Lolita

Lolita isn’t usually thought of as a crime novel but it is.

Thirty-seven-year-old Humbert Humbert stalks 12-year-old Lolita, then breaks all kinds of laws, moral, ethical, and legal, as he transports her across state lines.

The first time I read Lolita, I was dazzled by Nabokov’s stunning use of language—and remember, English was not his native tongue—word-play, and his ability to create full-blooded characters that leap off the page.

Nabokov pulls off this morally compromised tale with wit and humor, while dealing with the serious topic of pedophilia.

Reading Lolita gave me license to create morally challenged characters like… show more.

This book is an astounding and disturbing look into the mind and heart of a pedophile. Humbert Humbert, with his pretensions of literary brilliance, his ornate use of the French language, and his justification of his illegal and immoral actions, will fascinate the reader. What makes a man make terrible choices? Why can’t he fit into the mold of human respectability? And the victim, Lolita, what makes her go along with his depravity? Written in 1958, Lolita is heavy with internal ramblings but still fascinating.

Like the previous books in this list, the main character, in this case Humbert Humbert, seeks to justify the unjustifiable. The writer skilfully weaves around our expectations as a reader and attempts to subtly subvert them. Humbert’s skill of manipulation, using his standing as a professor to seduce and subsequently control a minor, can never be described as an easy read, and it’s a tribute to Nabokov’s beautiful, unapologetic, delicately poised prose that we even consider hearing the bastard out. 

I was leery of this book when it was assigned in a college class. The first lines “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul”—intrigued me. One page later, I was hooked. Or seduced. Lolita drew me into a place where I would not have chosen to be—the psyche of an unregenerate pedophile-turned-murderer. Yet this man proves to be a learned romantic too, desperately in love. Because the prose is brilliant and offers access to the deepest inner longings of the man, I found myself torn between rooting for him and hoping he would die… show more.

Once hailed as a masterpiece, today Nabokov’s novel is condemned for its subject matter, paedophilia. Some now feel it should never have been written, but I include it for two reasons. Firstly, the narrator knows his behaviour is evil and he doesn’t shrink from describing how his obsession has ruined his own life as well as Lolita’s. It is an exposure of poisoned obsession, not an endorsement, certainly not a defence of perversion and in any case, censorship of one literary fictional work wouldn’t deter paedophiles. Secondly, it is disturbing to read because it is so well written. It includes… show more.

It was on my reading list in college, many moons ago. The first sentence blew me away – and all the ones that followed did the same. It’s a feast of a book, an incredible read that doesn’t shy away from anything. The narrator is an anti-hero, a monster led by his physical desires, but I couldn’t hate him because I was too busy pitying him and his huge, helpless, twisted love for Lolita, his gum-popping streetwise nymphet of a stepdaughter who evokes memories of his first lost love as a young teenage boy. The road trip they undertake, just… show more.

Lolita features one of the most hateful of all protagonists in 20th century literature. A sniveling, sputtering hypocrite, Humbert Humbert gleefully hangs his misanthropy, his frustrated sexuality, his pathetic mediocrity, around the neck of a child, and changes the course of her life forever. That Humbert is a pedophile is undeniable; that he unapologetically recounts his crimes with such beautiful lyricism is truly terrifying. The novel is best read with a modern lens. This is not, as is so often touted, a controversial love story; it is a brilliant, unnerving satire about western patriarchy and rape culture that grows… show more.

Few obsessions are more compelling than love, and few snacks are more delicious than forbidden fruit. As we follow Humbert Humbert’s quest for his pre-pubescent “nymphet,” we are uncomfortably reminded of our own forbidden desires—passions we may not have admitted to ourselves, much less others. In addition, this book is an absolute delight for anyone who appreciates lyrical and beautiful prose, all the more stunning because it describes an obsession way outside the norms of society.

In his controversial novel Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov’s eccentric narrator Humbert Humbert laments the fleeting qualities of life by reciting a couplet from an “old poet,” who characterizes our mortality as a kind of corporeal tax—or duty—that must be paid for striving for an ethical life and enjoying the simple beauty of human existence: “The moral sense in mortals is the duty / We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty.” While he may be one of literature’s all-time detestable characters, Humbert Humbert recognizes the effortless splendor inherent in the merest of poetic phrases.