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I’ve tried to read Lolita a few times, and have never made it through. Between the turgid prose, the abominably horrible narrator, and the pedophilia, I simply

I’ve tried to read Lolita a few times, and have never made it through. Between the turgid prose, the abominably horrible narrator, and the pedophilia, I simply lack the endurance and interest. My daughter had to finish it for a uni project and she confirmed for me that the depressingly boring tone continued to the morally inadequate end. I’ve read a few of the “greatest” books of the last 200 years and simply cannot fathom how this one was so well received.

systemvoltage 4y ago
Perhaps, one has to realize that the artistry here is clever cloaking of the most repugnant motif with the equal and the opposite - utterly beautiful prose that captivates the mind. So, in a way, Nobokov masterfully created this intense tension in the reader between the foreground and the background. If this book was a painting, it'd be right up there with Hieronymus Bosch[1], visually the most contrasting thing one can imagine. I can see why some people "don't get it", may be there is more to it. This is my interpretation atleast and I personally think Lolita deserves its reputation as one of the greatest books ever written. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieronymus_Bosch#/media/File:The_Garden_of_Earthly_Delights_by_Bosch_High_Resolution.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieronymus_Bosch#/media/File:T...
- leephillips 4y ago
  I like your take. I agree about the status of the novel: it’s taken a permanent place as one of the supreme artistic monuments in the history of the English language. Like much of Nabokov’s work, Lolita is in part a puzzle, with traps set for the hasty reader. It may not be about what it seems to be about.
tomcam 4y ago
It is easy for me to understand just about any criticism of Lolita, but “turgid“ prose? In my mind it is one of the most beautifully written books in the history of modern English. That makes the book profoundly troubling for me, although of course I feel that no books should be banned for any reason.
- lr1970 4y ago
  > In my mind it is one of the most beautifully written books in the history of modern English. It is interesting how truly by-lingual Nabokov was. He wrote Lolita in English and then translated it himself into Russian. The original and the translation show profound mastery in both languages.
xeromal 4y ago
I, too, failed to finish Lolita. The prose is interesting, but I just couldn't get into the story. I'm sure I'll be derided for this, but I think a good alternative that you might want to consider is Perfume by Suskind. It has a similar over-the-top style of prose, but it was very enjoyable to me and it had an interesting story. Only the ending was a bit strange, but it was well worth my time. Give it a shot!
Barrin92 4y ago
I'm not sure we've read the same book if someone considers Lolita 'depressingly boring' in tone. The book is full of sly and dark humor and at times satirical, Nabokov has a lot of fun with language (in particular ambiguous puns), addresses the reader directly, and so on. One of the central points of the book is that art and fiction deals with the imagination and the aesthetic (mirrored in the fantasy or fairy tale like descriptions of landscapes in the book), and that moralizing has no place in it. This idea that novels need a moral end, or that the protagonist needs to be either moral or disowned that has become so commonplace is just an absolutely annoying feature of a puritan culture.
- formerkrogemp 4y ago
  Oh I'm sure if they referred to the book by name that it's the same book. We just came away with very, very different impressions of it.
neild 4y ago
There are many answers to why Lolita was well received by many people. (It's worth noting that it was certainly not universally well received--many, many people share your opinion of it.) One is that many of the people who like it seem not to have read it; or if they have read it, they did not understand it. Many men have described it as "a love story" or otherwise indicated that they feel the book approves of pedophilia. Two movies have been made based on the book, and both portray Dolores Haze (the girl the narrator calls "Lolita") as a seductress rather than as a victim. A substantial portion of the fan base of the book are, rather distressingly, men who appear to be quite enamored of the notion of having sex with children. Another is that Nabokov was a clever writer who excelled at writing books which reward close reading. Lolita is the story of Dolores Haze, but the narrator is a man who has no interest in her other than as than the victim of his sexual attentions. He drones on at great length about trivialities, while completely skipping over vital information. He is deliberately constructing an exculpatory narrative, which opens fascinating questions about how we can find any truth when