Review Score 4/5 Stars
Heavy spoilers abound in this review. Read at your own risk.
What is the difference between love, and obsession? Lust, and affection? Sexual attraction and that feeling of "love at first sight"? Many a man, including myself, have muddled the line between these concepts, especially when faced with a person we find desirable and close-at-hand. We think to ourselves that they're the right person for us, the one that we want to live with for the rest of our lives and consummate our love every night in fiery passion. Yet, it's often delusion and self-deception that clouds our judgement, creating fanciful fantasies that contour to this desire and longing, and if left unchecked, can cause untold damage to the object of our fixation.
Lolita is a book about a man's sexual escapade with a pubescent young teen, taken from her home and her mother to travel around the continental United States. Humbert Humbert, a self-proclaimed romantic, believes himself to be in love with Dolores Haze, and suffering from a psychological ailment that was spawned by the death of his would-be first sexual partner when they were both but very young teenagers. It's with this memory that H. H. claims that he could only be aroused by pubescent girls, whom he calls Nymphets, and that girls like Dolores, or Lolita as he calls her, were perfect for him.
Story Synopsis
He meets Dolores Haze when he's housed by Charlotte Haze, her mother, who has a sour relationship with her daughter. Here we are shown how H. H. becomes fixated on Dolores, styling himself as a handsome man, tall, and "European", visiting the girl in her bedroom and constantly talking to her whenever he can. In the recess of his mind, we're given a glimpse of the sexual perversions H. H. considers whenever he thinks of Dolores, even going so far as to think of drugging both her and her mother so that he could fondle the child.
Dolores’s mother would fall in love with him however, and gave him an ultimatum. Marry her or leave. Wanting to stay with Dolores, H. H. agrees to marry Charlotte, but afterwards, she thinks of sending her bratty daughter away just so that she could be alone with Humbert, and that dismayed Humbert to a great degree, even to go so far as to plan to murder her. However, in the end, after she discovered his diary and thus his desire for Dolores, she would die of an accident when she was run over by a car on the way to send a number of letters that would have surely blown the whistle on the man she had married.
Humbert Humbert, saved by chance, now only had one thing on his mind: Dolores. He proclaimed himself as the only legal guardian of Dolores Haze, and to this claim he acted. Just after the quiet affair that was the funeral of his late wife did he leave, in search of his Lolita in the summer camp she was attending. To get her cooperation, he lied to her, telling Dolores that her mother was gravely sick, and that he was there to pick her up. But of course, the lies did not end there.
Humbert Humbert soon takes her to a hotel, where he manages for her to agree in having sex with him with the notion (and lie) that he did not know how to “do it” while she, while on her stay in the camp, had lost her virginity to a boy. It was afterwards in the next chapter that he begins to try to justify this act to the audience, remarking about the Roman Law that stipulates that girls could be married at the age of twelve, and then saying that it was indirectly followed in most of the U.S. states while the legal age was fifteen, and was followed “everywhere.” However, he neglected to say that these required the consent of both the authorities and the parents, of which Humbert Humbert left the former oblivious while the latter was dead. And, of course, not to mention that it differs from the age of consent, which was at sixteen and above in most of the states in the United States at the time, with sole exceptions such as the distant Hawaii.
It is here that the story begins its second and last act, where Humbert Humbert and Dolores Haze begin to travel throughout the country, and where their relationship begins to slowly deteriorate. In their numerous trips, Humbert Humbert begins to see Dolores’s faults more easily, such as her bratty attitude and her tendency to make him spend money at every turn, all the while he filled her head with notions that she should regard him as her father in public and not tell anyone of their sexual affections, for if it happened to come to light, she would be taken by the government and placed in the miserable custody of the authorities.
After a year of this, however, Humbert Humbert and Dolores make an attempt at having a sedentary life by settling in the town of Beardsley, where he enrolls her in a girls-only school and closely monitors her, but this alone wasn’t enough. Jealous and paranoid of every interaction Dolores had with another male, H. H. would forever be suspicious of her, scrutinizing her every word and action to the point of breaking into her room on the notion that she was planning on leaving him. After finding hidden caches of her allowance money, his trust, what little of it there was, was completely gone. This would only escalate when Dolores insisted on participating on a play she had already rehearsed for, but Humbert Humbert fervently denied her the chance, and after a scuffle of an argument-turned-violent, Dolores flees their home. Humbert Humbert, desperate in finding Dolores, finds her talking in a payphone, and when he came to confront her, the girl suddenly wants to reconcile with Humbert Humbert, and asks him to take her to another trip. It was an offer he couldn’t refuse.
