Lolita

Sometimes, I feel like a bad English major. I read far more genre novels than "literary" ones, and my knowledge of classics is, frankly, lacking. Usually, this doesn't bother me very much, but I recently became vice president of my school's Sigma Tau Delta chapter, which means I'm going to be hanging out with lit majors a lot more, and I would like to be able to hold my own in discussions of classics.

I started with Lolita. Honestly, I don't even know if Lolita is considered a classic or not, but I hear it referenced a lot, happened upon it in the library, and decided to go for it.

Usually, when I've finished a book, I have a pretty strong opinion of it and can back that opinion up with specific passages. But Lolita has me torn in a way most books simply don't. I'm not sure if I liked it or not, but I don't think I'm supposed to be sure if I liked it or not.

On the one hand, I enjoyed Nabokov's writing style. On the other hand, the subject was disturbing.

For those of you who don't know, Lolita is about Humbert Humbert (a pseudonym) who is attracted to "nymphets" -- young girls between the ages of 9 and 14. He falls for one nymphet in particular named Dolores Haze, whom he calls Lolita. The novel is structured like a memoir, and serves as Humbert's attempt to confess to his relationship with Lolita and make peace with himself and with her.

What makes the novel so disturbing isn't the sexual content between a young girl and a man old enough to be her father, but the way the reader begins to sympathize and understand Humbert. I wanted to hate Humbert for what he did to Lolita, how he broke her childhood and obviously traumatized her, but I couldn't. His rationalizations made too much twisted sense. I could tell that he really didn't understand how wrong he was, and that gets into some big moral questions, such as, if he really believes he's in the right, is he? And of course the biggest question -- what makes me think I have the authority to say what's right and what's wrong?

Lolita made me feel things that I didn't want to feel, took me down a dark part of myself that could sympathize with an unlikable hero, and that bothers me. I can never un-see that corner of myself, and that makes me kind of hate the book. But I also think it's important to read literature like this because it makes us uncomfortable. It's the only way we'll ever learn.

So, read Lolita at your own risk.