everything we read is lies. Sifting through his self-serving prose to find glimpses of the actual Dolores Haze is challenging, and--to me at least--interesting. It's not an easy book, in many senses. The narrator is a monster. The bulk of the story is obscured behind lies and misdirection. There is no catharsis, no happy ending. Contrary to the opinion of many people who have not read the book, and some who have, Nabokov was extremely well aware that "Humbert Humbert", the narrator, is a monster. Humbert is a pedophile who abducts a 12-year-old girl and rapes her repeatedly over the course of years. Dolores Haze is a victim, not a seductress, and is in no way responsible for or desirous of her abuse. Humbert is not a reliable narrator, and nothing he says can be trusted. Nabokov himself was a victim of childhood sexual abuse. He knew what he was writing about. There's one scene that is almost certainly directly based on his own personal experience. I'd have difficulty saying that I enjoyed Lolita, but it's a rewarding book, and I'm glad to have read it.
- deleted 4y ago
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- mise_en_place 4y ago
  I've only seen the Kubrick adaptation but it was very heavily implied that the narrator is impotent. He's shown to be a character to be laughed at, nervous in his behavior, and quite hapless in romantic overtures. Contrast that with the movie Pretty Baby where the main character becomes obsessed with a 12 year old prostitute and then sleeps with her. I find that movie to be more bordering on the obscene than Lolita.
poisonarena 4y ago
the 3 reasons that made you hate it are genuinely why people like it and/or find it fascinating.. Have you seen either of the films?
xwolfi 4y ago
But the pedophilia has an interesting twist: the child initiate then dismiss it while the main character, writing from jail, is a victim of it. At least on a first level, but sometimes you can feel it's not exactly how it is for Dolores. It's strange and surprising all along, it's in 3 parts: the rise up to the seduction, the american road trip and then the morale: youth is passing, children play and forget, whatever else you want to take from it. It's an interesting book as a French since the character is French, the road trip was amazing for me because I dont know the backside america, and I like the fact americans are so prude they call that pedophilia, when frankly, it puts you off of it more than drags you.
- JoeAltmaier 4y ago
  Children cannot be responsible, almost by definition. The only person possibly responsible for pedophilia, is the adult involved.
- rfrey 4y ago
  Disgust at the rape of a 12 year old is not prudish.
  - xwolfi 4y ago
    Inability to see no one has been raped is though. Feeling this disgust while reading the perspective of the pervert is what is interesting. You don't need to be "fascinated", just relax, read the beautiful English, frown at the turpitudes of the monster and stop censuring this thing that at best can serve as a warning tales for young girls ?
- neild 4y ago
  Humbert marries Dolores’s mother. After her mother’s death, Humbert travels to Dolores’s summer camp, takes her away, and rapes her in a hotel room. There is no seduction. There is no ambiguity about what happened. She is twelve years old, her mother has just died, and her stepfather has taken her far away from any friends or relatives and had sex with her. This section of the book then concludes with one of the most chilling passages I have ever read in fiction: “At the hotel we had separate rooms, but in the middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, and we made it up very gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.”
jackallis 4y ago
this [1]might help you get a sense of why Nobokov is hard to read. [1] https://moodyap.pbworks.com/f/nbkv.GoodReaders_Writers.pdf https://moodyap.pbworks.com/f/nbkv.GoodReaders_Writers.pdf
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GeorgeBanica 4y ago
>morally inadequate end Should books only be morality tales, where Good always vanquishes Evil in the end?
- scotty79 4y ago
  When you read the story you kind of want it to go somewhere emotionally and morally (and in other aspects as well) when you are approaching the end.
- archon1410 4y ago
  I would be okay even if the evil won, that happens often. but there is something sinister when the book seems to not portray as evil, what is evil, or glorifies it. would you really want the glorified protagonist going around murdering, oppressing, being racist, etc etc with no indication that there's anything wrong with it? whether the book being discussed does so, is a different debate.
  - cinntaile 4y ago
    > would you really want the glorified protagonist going around murdering, oppressing, being racist, etc etc with no indication that there's anything wrong with it? If that is what the author wanted to write then I don't have a problem with that. Not every book needs to be a story with underlying morality teachings.

