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

Sexfreaks and bores: Humbert Humbert returns to Ramsdale

Professor Humbert found Lolita again, but she is more lost to him then when she was a child. She has grown up, he really hasn't. He flees from her weeping.



The hunt for the evil Quilty is on!



Well, at least this nutball is finally facing reality. Lolita's rejecting him, now that she is married, is forcing him to confront not only his own aesthetic paedophilia (forgive the spelling, Herr Nabokov would approve), but also the fact that Clare Quilty is no worse then he himself is. He had thought his own perversion quite exquisite and refeeeeened, Quilty merely a deviant and child-like child-rapist.
But he sees now that he has, by his exploitation of Lolita, deprived her of her childhood, no matter how willingly she jumped his middle-aged bones.


Humbert has revisited Ramsdale, scene of his many happy hours resisting the repulsive blandishments of Charlotte while envisioning eventualities with Dolores.

He is now heading to Pavor Manor. With his gun in his hand (good place for it).

Oh great - he's gonna whack his penile rival with a penis substitute.
The penis symbols just mount and mount, coming faster and faster.
Something's gotta explode.


And I still haven't flung this convoluted book away from me. so I guess we'll find out in the next post how the tale of a middle aged sex troll, a child-molesting playwright, a teenage concubine, and several other sexually crippled characters ends.
Oh yes, I already know it ends with a bullet. But the degenerate lives of white people just enchant me. They are so creative when they're depraved.


周小燕

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

Charlotte Haze and her dishy daughter

He should've seen that coming - Lolita will undoubtedly grow up to be physically like her mom. At twelve she's already showing signs of a dulling of the curves due to plumpness. No, that only looks like baby fat.

Charlotte Haze almost raped poor Humbert earlier on in the book, but his innocent little Lolita, the unspoiled little angel, proved more "vestigal" virgin than 'vestal'.
She had it on with a lump at camp.

Nabokov doesn't really make clear why Lolita "seduced" Humbert. Perhaps she simply wanted to get it over with, but more likely she though of it as a way of getting her hooks into the man. He proves a willing victim. Overkill. The merest of hooks would've been more than enough.

She's cunning. Knowing in one sense, but she doesn't really know. She is simply showing off her superficial awareness of a new party trick to an appreciative adult.

Of course, Charlotte's only hook for Humbert was her daughter, and though enormously strong, it wasn't enough. Charlotte never caught Humbert, he simply swam into the boat. She lost her grip, lost her life, and Humbert was still hooked.


They drive all over the country in Charlotte's car, heading further west. There's something twisted about using the dead mother's vehicle as the device that binds them together in perpetual shuddering motion. Especially as this is the second time they have done so - a journey to recapture her lost innocence, his lost enchantment.

She was never innocent (just rather ignorant), and he exchanges his glib cynical attitude for paranoia and disillusionment.
Things will happen soon. I sense an impeding gloom called Clare Quilty.


周小燕

Nabokov and Lolita - Nymphets in the bellfry

One third of the way in. So far, this is very European. Professor Humbert plays his old-world intellectual cards for all they're worth, the black widow, Mrs. Haze, oohs and melts and drips all over him, and Dolly Haze just flashes her sweaty adolescent attributes with studied innocence.

Humbert describes the appeal of the innocent-seeming girl in wildly over the top terms, almost as if he's writing filthy poetry. When Lolita speaks, it's dull and flat, like someone who hides everything inside of her, even though Humbert is the one who has to keep everything secret. Mrs. Haze is efusively dull, vibrantly boring.

Humbert sees curves where there aren't any, Charlotte Haze couldn't find anything curved on her own plump body if it came up and bit her in the guts.


I wonder if the name 'Beardsley School for Girls' is a deliberate reference to Aubrey Beardsley, whose ink-drawings are decadent and obscene, and often show prepubescent naked girls - except when they are filled with delicious big breasted harlots. Or odd sexless pudgy man-boys.
He was a man of Catholic sensibilities, so I'm sure he would've loved to have done the illustrated or manga version of Lolita.


周小燕

Lolita

Stuff about Michael Jackson has been on television for the last two months, reaching a crescendo yesterday when they finally buried him.

The news has been full of that man who kindapped a ten year old and raped her for eighteen years. Two solid weeks of sordidity.

So this past week, the local public televion station broadcast the 1962 version of Lolita, starring James Mason, Shelley Winters, Peter Sellers and Sue Lyon.


Perhaps after all the bad press, they decided that society needed a refresher course on how pedophilia is really supposed to be done. Or maybe they simply wanted to show the classy upscale version. Tweedy intellectuals seduce teenagers so much better, yes?

However.


Humbert! Humbert! Humbert! Humbert! Humbert! Humbert! Humbert!

Sue Lyon does NOT look like a twelve year old. Not unless bovine growth hormone was all over the dairy industry back in the sixties.
Humbert Humbert dithers and waffles, no guts whatsoever. Clare Quilty (Peter Sellers) is an extremely irritating man, you wish Humbert would just shoot him at the beginning, but nO!!!!!! he just allows the idiot to talk and talk and talk! Shelley Winters is a cow.
Lolita is a chip-eating coke drinking round bottomed slut. And there is no sex in the movie.

It's not very realistic.

But it is very entertaining.
I'm gonna read the book next.


周小燕