Agenda of Lolita, an overview of Lolita, a reader friendly guide

At the end of September, I came again with my blog post. And this time, I have chosen 'Lolita' by Vladimir Nabokov to give my views and understanding of the book.

'Lolita, the light of my life, fire of my loins, my sin, my soul. Lolita, the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap at three on the teeth, Lolita.' So those are the opening lines of the novel Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, and these lines I think are very representative of what it is like to read this novel.

Those lines are considered one of the greatest opening passages in the literary world. And for the good movement of it, it is really beautiful - the construction of the sentences is just really good. However when you remember that Lolita is a twelve-year-old girl and our narrator, the person who is saying these lines is a middle-aged man, it kind of changes the way you interpret life. You have this really beautiful description of love and lust in this very repulsive situation, and that is what it is like to read this novel. There are all sorts of great moments of beauty that are hiding in this horrible tragedy, which occurred especially to its characters. And it is an interesting experience as a reader to find it all in one place, compact into a piece of a novel. 

I am not going to characterize something that would be contradictory for some people because I understand that Lolita is the type of novel that some people won't be able to deal with. While there are never any explicit scenes of sexual contact between Lolita and our narrator Humbert Humbert, still, it would be unbearable for many who would find it quite disturbing. Here Humbert has his way to describe things from his point of view. It is quite dipped in literary explanations and metaphoric similies but there is also an exponentially biased point of view of him that would become unacceptable for others who are new to this type of novel. And I definitely can understand that. But I do think that there are some conceptions about Lolita, or at least there were some misconceptions that I had about the novel before I read it. That it might be keeping people from trying it out, so I kind of wanted to explain some of those things with you. It also occurred to my mind that what a person could gain from reading this novel because it is a novel that made a huge impact on me.

So, one of the misconceptions that I had about Lolita is - I was fearful of how the novel was going to be. It was a fear that Lolita was going to be a novel about a young girl seducing an older man or vice versa. The word 'Lolita' itself for the last whole decade came to be generalized as something that came out as an obscure thing. A girl addressed as Lolita, her looks, and how we can essentially sort of sexualizing young girls, all of this comes to a trend in the last period. But that is not what the novel is like as it was completely different from what I expected it to be. It is not obscene or not at all anything that the trend has to do with it, it is an excellent novel by far according to its literary concerns. It is not like the novel is upfront from the very beginning, it is about the fact that Humbert Humbert is a predator, he is very straightforward about that. He lets you kneel and submit to him as he is some kind of a most reliable narrator. He makes you believe that with his self-proven words. In the beginning, he stated the theory of nymphet - 'I am a person who has an unnatural attraction to younger girls'. He presents the incidents before you as it was all planned out before. He is just a mere human whom fate plays differently. Creating uncertain scenarios, he acted on these impulses. And have his ways to try and entrap the readers to believe his ventures. Like it is very clear that he is the person in control. In these situations, no urgency was necessarily being given to these young girls. And as we watch him, sort of progressing through his relationship and his contact with Lolita, he again stays very upfront about that he is the predator. He is manipulating. He is tricking and blackmailing and abusing this girl. But he is pretty upfront about that. Most of all he never pretended that he is doing something good for her. He never tries to pretend that this relationship is in any way shape or form mutual, and I appreciated that. I think that it is important to know because that was my biggest fear before I went into the novel that I decided to read at last.

My Views -

This novel with its characters was going to be random to apologize for pedophiles but that is not what the novel Lolita does. It makes great use of unreliable narrators like Humbert. I don't think that I read a book where the narrator has been as deceptive as Humbert Humbert. And he is deceptive because he is a smooth talker and that's the reason why he is very charming and very smart. He had this sophisticated aura around him that charmed others who came in contact with it. And so when you hear him speak and the language that he uses, and the way he talks, you kind of get drawn into him. I can imagine him being like a professor or someone who belongs to a leading role in our daily life. When the readers come in contact with this horrible dark side of him, it becomes intriguing, and also it is just a disturbing scenario for them who cannot tolerate his notions. It is surprising and also a kind of an eye-opening experience. Because it does a very good job of reminding us of the fact that we don't at least know who the monsters are in our world. You feel like there is a part of us that want to believe in the monsters but there is the other part that subconsciously fears it all together. We can figure out the people who would harm us or harm our children or harm people that we love. That we could just figure out who those people are and this book does a really good job of making sure that you can't do that. I think that that is genius of the writer to present it blatantly before us.

I think that Vladimir can write about his narrator and write his characters in a way that voices much more of his characters. It has been done so beautifully that you constantly forget who and what he is. It is remarkable and for me, that is something that I feel outstanding. Someone interested in beautiful writings like me wanted to explore more into human psychology, who gives a great focus in character understandings, this book is for you.