systemvoltage 4y ago

Perhaps, one has to realize that the artistry here is clever cloaking of the most repugnant motif with the equal and the opposite - utterly beautiful prose that captivates the mind. So, in a way, Nobokov masterfully created this intense tension in the reader between the foreground and the background. If this book was a painting, it'd be right up there with Hieronymus Bosch[1], visually the most contrasting thing one can imagine. I can see why some people "don't get it", may be there is more to it. This is my interpretation atleast and I personally think Lolita deserves its reputation as one of the greatest books ever written. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieronymus_Bosch#/media/File:The_Garden_of_Earthly_Delights_by_Bosch_High_Resolution.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieronymus_Bosch#/media/File:T...

leephillips 4y ago
I like your take. I agree about the status of the novel: it’s taken a permanent place as one of the supreme artistic monuments in the history of the English language. Like much of Nabokov’s work, Lolita is in part a puzzle, with traps set for the hasty reader. It may not be about what it seems to be about.

tomcam 4y ago

It is easy for me to understand just about any criticism of Lolita, but “turgid“ prose? In my mind it is one of the most beautifully written books in the history of modern English. That makes the book profoundly troubling for me, although of course I feel that no books should be banned for any reason.

lr1970 4y ago
> In my mind it is one of the most beautifully written books in the history of modern English. It is interesting how truly by-lingual Nabokov was. He wrote Lolita in English and then translated it himself into Russian. The original and the translation show profound mastery in both languages.

xeromal 4y ago

I, too, failed to finish Lolita. The prose is interesting, but I just couldn't get into the story. I'm sure I'll be derided for this, but I think a good alternative that you might want to consider is Perfume by Suskind. It has a similar over-the-top style of prose, but it was very enjoyable to me and it had an interesting story. Only the ending was a bit strange, but it was well worth my time. Give it a shot!

Barrin92 4y ago

I'm not sure we've read the same book if someone considers Lolita 'depressingly boring' in tone. The book is full of sly and dark humor and at times satirical, Nabokov has a lot of fun with language (in particular ambiguous puns), addresses the reader directly, and so on. One of the central points of the book is that art and fiction deals with the imagination and the aesthetic (mirrored in the fantasy or fairy tale like descriptions of landscapes in the book), and that moralizing has no place in it. This idea that novels need a moral end, or that the protagonist needs to be either moral or disowned that has become so commonplace is just an absolutely annoying feature of a puritan culture.

formerkrogemp 4y ago
Oh I'm sure if they referred to the book by name that it's the same book. We just came away with very, very different impressions of it.

neild 4y ago

There are many answers to why Lolita was well received by many people. (It's worth noting that it was certainly not universally well received--many, many people share your opinion of it.) One is that many of the people who like it seem not to have read it; or if they have read it, they did not understand it. Many men have described it as "a love story" or otherwise indicated that they feel the book approves of pedophilia. Two movies have been made based on the book, and both portray Dolores Haze (the girl the narrator calls "Lolita") as a seductress rather than as a victim. A substantial portion of the fan base of the book are, rather distressingly, men who appear to be quite enamored of the notion of having sex with children. Another is that Nabokov was a clever writer who excelled at writing books which reward close reading. Lolita is the story of Dolores Haze, but the narrator is a man who has no interest in her other than as than the victim of his sexual attentions. He drones on at great length about trivialities, while completely skipping over vital information. He is deliberately constructing an exculpatory narrative, which opens fascinating questions about how we can find any truth when everything we read is lies. Sifting through his self-serving prose to find glimpses of the actual Dolores Haze is challenging, and--to me at least--interesting. It's not an easy book, in many senses. The narrator is a monster. The bulk of the story is obscured behind lies and misdirection. There is no catharsis, no happy ending. Contrary to the opinion of many people who have not read the book, and some who have, Nabokov was extremely well aware that "Humbert Humbert", the narrator, is a monster. Humbert is a pedophile who abducts a 12-year-old girl and rapes her repeatedly over the course of years. Dolores Haze is a victim, not a seductress, and is in no way responsible for or desirous of her abuse. Humbert is not a reliable narrator, and nothing he says can be trusted. Nabokov himself was a victim of childhood sexual abuse. He knew what he was writing about. There's one scene that is almost certainly directly based on his own personal experience. I'd have difficulty saying that I enjoyed Lolita, but it's a rewarding book, and I'm glad to have read it.

