sentence is half a paragraph long. Some of his best are short:
"We hasten to alienate the very fates we intended to woo."
Again, one of the fun things is the way Nabakov makes up words:
"The stars that sparkled, and the cars that parkled..."
"...how I might eventually blackmail - no that is too strong a word - mauvemail big Haze into letting me..."
The way he describes the lack of a penetrative sex act is poetic:
"The conjurer had poured milk, molasses, foaming champagne into a young lady's new white purse; and lo, the purse was intact."
And describing his own drunkenness in the perfect lyrical sentence:
"The gin and Lolita were dancing in me, and I almost fell over the folding chairs that I attempted to dislodge."
His foreshadowing is blunt, which only adds to the humor, since it's already obvious this is not going to end well:
"A few more words about Mrs. Humbert while the going is good (a bad accident is to happen quite soon)."
"No man can bring about the perfect murder; chance, however, can do it."
He respects no one:
"...with Lady Bumble - or Sam Bumble, the Frozen Meat King, or a Hollywood harlot."
And more double entendre snuck in among his snobbishness:
"Palace Sentries, or Scarlet Guards, or Beaver Eaters, or whatever they are called."
In his madness, he does describe the pathetic lot of many men:
"When you decorate your home, I do not interfere with your schemes. When you decide - when you decide all kinds of matters, I may be in complete, or in partial, let us say, disagreement - but I say nothing. I ignore the particular. I cannot ignore the general. I love being bossed by you, but every game has its rules."
He readily admits his depraved behavior, in a deadpan, but hilarious way, by dropping in quick vignettes like this one:
"Finally, I did achieve an hour's slumber - from which I was aroused by gratuitous and horribly exhausting congress with a small hairy hermaphrodite, a total stranger."
His descriptions of the vast country of the United States, with its motor inns and barely-under-the-surface depravity are colorful:
"...all along our rout countless motor courts proclaimed their vacancy in neon lights, ready to accommodate salesmen, escaped convicts, impotents, family groups, as well as the most corrupt and vigorous couples."
His snobbish attitude:
"I needed a drink; but there was no barroom in that venerable place full of perspiring philistines and period objects."
He skewers religion and marriage in one fell swoop:
"There is nothing wrong, say both hemispheres, when a brute of forty, blessed by the local priest and bloated with drink, sheds his sweat-drenched finery and thrusts himself up to the hilt into his youthful bride."
He laughs at the ludicrous nature of the world:
"I derived a not exclusively economic kick from such roadside signs as TIMBER HOTEL, Children under 14 Free."
This sentence is an entire paragraph, and for readers, Mobius Loop of great writing:
"Now in perusing what follows, the reader should bear in mind not only the general circuit as adumbrated above, with its many sidetrips and tourist traps, secondary circles and skittish deviations, but also the fact that far from being an indolent partie de plaisir, our tour was a hard, twisted, teleological growth, whose sole raison d'etre (these French clichés are symptomatic) was to keep my companion in passable humor from kiss to kiss."
Nabakov is never blunt or crude when describing the sex act. Here is an elegant, pithy way he writes it:
"Venus came and went."
One of the best plays with words is when he is discussing Lo with the headmistress Pratt, and she keeps on using the wrong name for Mr. Humbert, and his Lolita:
"Mr. Humbird...Dolly...Dorothy Humbird...Dr. Humburg...Mr. Humberson...Dr. Hummer...Dorothy Hummerson"
His descriptions of others, stream of consciousness, with the ultimate insult being how terrible a man's language was:
"He always wore black, even his tie was black; he seldom bathed; his English was a burlesque. And, nonetheless, everybody considered him to be a supremely lovable, lovably freakish fellow!"
But he saves his best insults for Gaston, his real or imagined rival for Lo's attention:
"There he was, devoid of any talent whatsoever, a mediocre teacher, a worthless scholar, a glum repulsive fat old invert, highly contemptuous of the American way of life, triumphantly ignorant of the English language - there he was in priggish New England, crooned over by the old and caressed by the young- oh, having a grand time and fooling everybody; and here was I."
