May 29, 2012 02:14 AM
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Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea.
These striking opening lines are sure to stir you. I am happy I have accomplished Lolita.
The author. Vladimir Nabokov is a Russian novelist & written quite handful in Russian. Most of his works centre on the subject of paedophilia & that reflects in at least 4-5 of his various novels. Lolita is his best known work & his personal favourite too. His Russian work was banned in Russia & Lolita was rejected by half a dozen publishers before it saw the light of the day.
Plot. Humbert Humbert (HH) is a Professor by profession & later turns to literary writings. In his early teens he becomes romantic for Annabel but they fail as Annabel dies soon after. He marries Valeria, but she frees herself to a taxi driver. To pursue his literary fancy, he settles to rent a friend’s room in sleepy town Ramsdale, but destiny escorts him to the door steps of Charlotte Haze (mother of Lolita).
HH believes that his first love, Annabel has reincarnated in the form of Lolita, then 12 years old & is captivated at her gay sight. Scheming HH & unsuspicious (curtained by love) Charlotte marry when Lo is away at a summer camp. One day, Charlotte learns HH cravings for Lo, wants to run away with Lo to Europe, write to her she is coming to pick her up & flee, goes to post it to her at camp, is run over by a car & dies.
HH, now stepfather of Lolita, tricks to pick Lo from summer camp & takes her from one highway lodge to another before Lo is revealed about her mother’s death. She accepts her ill fate & HH because she don’t want to live in foster care either. However, she all throughout believes that HH murdered her mother to obtain her. Together they (partners in crime) tour the USA for one year & settle in Beardsley. Lolita (now age 13) joins school, but disinterested after 8 months, ask HH for a tour across USA again. Lolita conspires & as HH doubts, they were followed throughout their journey. One day Lo falls sick & is admitted to hospital from where she disappears after 8 days. HH tries hard to find Lo & her abductor for 2 years but in vain.
HH will meet Lo & her abductor. What happens to the three (HH, Lo, abductor), towards the end, is for you to find out.
Characters. HH has varied colourful traits. He starts as a maniac, on a constant look out for nymphets until one day when he bump into Lolita. He is a conspirator who wanted to murder Charlotte to eliminate the obstacle between him & Lo. He is a rapist who takes Lolita from one motel to another. He is foul, who gives sedatives to Lo in order to molest her. He was a Satan who wanted to marry Lo & breed with her a flock of Lolitas whom he would subject to his lust as a grandfather! A paranoid who wouldn’t let Lo meet boys of her age, because he wanted to be the only man Lolita knows. A repenting fatherly who devoured Lo’s adolescence for his aberrant appetite, denied Lo of her play days with gal pals. A lover, loves Lolita at the age of 17 & wanted to settle with her, even if she has way crossed the threshold of being a nymphet. A convict, who thinks capital punishment is too much for the evil he committed. Really!
This book is written as dairy of HH. He narrates the events as & what he knows & only how much he knows. Lolita, a brat is his girl. We know as much about Lo as HH knew & he claims to be alien to Lolita, “the girl child”. Lo loved comics. Lo loved cinema. Lo made stupid gestures. Lo was aware about HH intentions & encouraged his overtures, at first. Lo was corrupt, for she would throw tantrums in lieu of sex. Lo was shy of boys, still thrilled to meet them. Lo was contrasting when with school mates. Lo was a free spirit, assassinated by a fiend, refused of natural growing up years.
“Jollita annihilated” - A Jolly Dolly, deprived of existence.
Lolita, eroticism & theme. Lolita is “remotely” erotic. Dear friend, I beg, erotic is different from obscene & pornographic. The beauty lies in the sensibility & not its physical & biological impressions. In the first part, there are few lines, where HH draw pictures about Lo’s hair, skin, frock, legs, neck etc & you feel red hot blood boiling up & down your vessels, from tip to toe. But that’s it.
The main theme is doomed love & tragedy. Its about what not following the law of nature can do to you. Its about how chasing your fetish can lead to failure & total collapse. Fetishes are fetishes & best buried.
Narration. It’s a prose with splendid wordplay. Its Intense, appalling, conflicting, satirical, pictorial, arresting, brainstorming & fantastic. Its never obscene & skilled divinely to deceive the reader to connect with abominable HH & sympathise with the heinous hero!! Its so occupying that the reader tends to forget that Vladimir Nabokov, not HH is the author of Lolita.
I am putting down some extracts in the comments section (though, too much). It might help you figure out what to expect when you are considering Lolita.
A drawback I found was that it should have been 10 % abridged by the author himself. It drags at a few places, a bit too much.
My ratings – 4.5/5
Recommendation- Take the plunge!
What I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapour of blended voices, majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic-one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.
A million applause.
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Anshuman Maini