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mise_en_place 4y ago
I've only seen the Kubrick adaptation but it was very heavily implied that the narrator is impotent. He's shown to be a character to be laughed at, nervous in his behavior, and quite hapless in romantic overtures. Contrast that with the movie Pretty Baby where the main character becomes obsessed with a 12 year old prostitute and then sleeps with her. I find that movie to be more bordering on the obscene than Lolita.

poisonarena 4y ago

the 3 reasons that made you hate it are genuinely why people like it and/or find it fascinating.. Have you seen either of the films?

xwolfi 4y ago

But the pedophilia has an interesting twist: the child initiate then dismiss it while the main character, writing from jail, is a victim of it. At least on a first level, but sometimes you can feel it's not exactly how it is for Dolores. It's strange and surprising all along, it's in 3 parts: the rise up to the seduction, the american road trip and then the morale: youth is passing, children play and forget, whatever else you want to take from it. It's an interesting book as a French since the character is French, the road trip was amazing for me because I dont know the backside america, and I like the fact americans are so prude they call that pedophilia, when frankly, it puts you off of it more than drags you.

JoeAltmaier 4y ago
Children cannot be responsible, almost by definition. The only person possibly responsible for pedophilia, is the adult involved.
rfrey 4y ago
Disgust at the rape of a 12 year old is not prudish.
- xwolfi 4y ago
  Inability to see no one has been raped is though. Feeling this disgust while reading the perspective of the pervert is what is interesting. You don't need to be "fascinated", just relax, read the beautiful English, frown at the turpitudes of the monster and stop censuring this thing that at best can serve as a warning tales for young girls ?
neild 4y ago
Humbert marries Dolores’s mother. After her mother’s death, Humbert travels to Dolores’s summer camp, takes her away, and rapes her in a hotel room. There is no seduction. There is no ambiguity about what happened. She is twelve years old, her mother has just died, and her stepfather has taken her far away from any friends or relatives and had sex with her. This section of the book then concludes with one of the most chilling passages I have ever read in fiction: “At the hotel we had separate rooms, but in the middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, and we made it up very gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.”

jackallis 4y ago

this [1]might help you get a sense of why Nobokov is hard to read. [1] https://moodyap.pbworks.com/f/nbkv.GoodReaders_Writers.pdf https://moodyap.pbworks.com/f/nbkv.GoodReaders_Writers.pdf

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GeorgeBanica 4y ago

>morally inadequate end Should books only be morality tales, where Good always vanquishes Evil in the end?

scotty79 4y ago
When you read the story you kind of want it to go somewhere emotionally and morally (and in other aspects as well) when you are approaching the end.
archon1410 4y ago
I would be okay even if the evil won, that happens often. but there is something sinister when the book seems to not portray as evil, what is evil, or glorifies it. would you really want the glorified protagonist going around murdering, oppressing, being racist, etc etc with no indication that there's anything wrong with it? whether the book being discussed does so, is a different debate.
- cinntaile 4y ago
  > would you really want the glorified protagonist going around murdering, oppressing, being racist, etc etc with no indication that there's anything wrong with it? If that is what the author wanted to write then I don't have a problem with that. Not every book needs to be a story with underlying morality teachings.