However, this trip would not be like the last one. Humbert Humbert, ever paranoid, begins to notice a car trailing his own everywhere they went, to which he tried to confront at times but was foiled by timely distractions from Dolores. At one point, during a stop, Humbert Humbert finds Dolores disheveled, and begins to suspect her of having sex with another man at his back, but ultimately had no proof of such a claim. Some time afterwards, she would begin to feel ill, and it had come to the point that Humbert Humbert hospitalized her, which, to him, would prove to be a grave mistake. Days later, he would attempt at a visit to Dolores’s room, only to find her gone, checked out by an uncle and taken to a grandparent, but Humbert Humbert knew better. Dolores had no other relative than his dead mother. She was gone. Taken.
After two years of living in depression, having married a young woman prone to alcoholism and moved to the city of New York, Humbert Humbert would receive a letter from a certain Mrs. Richard F. Schiller, asking him for money to support her and her husband, addressing him as if she were his father, and then comes the name she had signed at the bottom. Dolly. He would leave everything, including Rita, for his trip to Coalmont.
He would at last find Dolores Haze, now seventeen years old, pregnant and living in a clapwood house on a destitute street of the town. He had come prepared with his pistol, ready to kill the man that had taken her away from him, but Dolores manages to dissuade him, telling him that it was another man, and one that had been so unlikely. Quilty. The one that wrote the play for Dolores’s play in her school, and the man Humbert Humbert had spoken to in the hotel where he had had sex for the first time with Dolores. Distraught, Humbert Humbert pleads with Dolores to come with him, and not only gives her the money she asked for, but three thousand dollars more, and still she refused, vehement in her new life with her husband.
Travelling back to the town where it all started, Ramsdale, Humbert Humbert prepared himself for what was surely murder of the man that had taken away his own Lolita. He would find Quilty in his mansion, and Humbert Humbert, resolute in the coming violence would manage, amidst several awkward blunders, to kill the man in his own home, even as he failed to get a confession from him. It was all over, and yet to him, it was still not enough.
Afterwards, during his escape, he would let himself be captured by the police. Not by coming to them to confess his crimes, but in his bout to break all the laws man has created, after committing murder and adultery with a child. What laws did he break just so that he could be captured? Traffic laws. Then Humbert Humbert writes the last paragraphs of his book, about his contempt to capital punishment (death penalty) and his last thoughts on Dolores, of whom he hopes to live a happy life with her new husband.
My own thoughts
Lolita is an incredible book and a great work of literature from Vladimir Nabokov, but the reason I'm giving it four stars is because I found many parts of the book to be slow and dull, especially when Humbert Humbert starts to babble and ramble about small insignificant things, such as locations and whenever he addresses the reader in matters such as money or what he would do to Dolores had he been able to do this or that. For one to find themselves bored while reading is the last thing an author should achieve, and although Mr. Nabokov achieves to make them somewhat relevant and interesting, there were far too many paragraphs detailing things of no import.
That said, there were many points in the story that were incredibly peculiar, such as Humbert Humbert’s own coined term, Nymphet. He describes Nymphets as girls between the age of nine and fourteen that display sultry and sexually attractive qualities, subtly standing out from the rest of other girls their age. It's interesting because it does one thing: dehumanization. H. H. does not see these Nymphets as children or even humans, but rather, other beings disguised as them, mingling with their peers and blending in to fit in their society.
Some excerpts of Humbert's description of Nymphets:
"Now I wish to introduce the following idea. Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac);"
"...in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs—the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limb, and other indices which despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate—the little deadly demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power."
These children are hidden demons because they unknowingly excite men like Humbert Humbert, arousing them and thus “absolving” them of their perversion, because it’s not their fault that they’re attracted to these girls. This way of thinking is nothing but a personal justification a person repeats to themselves just so that they can pursue these young girls without guilt, even if they know it’s immoral and illegal.
And another point that has been brought to my attention by people that have read this book: Humbert Humbert was in love with Dolores, which excused his actions.
I cannot fathom to ever have such thought. That idea was incredibly erroneous, and simply analyzing H. H.’s actions can explain why. Humbert Humbert was guided by his lust in anything he ever did with Dolores, from lying to her so that she could not report him to the authorities, to stalking her and even going so far as to make sure she never had the chance to make an escape. This was cemented during their attempt at sedentary life, where Humbert never once could trust her in what she did and what she spoke. He always suspected her, and was suspicious of any friends she made in school, and it reached the point that he began to thought that she had begun to have sex with another man. Lies, manipulation, and control, is what seemed to be Dolores’s life with Humbert Humbert.
Final Score: four out of five stars… Why?
The reason I'm giving this story four stars is because of the babbling strewn about in the story. Many times have I become bored in incredibly stale parts of the story where paragraphs covered an entire page and one could become lost in due to the unimportance of some sentences. Of course, one could argue that they're the ramblings of a man who is at the end of the line, going on about the tiniest detail in their story, but even then, the audience might still fall asleep during these page-long lulls in the story. Still, it’s the prose, the story, and the themes in it are more than worth it. I might even think that this story doubled my vocabulary!
