[AnglophoniZ] Lolita

Did you know that the best-seller of Vladimir Nabokov almost never reached our bookshelves as the author himself wanted to burn his work? Fortunately it has been saved by his beloved wife Vera, his muse – and driver. After many editors refused to publish Lolita, it has eventually been accepted by a French editor, Olympia Press, in 1955 and in the United States in 1958.

I purposely won't give too much information, not to spoil you the novel. I hope you'll forgive my short summary. Actually Lolita is not the story of a girl. More precisely it's not entirely the story of a girl named Lolita but rather that of a man, Humbert Humbert, obsessed with a girl, Dolores “Lolita” Haze. Humbert or “H.H” presents himself as the author of his own memoir. In this way, we readers will be given facts from his point of view, from his own perspective and subjectivity. And that's interesting! The particularity of Lolita is that, actually, Humbert is in his forties and that Lolita is hardly an adolescent. She is, as he coined it, a “nymphet.” You can easily imagine how shocking it was at the time... Basically, the educated European H.H goes to America and moves in at the Hazes' and meets Lolita there. From then on, H.H will develop an obsession for the seductive girl, to even marry the mother in order to get closer to the daughter. But Charlotte Haze will soon die in a car accident. H.H, as a cautious stepfather, takes the - easy - decision to take care of Lolita and together they will drive throughout the United States. That's the beginning of games of manipulation and sexual intercourse leading to a strange relationship between the two. Eventually the story will end with Lolita taking flight from H.H with the help of another man. In short.

To put it in a nutshell, H.H seems to corrupt a young and nice girl, or isn't it rather the opposite? What would you be capable of when blinded by love ?

Lolita is thus presented as the memoir of a man, Humbert Humbert who has written “the confession of a white widowed male”, which is actually the subtitle of the novel. The foreword written by John Ray, Jr directly invites the reader in the text by telling the practical facts : who, where, when, why and how they end up. Of course it is all mockery, John Ray does not exist, and neither does Humbert nor Lolita.

Highly controversial a novel, Lolita is nonetheless one of the greatest literary work of the twentieth century. Nabokov managed to manipulate the reader and even forced him to re-read his work so as to fully understand all the tricks he has put in it. Lolita is not simply a novel, it is not an easy novel either. Lolita is a story of love, of passion, of destruction. It compares Europe and America and introduces the doppelgänger theme (indeed, there are one or two examples of doubles in the novel). Lolita is also a detective story, including clues scattered throughout the plot. We readers are detectives who are eager to collect them and to solve the puzzle Nabokov displays in front of us. Moreover, Humbert Humbert is so persuasive and gifted that we are nearly bound to love this character that decency would suggest us to hate. His “fancy prose style” as he says seduces and even elates us hence the sense of manipulation that it conveys.

Seven years later, Stanley Kubrick completed to immortalize Lolita (and Lolita) with the release of an eponymous adaptation, quite close to the novel but not as crude as the novel. As a last proof of the book's success, “lolita” is now a word commonly used that, according to dictionary, defines “a sexually precocious young girl.”