By Olivia Bounvongxay
Published: October 26, 2010

There was a constant longing for frail honey-hued shoulders, a silky supple bare back and an innocence that can only be found peeking before womanhood.
In Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel, Lolita, he creates Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged European intellectual whose obsession was: “Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.”
Humbert sees an image of what he calls his perfect lover in the shape of 12-year-old Dolores Haze. He was a man, maddened by an impossible and twisted love.
He meets Lolita in his first move to the United States where he takes a room in the house of her widowed mother, Charlotte Haze. His pedophile urges drive him to marry her dreadful mother just to be closer to Lolita. Her mother eventually is led to her death and now for Humbert, there was nothing to come between him and his little Lolita.
They hit the road to travel through the U.S. Here, Lolita slowly unravels to being just as deranged and unbalanced as her lover himself.
The madness began during Humbert’s peaceful upbringing in the Riviera. It was the death his first love Annabel Leigh who was 12 when Humbert was 13. Followed by a failed marriage with an adult woman and a succession of odd jobs, Humbert tries to consummate that lost adolescent love with what he calls nymphets, a term he uses for soul shattering, charming young girls.
Nabokov unveils Humbert as a pathetic monster who slowly pays the price for his sins through wretched madness and total loathsomeness. Nabokov gives no sympathy for this annoyingly self-absorbed and narcissistic man who was a slave to his urges, but his self-love makes it laughable.
“To think that between a Hamburger and Humburger, she would – invariably, with icy precision – plump for the former. There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child,” Humbert said.
Those who can’t see past Humbert’s strange obsession with ripened nymphets would probably be repulsed by Lolita’s notorious plot. It is a vulgar and scandalous subject matter and has been controversial for decades.
Nabokov’s love for the English language is present in all aspects of the novel. Lolita is not the easiest read, not only because it’s a child molester’s story, but the fact that there is so much symbolism and complexity. You must read between the lines.
Humbert finds a balance between the act of cruel and the beautiful. What drives Lolita is Nabokov’s love for a perfect choice of words. He evokes human comedy that is precise, aloof and full of trickery through the narration and wordplay of Humbert.
Humbert seduces you with his words and his worldview, but then you remember he is referring to a young girl, which in the end leaves you feeling a little queasy.
What makes Lolita so repulsive to readers is not Humbert’s pedophile urges, but rather his immaculate sentence constructions and the wild, perverse and kinky things he’ll do.