IN LOVE WITH ‘LOLITA’

Once upon a time, a young boy loved a young girl, and four months later came her death and the tragedy continued for the rest of his doomed life.

This is how it begins for me: Lolita – I loved it when I was 12. You, too, will love it from the start, devour it till the middle, and take it slowly in the end.

I discovered Vladimir Nabokov through good reviews and a particularly interesting title (Laughter in the Dark) that stared up at me in stark black and white from a plethora of colorful covers. I enjoyed this novel immensely, it was a quick read in measured paces, pleasing to the imagination and provocative of feeling – characteristics so uncharacteristic of literature today. But we are speaking of Nabokov’s Lolita, and this novel is better in all aspects.

It seems everything has been written about love, and still more is being written: some of it good, most of it trash, all of it made (intentionally or unintentionally) to break the reader’s heart with happiness, sadness or literary disappointment. Lolita is no such novel. The premise, to begin with, is simple yet original: A European thirtysomething scholar named Humbert Humbert is entranced by the 12-year-old American schoolgirl Dolores Haze (aptly nicknamed Lolita), who happens to live with her mother in the house where he is lodging. His relations with Lolita deepen from fellow lodger to stepfather to obsessed lover. His passion for her continues throughout his marriage to Mrs. Haze and after her death, and as he and Lolita tour the States, and settle as a family and ultimately extending the tragedy up to the slow, painful, poignant end.

The most attractive quality of the novel is its idiosyncratic prose: a salad of literary language that heightens one’s senses and occasionally produces a smile. There is something about Nabokov’s hyperboles and paradoxes; there is a strong thread of poetry running underneath his pathetic fallacy and syllepses, transferred epithets and misplaced participles. His imagery is amazing: The ideas of time and place are powerful, plentiful to the senses but concise in the written word, and very real – so real that Humbert, as he narrates his memoir, remembers what is worthy and thus lets the reader indulge in it.

The trajectory of Lolita’s plot is admirable as well. Its interesting turns cause a willingness to finish the story, and this, coupled with the reflective leisurely read that its poetry demands, elicits a happily ambivalent reaction. It is the reader’s duty to know when to go over it quickly and when to pause and enjoy the sometimes literal scenery. There is no other novel of its kind because it is the kind that is not brief yet goes by briefly – and remains in one’s sentiments long after that.

This is my favorite book, so I might as well explain why. In spite of the realistic cheesy-romance-novel hater I am, and my frequent lack of emotional reaction to most things, the underlining emotional rhythm over which Lolita plays its triumphant symphony plays eternally in my pragmatic mind. This is an unlikely occurrence, the cause of which is one worthy of praise. It was funny, and sad, and miserable, and funny yet again – I felt it all. Laughter and heart-wrenching empathy are supplied in a consummate manner: They are created by the reader and evoked by the story, not the other way around.

Some might argue that the novel is about pedophilia, not abusive but obsessive, and its disastrous effects on the victimized predator as opposed to the victimized child. This is an intelligent but unfortunately crass argument. The story is not about that. It is about love.

Lolita presents a sort of love that we so often refuse to see, or fear so much as to pretend it does not exist. It is the dangerous parasite that takes and never gives back; the love that kills us slowly, slowly, without our knowledge, until we lie in our proverbial deathbeds and it’s too late. The story tells of love based on lust – not lust as sexual attraction, but lust as the desire to have the object all to oneself. Humbert’s desire builds up inside him until it becomes uncontrollable, and in the end it ruins him, as we knew from the beginning that it would.

We can never fully have anyone. Most of us have learned this. We have tasted it like blood on our lips; we have heard it ring in the dark depths of our wretched hearts. And most of us have forgotten it more than once, more than ever, if only because we wish it wasn’t true. Until the well-informed age of today, middle-aged scholars like Humbert – and people much older and wiser – prefer to adorn their lives with elusive dreams and impossible ideals of possessing the persons they love, even if they have known for years that it isn’t going to happen. Parental, filial, puppy love; infatuation, eros, even the firm fortress of friendship: We cannot control selfish love. It controls us.

This is how it begins: "Lolita. Light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul."

And it ends with deaths, some of which are more pernicious than physical; it ends with tragedy so tragic it will leave you trembling with vicarious remorse; it ends with lust and love powerful enough to destroy the man they have made. It ends precisely the same way it starts.

Don’t let it happen to you.