Lolita - not enough sex, far too much Humbert

How dull, and how predictable. The ending of this book. Why did Nabokov have to end this with a morality tale? Humbert Humbert speaks of his motivations and realizations, and acknowledges that having depraved sex with a teenager was wrong wrong wrong!

He merits horrible punishment, he says, and advises Lolita to make the best of it with her husband. Dreadfully moral. Too good to be true. It makes a lie out of the man.

Again, Nabokov plays with mirrors. Humbert is sick within, Lolita's husband is damaged without. Humbert is a deviant, Quilty is depraved, Lolita is damaged, and her husband is relatively none of the above. I suppose exaggerating these differences makes them all somehow balance each other, just like all the coincidents and corollaries elsewhere in the book filled out a broader picture. The glib trickery of a febrile mind.


Still, it ends with Quilty dead, Humbert dying in the slammer. Poetic justice, huh!
He suggested, in chapter THIRTY SIX, that he deserves THIRTY FIVE years in jail. Dude, we've already been there! Thirty five chapters of your self-indulgent pedophile ramblings across America and across the pages and our patience!

"Light of my life, fire of my loins" - Hah! My donkey!!!

Couldn't you at least have admitted that you enjoyed every wet moment? That your visual tastes in girl-flesh made the fact that she was not a very interesting or romantic girl more than worth it? That the heat from her spare young body warmed those brittle old bones more than had you burned in the fires of hell? That the touch of her feet, the fuzz on her skin, the silk of her cheeks thrilled you more than anything else?
Dwell on it man! Don't sicken us with your guilty remorse!

The sex descriptions were not nearly as exciting as the visuals. The perversion of this book is in the lack of climax. It left me flushed but unfulfilled.

Sad to think that the greatest book of 1955 was, in some regard, barely more than the private scribbles of a frustrated teenage boy.
I want more.


周小燕