#it is a Loaded topic tho i am not willing to dump on the public at this time special privileges for besties like u

[nadekosnake]

neglected manuscript - Do you have a favorite novel?

from this ancient ask meme

LMAO NO!!! PICKING THE ONE I WAS AFRAID OF 💀 I could make it easy and lie but y’know what? We’re gonna be honest about this 🫡 Gonna be LONG bc I have 1) not talked with about this in any capacity with another human being before and 2) a pretty complicated relationship with this book 🤕

Content warning for CSA 👇

This is difficult partly bc I do love a lot of books but partly bc I don’t like to reveal my actual favorite book… I genuinely worry people will perceive me in a very negative way LMAO. My favorite of all time is Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov 😶 It’s the book I’ve reread the most in my life so far and it is genuinely one of the best written books I have read 🤧 I think generally people are like 😰🤢 when you drop a bomb like that what’s typically supposed to be a light-hearted convo so I usually will say something else! Typically my safe answer is The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (which genuinely was my favorite book at some point in time, we are not going to dive into this right now).

(A disclaimer as I talked about Lolita fashion before, I am aware that the fashion gets its name from the novel but that’s where the relation ends. I like Lolita fashion because I’m a loser that likes subculture fashion and not because it has the same name or any other connection to the book. That happens to be coincidental. I am staunchly against fetishization of the fashion ok thanks! 🙂‍↕️ back to the program!)

Brief summary for those who need it: Humbert (the narrator) is a scholar and a secret pedophile, who one day meets the Haze family for a home stay. He obsesses over the daughter, a 12 year-old girl named Dolores Haze, who he personally calls Lolita. Humbert marries Ms. Haze to be around the real object of his obsession. Through unfortunate events, he ends up Dolores’s sole caretaker. She lives with Humbert’s constant sexual abuse that spans a cross-country roadtrip, but eventually she runs away with the help of another pedophile. Unfortunately it is not a happy ending. Despite Dolores’s escape from both pedophiles, she dies before she can rebuild a normal life with her future family.

The first time I tried to read it, I was too young (around Dolores’s own age 🫥). It was recommended to me by another middle school girl! God knows what the fuck we were doing back then LMAO but the girl who recommended it to me said it was a love story. Older man girl our age whatever. Tbh when I started it I understood that it wasn’t a love story… and I couldn’t finish it because of how uncomfortable it made me. I reread it a handful of times between middle school and uni with varying degrees of success, and I only really started to grasp it when I reached uni. I do think I was entirely too young to read the book or even understand it, and thankfully it was not used as a tool to manipulate me. It was a dicey time tbh. When I was growing up, there weren’t communities of young women that centered around accepting Dolores Haze as a victim.

I think there’s a disclaimer for those you haven’t read it and think it glorifies CSA and pedophilia. It really does not. Nabokov himself was a victim of CSA and did not condone it. I think that the #1 thing that movie adaptations and pop culture struggle with is that people believe the narrator point blank. So the adaptations all have this horrible romanticization of the story at their cores. People even struggle with understanding the book because the narrator is an Educated & Scholarly Man who is like ✨I’m a poet I’m a sensitive soul and we poets just believe in love✨ like NO!!! The whole point of the story is that he is an unreliable narrator!!! The narrator is a murderer, rapist, kidnapper, and if you’re actually paying attention you see it all with your own damn eyes! And of course nobody really does pay attention! 😭

So like, why is this my favorite? This is also complicated LOL, but I think that there’s a couple of main reasons.

Ultimately, to me, the novel is a puzzle that Nabokov invites you to solve. You have an unreliable narrator, but he’s an excellent manipulator. I think a lot of people lose “the game,” so to speak, the first time they read the book because the narrator is so good at making you see only what he wants you to see (he loves her, he’s just a nice sensitive guy who lost his first love too early, he’s doesn’t mean to hurt “his” “Lolita,” she “seduced” him, she “makes” him do horrible things to her, etc). It is written so well, and since the character himself is a professor and an intellectual, I think it’s easier for folks to let their guard down and to literally be tricked. Genuinely speaking I struggled with what to believe too, especially as a child. The only reason I didn’t buy into the “love story” bit was because by some intuition, I was aware that something Bad was happening despite the narrator’s insistence that it was all good. Tho I could not pinpoint what it was at the time.

But once you break past the facade and you’re fully paying attention the novel, it is like two stories in one. One hand, poets romantics in the name of love blah blah blah, but on the other hand? Dolores is a girl from a broken home, who’s mother is murdered by a man that wants to rape her. She’s kidnapped and shows clear signs of abuse (triggered by paternal affection, cried herself to sleep every night since the abuse started, bouts of disassociation, extreme rebellion towards Humbert, etc). Some of this stuff is actually glossed over by the narrator, but signs of a whole other part of the story are literally right in front of you if you’re paying attention.

For example, there’s a single line about Dolores’s mother, Charlotte, where she reveals in a letter to Humber that both her first husband and her youngest child (Dolores’s baby brother) died. And the narrator does NOT give a rat’s ass about this woman or her woes so it’s never talked about again. It’s whittled down to one single dismissive sentence, and I missed it tons of times. But knowing that, it makes sense why Charlotte acts as she does, why Charlotte and Dolores’s relationship is fraught. And why Dolores acts as she does at the beginning of the novel. Literally the Haze family is going through extreme grief with barely the emotional resources to process a double death in their immediate family. Without that context though, you’re just going along with whatever Humbert wants you to believe. You don’t see who Charlotte or Dolores are as individuals. You miss a chunk of the truth. And that’s literally just one of the smallest instances I can think of. There’s so much to dig through both directly and in between the lines. Nabokov is so deliberate with his writing and so extremely detailed that there’s a LOT of things that are easily missed unless you read it multiple times. This shit is so detailed, there’s scholars dedicated both to Nabokov and to Lolita the novel.

I think the last big reason I keep coming back to it is because I think it’s something so deeply rooted in society, you never really live without Lolita. The book has been bastardized to hell and back because most people, especially those in power once again, Do Not Understand how to read this book. So we’re left with not necessarily Dolores Haze, but this enigmatic “Lolita” the abstract figure of Humbert’s delusions. She is so influential, we all live our lives with her whether or not we’re aware of it. Coquette aesthetic? Lolita. Lana Del Rey? Katy Perry? The Police? Lolita. Marc Jacobs? Carven? Lolita. Vladimir? Excavation? My Dark Vanessa? Lolita. Heart-shaped sunglasses? Lolita. Butterflies??? Yes, Lolita. You can even go so wild with the connections to the point of bringing up the goddamn Lion King (animated 1994 version, Scar is voiced by Jeremy Irons who played Humbert Humbert in Adrian Lyne’s 1997 adaptation).

And it’s this constant reminder, every day. You pass by her on the Internet or in an ad while you’re out and about. She lives in the shadow of your acquaintance or your loved one. She haunts everything in a very real and literal sense. I think that’s what keeps me coming back to the book… even if I wanted to forget about her, I don’t think I ever really could.