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I read Lolita several years ago. I went into it with some prior knowledge of its influence, and how it has largely been perceived - both in and outside of the literary world.

With that being said, I remember being drawn into this sordid tale of selfish, terrible obsession - not love, not really, because love isn’t about taking and taking from a person, grooming them, and manipulating them to your own ends. Love isn’t about a middle aged man preying on a twelve year old child, regardless of what Vanity Fair* and many others seem to think. So in my mind, it was very clear that Humbert Humbert was an unreliable narrator and a predator. Did he love her? Maybe. But not in a way that anyone should love anyone else. He may paint himself as the helpless victim and Dolores Haze as the young, wily seductress, but that doesn’t mean that we as readers have to buy into it. And if you have? I’m sorry, but either you’ve believed all of the lies a work of literature has told you, and have thus been defeated by it, or you’re probably the type of person who would make excuses for child rapists in real life, too. It doesn’t even matter if the child in question approached or seduced the adult; the adult should know better.

This book is very prettily written; the prose has a particular, lovely flow, rife with flowery descriptors and metaphors. In my opinion, that is a strong force in playing down the intense and disturbing themes of pedophilia, molestation, and rape. The way a book is written can be immensely swaying, and I didn’t realize quite how devastating the effects could be until I saw some of the other book covers for Lolita (that feature illustrations or photographs of young girls posing in what’s probably meant to be a seductive manner, or that one cover which has a photograph of what appears to be a child wearing a mini skirt - and which really only shows her from the upper thighs down to her childish looking sneakers). Until I read some of its reviews, including that Vanity Fair one. Until I read about Lo’s Diary, and read some of the reviews on that. Of course, some of the interpretations about Lolita are things people already think. Things like, ‘oh, she was asking for it�, or ‘she seduced me, so that means she is an adult and I can do whatever I want to her.� Rape culture, it seems, does not exclude children.

Vladimir Nabokov himself referred to Humbert Humbert as ‘a vain and cruel wretch who manages to appear ‘touching.’� That’s the whole point, at least to me. He lies to us, again and again and again. And it really is terrifying that we as readers can so easily be made to side with a monster and blame the victim based on the lies the monster tells us, so long as he makes it sound pleasant. Sure, he eventually admits that he raped Dolores, but even then it’s kind of� swept under the rug, not necessarily ignored, but certainly downplayed and even normalized. And people buy into it so completely. That is the power of literature, and of writing. That is why Lolita remains stuck in my head - in the background, mostly. But it always seems to come to the surface when I watch the news and hear about another teen, another child, or when I hear the phrase, ‘she asked for it�. Or when I recall those scattered moments of shame-laced unease when I myself was Dolores� age. To me, Lolita is a very important book, and remains so to this day� and I think it’ll only stop being important when people stop believing those particular lies that are fed to us, over and over again.

*The back of my copy features a review by Vanity Fair, which both catastrophically misinterprets Lolita as being ‘The only convincing love story of our century�. Like� really? There is not a single love story that convinced you for 100 years? You had to choose the one about a pedophile?

-Kelsey Joy