4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Year Published: 1955

Pages: 317

First Sentence: Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.

Rating: 2/3 (meh)

Review:

A few months ago, I listened to a podcast called Hunting Warhead, which is about taking down an online pedophile ring. It was tough to listen to—there are interviews with reporters, cops, family members and friends of the guilty parties, and some details of the crimes. It's so hard to imagine what it's like inside the heads of people who are sexually attracted to and abuse children, some entirely unrepentant and unconcerned about the harm they've done.

Vladimir Nabokov tried, and that's how we got Lolita. It's narrated from the first person perspective by a man calling himself Humbert Humbert. He likes young girls, specifically those between 10 and 13 years old, and only specific ones, who he refers to as nymphets. After taking us through some of his history (an unconsummated juvenile romance, his unsuccessful marriage, several stints in mental hospitals), Humbert goes to stay in the town of Ramsdale in New England with a woman named Charlotte Haze and her daughter. Humbert immediately identifies Dolores as a "nymphet" but Mrs. Haze doesn't identify Humbert as a monster. He calls the little girl "Lolita."

Obviously I've known about this book for a very long time. It's notorious, and it's been waiting for me in the highest reaches of The List for over a decade. That's not mentioning how it's so famous that it's become cultural shorthand. However, just like with Lord of the Flies, it doesn't play out quite as I expected from its reputation. I'd never been sure, for instance, whether Humbert actually abused Dolores during the book. The answer is yes, this book is full of child sexual abuse. It's often obscured, but it's there if you don't allow Humbert to charm you into looking the other way. 

Lolita is in some ways an objectively excellent book but I didn't enjoy it much. I like the manipulation of the English language by a non-native speaker (neither Nabokov nor Humbert has English for a first language, and the book is packed with French words and phrases). I like a good unreliable narrator, and Humbert is definitely that. But in addition to the horrifying subject matter, the pacing in the book is also not the greatest. When Humbert and Dolores are touring around the United States, things often get a bit boring.

For my second foray into Nabokov's work I'm again impressed and yet failing to connect. I don't know if it's me or him or both of us, or just the books I've tried. (I'd be a bit concerned if I had any kind of close connection to Humbert.) Maybe someday I'll read Pnin.

But as far as recommending this book goes, I don't know what to say other than read it if you were already planning to. I don't think it's essential. I do think that an understanding of pedophilia is critical for our society in order to hopefully reduce child sexual abuse in an era when it's easier to perpetrate than ever before. For daring to present things from a pedophile's perspective, I think this book has some value, I'm just not sure how much. I've seen a few descriptions that call it a love story (and also some that say it's about Europe vs America, to which I say—ok, sure). If it reads as anything other than a "love" story about one-sided obsession and abuse then I would suggest the reader needs to examine their values.

I just can't help comparing Lolita to Bastard Out of Carolina, in which we see abuse from the child's perspective. Comparing the effete tone of Lolita to the raw brutality of the other book leaves me wondering which one of them we need more right now. Is it possible that we need them both?

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You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine (oh, how you have to cringe and hide!), in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs—the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limb, and other indices which despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate—the little deadly demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power. (This is (one of) Humbert Humbert's descriptions of what a "nymphet" is. -MR)

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The Hyper Text Novel

While I was getting my Pale Fire review ready for posting, I found that I hadn't written down the first sentence, and I wasn't able to find an instance of the book on Amazon that I could look into (that's my usual tactic when something like that happens).

Lucky for me and maybe you too, someone has taken the time to turn Pale Fire into HTML, as I'm sure Nabokov always wanted.

Thank you Shannon Chamberlain, whoever you are. I doubt this translates well to mobile, but have a look anyway.

Pale Fire

This also means that I can link to the commentary on line 493 that I mentioned in my review as being too long to quote but also the most harrowing thing in the entire novel.

53. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

Year Published: 1962
Pages: 239
First Sentence: Pale Fire, a poem in heroic couplets, of nine hundred ninety-nine lines, divided into four cantos, was composed by John Francis Shade (born July 5, 1898, died July 21, 1959) during the last twenty days of his life, at his residence in New Wye, Appalachia, U.S.A.
Rating: 2/3 (meh)

Review:

I need to learn not to look forward to List books, because the process seems to end up colouring my opinion in strange ways, usually not in the novels' favour.

With Pale Fire, the first time I've ever read Vladimir Nabokov (but not the last, with Lolita appearing way up in the Top Ten of the List), I saw someone comment somewhere that they thought Mark Z. Danielewski was striving (and perhaps failing) to emulate Pale Fire with his novel House of Leaves.

Having read Pale Fire, then: yes, maybe, but the two books are very different, and the architectural aspect of House of Leaves makes me prefer it to Pale Fire. A lot of people find Danielewski gimmicky, but I'm a fan, especially of that particular novel (the others are of more ambiguous value).

Enough about a different book entirely.  In case you've never read either one of the two novels I've mentioned so far, here's what Pale Fire is, and the order that I read it in.  The novel consists of a Foreword and Notes by a fictional academic from a country called Zembla, named Charles Kinbote.  He is writing said Foreword and Notes on the subject of a 999-line poem in four cantos called "Pale Fire" written by a fictional poet named John Shade.  As the reader discovers very early on, John Shade died after composing these lines, his final work.  The first sentence I've quoted above is from the Foreword, and the four lines below are actually the first four lines of Canto One of Shade's poem. I personally read the book straight through: I began with the Foreword, read the poem uninterrupted (contrary to Kinbote's advice to begin with his notes and go through the whole thing several times), and then proceeded to the Notes, and returned to reference the lines of the poem while going through the Notes.  I must admit that I did not make it through the Index, however.  I'm sure there are other ways to approach it, though.  Normally I skip forewords and introductions, though (because they always spoil this sort of literary classic), including the introduction that appears in the edition of Pale Fire that I read*.

If one begins with the Foreword, one is treated to a very creepy and suspicious borderline rant by Kinbote about his relationship with Shade and how he came to possess the manuscript for the poem.  He also, disconcertingly, accurately predicted that the second canto would be my favourite.  I didn't spend an enormous amount of time puzzling my way through the intricacies of the poem.  The Notes, then, clarify some things in Shade's poem, and also get into Kinbote's psyche and actions, all interwoven with the story of an exiled King that Kinbote had urged Shade to write poetry about. It's cool and occasionally eyebrow-raising, but I have to admit that I found the prose in this novel exhausting, to the point that I took at least three naps over the course of my reading, and that's mostly why it didn't earn a 3/3 rating.

I'm really really really not familiar with the kind of literary criticism that Nabokov is sending up, either, and if I were I might've enjoyed it more. Nabokov is a good writer (there's an absolutely harrowing passage on the topic of suicide, the note to Line 493, which I would've included here if it hadn't been so long), and I think my problems with the prose were possibly intentional style choices.  I like that this book exists in the world, but like some of the other List books that I haven't really connected with, I think it went a bit over my head and might not be for me.

* The Introduction, by Richard Rorty (a real person, not yet another invention of Nabokov's, I looked this up) included the following helpful note:

Warning: this Introduction not only gives away the plot of Pale Fire, but presumes to describe the reader's reactions in the course of a first reading of the book — reactions which will not occur if the Introduction is read first.  The first-time reader may wish to postpone the Introduction until he or she has finished the Index.

So as usual, I didn't bother to read it.

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I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff—and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.

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