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This is the fourth Nabokov work I've read in as many weeks, and what I’d really like to do in this review is compare the four books in terms of narrators, literary references, mirror effects, word games, etc - and avoid entirely commenting on the issue of underage sex slaves.

But I can't do that. Not when the core of the book concerns the main character's obsession with girl children of twelve years of age. Not when he is so particular in his categorising of those girl children that he begins to sound horribly like a lepidopterist. The 'nymphets' he searches out have to fit the classification he has drawn up: there are precise measurements listed; there are exact skin tones and hair colours described: honey, peach for the skin, russet for the hair; there is a focus on the exact shape of their wing-like shoulder-blades and the exact texture of the fine down on their limbs; there is even a description of the way they must move. He is so rigid in his selection process that only very few meet his requirements, and when he finally succeeds in capturing one, he pins her triumphantly to his bedsheets. Hmm.

There was clearly no way to avoid referring to all of that.

I know, of course, that I'm dealing with an author who likes layers. For that reason, I was wide awake while reading Lolita, all senses on alert. The previous Nabokov books had taught me to look out for the meanings that lie beneath the surface, but as I read through the first half of this book, my awareness of the captive orphan theme overrode the sense of pleasure I experienced in the turns of phrase, the literary treasure hunts, the wordplay and the games that the author likes to play with the reader. Speaking of games, the scene I found the most disturbing was one in which Nabokov cleverly allowed his narrator, Humbert Humbert, to draw me deeply into his mindset. The scene takes place in the early pages when the narrator describes visiting an apartment in Paris where a young girl is offered to him by a procuress. The girl is sitting on a bed, holding a bald-headed doll, but since the girl is older and more developed than the type of 'nymphet' Humbert is looking for, he tries to leave, and a tussle with the procuress ensues. Then, a door at the end of the room was opened, and two men who had been dining in the kitchen joined in the squabble. They were misshapen, bare-necked, very swarthy, and one of them wore dark glasses. A small boy and a begrimed, bow-legged toddler lurked behind them. With the insolent logic of a nightmare, the enraged procuress, indicating the man in glasses, said he had served in the police, 'lui', so I had better do as I was told. I went up to Marie—for that was her stellar name—who by now had quietly transferred her heavy haunches to a stool by the kitchen table and resumed her interrupted soup while the toddler picked up the doll. With a surge of pity dramatising my idiotic gesture, I thrust a banknote into her indifferent hand. She surrendered my gift to the ex-detective, whereupon I was suffered to leave.

That brief peep into the misery of one family’s life stayed with me; it somehow seemed more horribly real than all of the rest of the book. And it was because of the details in the description, the bow-legged toddler reclaiming her precious doll, the reprieved girl stoically resuming her supper, that I was more moved by that scene than by anything that came afterwards. Nabokov had engineered the situation so that I was somehow sharing in Humbert's distorted sympathy and simultaneous revulsion for those people; the details he thought important to record were details that overwhelmed me with their hopelessness. As I read on, I was aware of Nabokov arranging things to both entertain and discomfit me by turns, and he succeeded - the updates provide the history of my alternating state of attraction and repulsion up to about the half way mark.

Once beyond that point, I began to understand and better appreciate what Nabokov was up to, or at the very least, I understood that he was up to something artistically and lexically interesting, and that his text was not about morality or immorality, that it was outside such terrain just as Proust’s La Prisonnière, also about an imprisoned orphan, lies beyond it. In the end notes, Nabokov disowns the ethical justification that his fictional editor 'John Ray' seeks to convey in the foreword, a message of vigilance to parents, social workers and educators. Instead, he tells us that Lolita has no moral in tow. For me, a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. In so far as I understand Nabokov's statement, it conforms to what I believe to have been Proust’s motivation also: a constant searching after the aesthetic quality of experience so that everything in life, however unsavoury, becomes grist to the art-mill.

Returning to the imprisoned Albertine theme, there are more parallels than the simple fact that she and Dolores Haze are captives. Proust and Nabokov give their 'captive' characters a serious preoccupation with clothes, and allow their narrators to take great pleasure in choosing elaborate garments for their 'darling' captives. Both narrators are exasperated by the lack of culture their darlings insist on presenting, and try to interest them in books and music and art without much success. In the meantime the darlings dally with other partners behind their besotted captors' backs, the darlings being far cleverer than their captors, so that the notion of captive and captor is reversed in the end.

