9 of 11 members found this review helpful.
“Many critics have called Lolita a tragicomic, although ‘horror satire’ might equally be apt of a descriptor. The novel’s narrator, Humbert Humbert, remains a memorable literary villain drawn from the literary gene pool of Iago or Roger Chillingworth. And like the above villains, Humbert takes pride in manipulating individuals’ struck by tragedy (in this case Dolores Haze or, as Humbert christened her, Lolita).
What’s striking about this novel is the villain acts as the narrator, and the reader gets a darken view of an irrational man and his sexual desires. And while his actions are detrimental to the social structure of Nabokov’s self-made literary universe, those same actions are masked by the narrator’s charm, intellectualism, bohemian lifestyle, and ‘fatherly’ kindness. And of course the reader is in danger of falling for this devilish charm up till the last half of the novel’s end (and perhaps not even then). This is the subtle genius of Nabokov where the reader is disgusted by the protagonist dirty hands while, at the same time, being caressed by the narrator’s erstwhile poetic rationale.
Despite historical troubles with Lolita and censorship, the book is not ‘pornographic’ in the strict sense of the word, nor does it endorse rape. In fact, the novel stands as a morality play on the consequences of one man’s destruction of society through an act of destruction of one child’s innocence. By novels’ end three characters will die and the reader is left with the impression that a cathartic experience of the Grecian kind has just occurred. In this sense, Lolita stands as perhaps as one of the most important books of the last century. And despite some individuals decrying the novel as pornographic, to many discerning readers it stands as a great ‘anti-erotic’ or ‘anti-pornographic’ novel.
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treal wrote this review Thursday, February 7 2008.
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