The beauty that can weave these sorts of masks around ugliness is a passage in the book. It is illustrated in the section where Humbert Humbert is describing this road trip of him. This trip is across America and he is describing a lot of stays that they have made along the way. It is in this nice section, a list of these things that make it so beautiful. This is so beautifully written that it sounds like he is subscribing. He is an amazing American landscape reader that explains it further with his American-like perspective. The picture that he paints of America is really beautiful and striking. And then however when I read it, I felt a deep urge to experience it all according to how he is describing things. You sink deeply into it, you felt it almost as you read it for the first time. You realize that the places he is describing are like backwoods, motels, and like those little sideshow shop attracts us the most. These attractions that you see people avoiding or look at or Roach at movies right felt weird as you are some kind of an exile yourself. Like those weird oddities and attractions that we see on the sides of roads, he's not describing the Grand Canyon or any of these. He simply dictates his ideas and perfectly mixed them with his feelings that draws the readers in. He has a way of describing it so that it sounds really beautiful. And I think that is how this novel works. It's like 'how do I make these ugly ordinary things seem amazing', I think that Nabokov does a great job with it. Though unreliable Humbert Humbert is a narrator, and you cannot trust him, but eventually, you will find yourself doing it. Often so for an instance, he gives us a lot of descriptions of Lolita's mother and what he thinks about her. Snd I found myself seeing her just like he sees her in the novel. She thinks she is richer and more sophisticated than she is, so she says, 'Women who put on airs and pretend to know things that she doesn't know, she hates them.' But still, it is her who is spiteful, who is even jealous of her daughter for attentions. If she heard about a sexual relationship going on between their daughter and an older man she would probably blame her daughter before blaming anybody else. Like this Humber describe her as an awful woman and I found myself disliking her so much until I remembered whose point of view I was getting her description. He is so manipulating that it will be too late for the reader to decide whether to trust him or not. As in reality, we are taking the words of a person who is seducing her daughter over hers. At a point, it will be difficult to trust. It is just that He might want to make her appear in a certain way just to make himself look better.

It is a very interesting experience for a reader o I pointed it out beforehand. But with time a reader can finally see him under his deception. When he was in jail and trying to justify himself you will become skeptical because he is not in jail for his relationships. It is not for his molestation or of his abuse of Lolita. He is in jail for another reason, and when you get to the reason for why he is in jail the whole situation will feel absurd. It is written so beautifully as so comically and so absurd that you're like there is just no way that it feels true. And so it makes you wonder whether or not any of the issues in this story that he's telling me about is true or not. Many questions will arise in your mind while reading, as 'how he is just trying to do something for the girl or it is just for his own needs?' This very thing I love about this novel, of having that question of not being able to know what is real and what is not.

Character Insights -

Humbert always says that he does not know what is happening in the character's mind. In the interior of Lolita their works a foreign world that was completely outside of our gasps as we are following Humbert's storytelling. That is why we never get a solid idea about how she feels about certain situations. And it in a whole helps the plot further to create a mystery, a mystery of her ploy. Her long-planned deception to escape the clutches of Humbert's perverts. I can see some people seeing that as a flaw in the novel but I think it works splendidly. Because it is an individuality of the beautifully written books that wrote about repulsive things we often neglect in our lives. This book is not horrible, I would say if there is anything that can open your eyes more to how impossible it is to determine who the bad guys in this world are. Then being tricked by one is one thing and to watch another character be lured into trusting someone is another thing.

To sort of have that experience yourself is truly celestial for a reader. When I was reading it I saw I had an even clearer understanding of how I feel about certain human psychology. I guess to put it in simple terms, you would have an idea of pedophiles and rapists and murderers, and all of these kinds of horrible people who do these horrible acts, are still human beings. Before Humbert's arrest, we got his ultimate realization about his crime that would coin this as a poised truth about the realities of these criminals. Here, Humbert gives us his scene of redemption, his fullest recognition of what he has done. His crime, as he understands it, was to deprive Lolita of two things that he, an eccentric exile, never knew: a home and a place in a community. Two stories end here at the same time. One is the story of Humbert the character, and it ends with his arrest. The other is the story of Humbert the narrator, who has just finished figuring out the plot—the pattern and meaning—of his life. The story of the telling is no less important than the story of the life told: Humbert's manuscript has been an emotional attempt on his part to immortalize Lolita, make sense of his life, and come to terms with his crimes.

They are still people with feelings and thoughts and personalities and I feel like this piece drives us home to where we started the novel. Where Humbert was just a normal person who got jilted by his recently lost love and become love-sick. It is from that point he becomes obsessive about possessing something that would become a substitute for his lost love of Annabel.

So, here ends my overview of Lolita. It is simple and to the point, only became descriptive where it sites the juncture of plot twists. I never give ample solicitations about the plot and it cannot be said that I gave any spoilers. So be adoptive and accept it as just an overview and nothing more. It is up to you whether you are going to read it or not. And if you want any deep studies of the characters, feel free to contact me here. But I would highly recommend you to read the book first. Cause nothing gives the vibe same as the original creation does.

For your kind information, after reading the book you can watch the film adaptions of this novel. There are currently two faithful adaptions, one is black and white (1962) and the Colour one (1997) featuring Jeremy Irons as Humbert Humbert.

Goodbye, and wait for my blog post. I bet it will be interesting.