Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, published in Paris in 1955 after being rejected by four American publishers, remains one of the most discussed, most argued-about, most challenging novels in the Western tradition. The challenge is not merely moral but formal: Humbert Humbert, the pedophile narrator who abuses a twelve-year-old girl across two years and a continent, is also one of literature’s most brilliant prose stylists, and the novel requires the reader to hold simultaneously in view the beauty of the language and the ugliness of what that language is designed to conceal.

Nabokov’s formal achievement is extraordinary. He constructs Humbert as a self-serving, self-aware, brilliantly deceptive narrator-a man who knows he is monstrous and uses literary ability to aestheticize and thereby justify his crimes. The reader must read against the grain of the prose, must resist the seductions of Humbert’s wit and style and recover, within and between his sentences, the girl he erases. Those readers who find Dolores Haze-the actual child-visible in the text are reading correctly; those who find only Humbert’s “Lolita” have been taken in.

Nabokov’s English prose-he wrote in three languages, translated himself, and came to English last-has a quality of strangeness that native speakers cannot produce: too precise, too aware of idiom, lit from within by an alien intelligence. His sentences feel like mathematical constructions whose elegance is verifiable by proof.

Lolita is not a comfortable novel and cannot be made comfortable. It is a masterpiece of an unusual kind: one that places the reader in an ethical predicament and asks what they will do with it.