How do you read things like this without laughing out loud?
"Dolly has written a most obscene four-letter word which our Dr. Cutler tells me is low-Mexican for urinal..."
And:
"Should I marry Pratt and strangle her?"
And this crazy sentence, which shows his madness and depravity and brilliance at once:
"It may interest physiologists to learn, at this point, that I have the ability - a most singular case, I presume - of shedding torrents of tears throughout the other tempest."
Great descriptions, this of the American countryside:
"... the enchanted interspace slid on intact, mathematical, mirage-like, the viatic counterpart of a magic carpet."
And just plain silliness:
"We had breakfast in the township of Soda, pop. 1001."
The way he describes his terror at being caught, after it has faded:
"... there was a day or two of lovely release (I had been a fool, all was well, that discomfort was merely a trapped flatus)"
Who hasn't felt that way before- something that bothers you viscerally, fades in importance?
And finally he drops the inevitable punch line, as if he was waiting the entire novel to say it, when Lolita has escaped him:
"There was no Lo to behold."
Nabakov at one point finally breaks out in poetic verse, which is effortless for him, because all of his writing is so lyrical. And in his usual style, he uses a sentence to develop the Humbert character further:
"By psychoanalyzing this poem, I notice it is really a maniac's masterpiece."
He describes later Rita, his companion that he picked up "some depraved May evening between Montreal and New York" and says of her "She was so kind, was Rita, such a good sport, that I daresay she would have given herself to any pathetic creature or fallacy, an old broken tree or a bereaved porcupine, out of sheer chumminess and compassion."
And soon thereafter, one of my favorite sentences in the entire novel of great sentences:
"It is no the artistic aptitudes that are secondary sexual characters as some shams and shamans have said; it is the other way around: sex is but the ancilla of art."
His description here is perfect:
"...in a hideous hotel, the kind where they hold conventions and where labeled, fat pink men stagger around, all first names and business and booze..."
He sneaks some truths in:
"I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art."
He makes us laugh even with the silly, childish acts like this passage, in which he asks a dentist for a price quote:
"'No,' I said. `On second thoughts, I shall have it all done by Dr. Molnar. His price is higher, but he is of course a much better dentist than you.' I don't know if any of my readers will ever have a chance to say that. It is a delicious dream feeling."
Such silliness and even the "Dr. Molnar."
Only Nabakov can describe masturbation in such elegant terms:
"The house, being an old one, had more planned privacy than have modern glamour-boxes, where the bathroom, the only lockable locus, has to be used for the furtive needs of planned parenthood."
In his post-novel comments, Nabakov gives more clues on the novel, admitting that the forward by the fictional John Ray steals some of his credibility when discussing the novel from a distance. But he does tell us:
"I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction, and despite John Ray's assertion, Lolita has no moral in tow."
He tells us the "secret points, the subliminal coordinates by which the book is plotted- although I realize very clearly that these and other scenes will be skimmed over or not noticed..."
He finishes the novel on a high note, expressing the truth, only art endures, if it isn't written down it didn't happen:
"I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita."
Throughout this brilliant, perfect, lyrical novel, Nabakov alternates between lies, fantasies, funny stories and fabrications. But he does sometimes admit the truth, such as when he bluntly says:
"Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with."
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Reviews with images
Everyman's Library edition
The letters could be a little bigger (AA batteries for comparison) and less blurry (they're not that blurry, but a cheap classic penguin book I compared to has a sharper font).It doesn't stay open as easily as certain videos I saw suggested.Otherwise, It has all the good features you expect from Everyman's Library (clothed hardback, acid-free paper, ribbon, ec.).
Top reviews from other countries
Brujo Gómez
Una obra maestra que no es lo que pareciera
Reviewed in Mexico on March 19, 2022
