#but guys. for all that reading lolita is a full contact sport it should not be that easy to miss the point

[queenlucythevaliant]

I read Lolita a couple weeks ago now. Here are my thoughts:

This book is fascinating. I couldn't shut up about it. The drive to keep reading was squarely in between the one that keeps me reading someone like Falkner (this book is being held together with some incredible mystery adhesive that I must identify/drizzle all over myself) and like. the high I got when I read Atlas Shrugged in 9th grade (I don't like it exactly, but it makes my brain light up as though I've just discovered quarks and now must figure out how to articulate my findings.)

Basically, reading this book is an exercise in reading past the narrator and trying to find scraps of the other characters (especially Dolores) in what he bothers to tell us. It's like panning for gold in a bunch of muck. It's a very active, almost athletic reading experience, if that makes sense.

The beauty of Dolores peeking through all Humbert's mud is that of an ordinary little girl brimming with quiet courage and irrepressible dignity. Dolores Hayes manages to hold her ground against Humbert's best efforts to subsume her and I ended the book just viscerally angry on her behalf. The prevailing sense that I had on finishing Lolita was one of deep injustice.

Nabokov is a treat as always (I've read and loved Speak, Memory and some of Letters to Vera, but this was my first foray into his fiction). The prose was appallingly clever and there were a few little storytelling tricks he pulled that had me all but cackling. The craft of this book is next level.

Reading it was exhausting. I do not think I could have gotten through it had it not been the middle of summer.