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Pushing the boundaries of what acceptable literature can actually be, Lolita is very much a piece of art.

For many years I kept hearing about this book, the content sounding disturbing and perhaps even slightly fascinating. It’s a book that’s central theme is one of the darkest elements of mankind: paedophilia. And although such a thing is beyond revolting, it is used to tell the tale of a very lost and very lonely man. Humbert is a man to be pitied, pitied because he actually exists.

A child in a man’s body, unable to move on from what was to him the most perfect memory; Humbert’s obsession with youth takes on the form of paedophilia: he becomes attracted to this idea of purity and develops strong sexual feelings towards it. Humbert knows he is a monster, but he just doesn’t care. To him his feelings are perfectly justifiable, natural even. He has an incredibly distorted view of the world; thus, we see the world through the eyes of an extremely unreliable narrator. Perhaps unreliable is the wrong word. He reports what he sees with utmost honesty; however, his perceptions of these experiences are, well, just wrong.

As a character study, he is a very worthy subject. In the wake of Freudian psychoanalysis, Nabokov’s novel is aware of the rising field of psychology. Humbert is a walking contradiction. He is at times unbelievably arrogant, and at other times he is timid and weak; he is passive yet manipulative; he derides nothing from life other than a person sense of sexual gratification: it’s all he lives for. He has an exceedingly narrow range of interests; he scrutinises everything and remembers the most minor of details. He is charming, but at other times completely socially awkward. I think it wouldn’t be too far a thing to suggest that there are elements of Autism within his personality. He is obsessive about things, about his work and “his�� Lolita. Ironically, at one point, he expresses succinct knowledge of Freud and at another he demonstrates complete ignorance towards Freud’s psychosexual stages of development. So who exactly is this Humbert?

Humbert is lost; he is lost in life, and he is lost within himself: he is hopeless, looking for any sense of light in his life. Unfortunately, this projection of desperation takes on the form of a child. He falls in love with Lolita, and what she represents to him. But of course it’s not real love; Lolita is just a sexual object to him not a person. So what follows is a story of a man who has convinced himself that his actions are perfectly justified. When he takes a twelve year old child in his arms; it is perfectly fine to his mind because she comes willing. Never mind the fact that he has crafted a situation so that she responds to his advances. She is vulnerable and completely alone in the world; she has no one to turn to in her moment of grief, and the snake is ready to lunge.

Nabokov describes some truly disturbing scenes, though he does so with eloquence bordering on the genius. Sounds odd, considering what I have just described. The content of the book is vile, Humbert is vile, but in a fictionalised world we have to look beyond that. The world is seen through the eyes of Humbert, so everything we see is what he sees and what he experiences. Nabokov uses free-indirect style to narrate some harrowing scenes, the content is vile but the language is beautiful. Again, this is what Humbert experiences. As troubling as this book may be, I argue that this has very strong place in the literary world. Nabokov explores the mind of a sexual predator and I think as readers we can learn a great deal in the process. We can see how the psychological make up of such an individual is formed and we can see what they think and they feel. To understand such a man is the first step towards stopping him and recognising this behaviour in other men.

As a reviewer, I find it of vital importance to read the reviews of others. There’s a quote on the back of my book from one such review; it says, and I quote “There’s no funnier monster in modern literature than poor, doomed Humbert Humbert.�� I cannot quite describe how angry that quote makes me. There is nothing funny about Lolita.This book is terribly serious in content, and Humbert is not a man to be laughed at. What we have is a deeply disturbed individual, one confused and drifting through life, cold and utterly broken inside, and he is about to ruin the life of a young girl.

I don’t laugh at this book, I weep at its brilliance.

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