Review: Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

In my experience, the best unreliable narrators are those that go to great efforts to prove their reliability, or excuse their unreliability. The account of Humbert Humbert is introduced as being written 'under supervision' giving the impression that he is far worse than he lets on. However, when facts and figures are omitted, he professes that they are only changed to suit a seemingly irrelevant narrative, such as making up names and filling in conversations he doesn't remember in entirety. The rest of his crimes, therefore, are confessed with a full chest.

As I read this novel I felt a constant sense of overwhelm. Not just by the content of Humbert's crimes against the teen-age Dolores Haze, but the sheer volume of them, committed in full lucidity. It's this lucidity that made reading Lolita a truly unique experience. The hallucinogenic prose style, riddled with wordplay ('nymphet/infant') and ever-changing settings made it so almost every other page had a different tone that demanded to be explored in full. Dolores 'Haze' herself seems to exist in a shifting identity: a professed New American Teenager, her power oscillates between meek child and self-assured woman. In the words of her paramours: 'She seduced me.'

The concept of the teenager was a new one in the emerging American market. Having become marketable, the 'teen' years were fueled by debate, from child rights advocates, popular culture curators, and the youths themselves. Existing in a grey area between child and adult was no easy feat, and with the whole of America as their playground (the culture of hotels and motels is a subtext that piqued my interest) the book read as a game of cat and mouse across the country. Humbert and Lolita navigate perpetual homelessness for consecutive years, evading suspicion while their strained relationship drives a wedge between them, and as Lolita comes of age tragically early, Humbert's 'nymphet' seeks escape at every intersection.

I wondered at how self-conscious and self-aware Humbert could be, who professed that if there was a way to sate his perversion without affecting the course of a child's life, he would, then contradict himself by becoming a tyrant to the one he claims to be deeply in love with. Simply put, Vladimir Nabokov didn't shy away from highlighting the hypocrisies of the American culture he wrote from, as an outsider looking in. Examining the institutions that young girls are subjected to, and throwing accusatory literature their way, he aptly exposes how the post-war patriarchy was obsessed with two things: girls and sex.

Reading this novel was eye-opening to me. I had surface-level knowledge of post-war America from A-level History, but this novel read like it was reported from the ground, and though Humbert almost revels in his exploits and reporting them, Nabokov surely doesn't. In the afterword, he confessed he thought of burning early manuscripts early on:

...I was stopped by the thought that the ghost of the destroyed book would haunt my files for the rest of my life.

In short, Humber manipulates the reader, Lolita, and to an extent, the author. Like Lolita, we 'had absolutely nowhere else to go.' Forced to hear his 'logical' excuses out with no power to interject, the worst of humanity is fed through unfiltered into our eyes and ears. The only reprieve comes from the prologue: assurance that Humbert, at the time of publication, is already dead.

Lolita offered one of the most unique reading experiences I've had this year. Unreliable narrators always score high in my books, but because of the fact they force the reader to put in half of the work of untangling the truth beneath what they say. Nabokov made all of America into a character that both antagonised and enabled Humbert (Humbert's 'official' crime, the one he was on trial for, was murder); he accused it as much as Humbert for nurturing a society where girls are preyed upon in a time where their identity is most uncertain to themselves and the world.

Lolita scores another 5/5 from me, but like most books that score so high, I can't see myself re-reading it any time soon. (A common trend, as next week's book is Cormac McCarthy's The Road.)