While we're on the subject of Proust (and non-Proust fans might want to skip the next two paragraphs), Dolores reminded me not only of his famous Albertine but also of Gilberte Swann as we meet her in the last section of Du côté de chez Swann, when she is about twelve. In the afterword of Lolita, Nabokov provides the opening paragraph of a story that is his original of Lolita. It was called The Enchanter, and he wrote it in 1939 more than fifteen years before he wrote Lolita. There is a girl described on roller skates in the Tuileries gardens in Paris who sounds exactly like Gilberte: A violet-clad girl of twelve (he never erred), was treading rapidly and firmly on skates that did not roll but crunched on the gravel as she raised and lowered them with little Japanese steps and approached his bench through the variable luck of the sunlight��. The description goes on and the resemblance to Gilberte as Proust's narrator first described her becomes clearer.

There are other parallels with Proust I could point out, especially with regard to how both he and Nabokov describe colour and landscape. This passage highlights the similarity - I almost said parody: Beyond the tilled plain, beyond the toy roofs, there would be a slow suffusion of inutile loveliness, a low sun in a platinum haze with a warm, peeled-peach tinge pervading the upper edge of a two-dimensional, dove-grey cloud fusing with the distant amorous mist. There might be a line of spaced trees silhouetted against the horizon, and hot still noons above a wilderness of clover, and Claude Lorrain clouds inscribed remotely into misty azure with only their cumulus part conspicuous against the neutral swoon of the background. Or again, it might be a stern El Greco horizon, pregnant with inky rain, and a passing glimpse of some mummy-necked farmer, and all around alternating strips of quick-silverish water and harsh green corn, the whole arrangement opening like a fan, somewhere in Kansas.
The 'somewhere in Kansas' reads like a joke at the end.

As well as displaying his art credentials, Nabokov leads the reader on a blistering literary paper chase referencing many characters and literary works. I'm encouraged to indulge myself in the same way (self-indulgence is not foreign to Lolita), and recall here all the literary characters who came to mind while I was reading about Dolores Haze. Two of Raymond Queneau's characters remind me of her: Sally Mara from Les œuvres complètes de Sally Mara, and the twelve year-old Annette from Un rude hiver, a perky little person who seduces the apparently helpless and harmless narrator! I also thought of Gerty McDowell from Ulysses, although she is older admittedly. Nabokov makes several reverential references to Ulysses so it's possible she is an inspiration. Issy from Finnegans Wake he doesn't mention, but I think she resembles Dolores Haze too. Alice Lidell comes to mind as well, and she is mentioned once or twice. I also thought of Jonathan Swift's Stella - she was very young when they first met, in fact he was her tutor. And of course Dante's Beatrice - the girl Dante claimed to have loved since he first saw her aged nine. Nabokov mentions Beatrice a couple of times, but his main inspiration is Poe's Annabel Lee: Humbert talks frequently of the Annabel whom he loved long ago in a kingdom by the sea, parodying Poe without the slightest blush.

There is a lot of parody and even some outright farce in Lolita. Nabokov sometimes doesn't bother inventing names, resorting instead to some hilarious excuses for names: Humbert mentions a Mrs Opposite (the woman who lived opposite), a Miss Pratt (who lived up to her name), a Mr Trapp (who was a detective), and lots more. He plays similar games with place names and it's fun figuring out the clues embedded in the names.

The most farcical character is Clare Quilty, a kind of mirror image of the main character, Humbert (and Humbert comes from 'ombre' meaning shadow or shade in French, while Clare is pronounced similarly to 'claire', which means light or clear).
The idea of characters having a mirror image was a theme I noticed in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and was present in Pale Fire too, with Charles Kinbote mirroring John Shade, and in Pnin where the narrator is a kind of enhanced mirror image of the unfortunate Pnin.
The mirror idea recalls a chess board too, another common metaphor in Nabokov's books, so it's not surprising that Lolita can be seen as a giant chess game where the United States of America is the actual board. Quilty and Humbert chase each other across the board and back again in an attempt by each to steal the other's Queen. The end of Lolita can be described as a perfect stalemate: nobody wins but nobody loses.
My experience of the book was similar: I wasn't always super happy while reading it but nevertheless, I opened my fifth Nabokov as soon as I finished..