Oh no! Lolita has absconded!

Not with the crown jewels, but with Clare Quilty! The evil maniac "saved" her from her sickbed, leaving poor Humbert alone. And, as it turns out, frustrated.

So frustrated that he obsessively revisits the scnes of his crimes, hoping for clues. But of course there are none. After a period of intense and wildly loopy crisis, he has taken up with a woman who is mentally as childish as Lolita was physically, and together they drink like fish.
The two of them live in the hotels where he remembers fondling and worse Lolita, in bouts of intoxicating despair.

He is unmoored, Rita is unstable. This cannot endure.
It doesn't.


Rita and Humbert now no longer live together. But they seem closer now that they're apart.

Sofar, I don't think that Nabokov had a good sex life himself. His portrayals of women veer towards the either mentally featureless, or the physically undeveloped. Did he leave a lost love in Russia? Did he ever really connect with women? Was he an alcholic or very Greek?
Was that butterfly madness a substitute for the freshness that he sought?

And what's with all the ridiculous coincidences that are now cropping up? Are those replacements for the bad puns and convoluted word plays and theme-mirrors that earlier larded the text?
Tune in next time to find out whether Humbert's old-maidenly madness is catching, or whether this frustrated maiden will fling this dense book away from her with furious force.


周小燕