Lolita
by Vladimir Nabakov
Reading Lolita is like listening to the most technically perfect guitarist perform. The technically perfect guitarist will wow you with his precision and render any complexity into a shell of a joke. The guitarist’s fingers will hit all of their marks on the fretboard with frightening and spidery ease; their other hand will glide over the strings like a wizard hitting their perfectly tuned chords. Their music won’t be seen as music per se by their adoring audience, but something that transcends “music”; it will be explained as being more a manifestation of atmosphere and an exercise of perfection rather than mere performance. (In fact, to call it a performance would probably be insulting.)
There is one other caveat to watching, or listening to, a technically perfect guitarist perform, and the same caveat applies to reading Lolita: its perfection and its essence begins to transition into boredom.
To me, Lolita is the example by which a case could be made for a literary Uncanny Valley; its prose and its structure was so well-executed that it actually became more and more disorienting to read the further I got into the book. The prose tried so hard, too hard, that I found myself thinking that the book was like a printed version of an animated movie by Robert Zemeckis—in its attempt to be as real-looking as possible, it only amplified the minor flaws I was picking out and caused more thoughts of annoyance rather than praise to infiltrate my head.
To put it another way: this book comes across as a little too professorial. Maybe if I took a semester course that only focused on this novel, with a professor that kept my interest, I would have been in the proper mindset to adequately worship this book. But then again, therein lies the rub. I actually do admire this novel. I do realize what it’s strengths are. I do recognize its significance. I do recognize that it is Important, and deserving of a spot in the canon of modern American literature alongside Invisible Man and To Kill A Mockingbird and Infinite Jest. I stood in awe of some of the writing. I understand now why Nabokov worshippers exist and I have begun to understand their platform. I will admit that this book should be on the list of novels you should read before you die.
That said, I just didn’t like this novel.
The primary reason I did not like this novel is because it ultimately wants to be too many things throughout its pages. It is a book that wants to be treated like an experience, filled with double entendres, word play, and psychological and subconscious observations of tyranny, and the objectification of girls. I get that. I would guess that this is exactly why the people who love this book love it so much: because, technically speaking, you can dissect many parts of it and be amazed at its individual structure and prose as well as marvel at the cohesive whole. Me? I found the cohesive whole—specifically, the second part of the novel—to be just mostly uninteresting. I found myself getting bored by the technically wonderful prose… just like how I begin to get bored by the technically wonderful and perfect and classically-trained guitarist. It becomes too much too care about.
The first part of the novel (excluding the foreword) is brilliant, make no mistake about it. It’s uncomfortable and it attempts (successfully, I think) to force you to care about Humbert Humbert, one of the most grotesque characters in modern literary history. It wants you to feel sorry for—or, at the very least, quell our knee-jerk predispositions—about a pedophile, and it wants us to do this in a fundamental sense but to still care about it through the lens of the pedophile himself, even when we know that his narration goes through valleys of fog and outright lying. The second part of the novel? Again, the prose is so good from a technical aspect but I also found it to be suffocating. At times, I wanted to throw the book against the wall and scream Get on with the story already! Stop being so fucking scholarly with your prose! Sometimes, the book felt more like a writing project than an accessible story.
Before I end this review I must repeat an earlier clarification: though I didn’t like this book, I still respect its “classic” status. It is a very smart and complex novel. If nothing else it is amazing to read how Nabokov wrote a story about pedophilia, a story in which he is prevented from giving you any real details about the act that Humbert so desperately craves; an act that is central to the story. It is truly impressive. It’s just that this novel spoke to me on maybe one or two levels rather than the five, six, or eleven levels that classic novels usually speak to you on. So, yes, I did not like Lolita but I would be the first to recommend that everyone include it on their “to read before I die” list of books. The flashes of brilliance in this book are remarkable—remarkable enough that having to wade through its oceans of boredom in the second part are worth it.
