All We Ever Wanted Was A Blog

Last year, NPR asked me to talk about one of my favorite books. This never aired - it turned out that another author had previously Lolita as one of their favorite books (who woulda thunk it?) and so I had to come up with another book (I chose the post-apocalypse tome The Stand, by Steven King — a piece which still hasn’t aired yet).

But that doesn’t mean I can’t share this with you, dear readers….

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Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov

I bought my copy of The Annotated Lolita in a used bookstore just off the Berkeley campus, in 1991. Required reading for the freshman English 110 course, my Lolita was already marked up with a stranger’s highlighter, and stale bread crumbs fell out of the spine when I opened it. Having only recently worked my way through War and Peace, I regarded this book with dread: Another dead Russian author, I figured, another dense and musty tome.

How wrong I was. From the very first line of this tricky, slippery book, I was electrified: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.” Eighteen years later, this is still the only opening line of a novel that I can recite by heart. I find it irresistable, capturing, with its thrilling alliterative wordplay, the horror of illicit lust, the magic and the agony of love, the darkness of the heart.

My mother, when I later told her I had read Lolita, responded with surprise: “That nasty little book?” And if you go by the plot synopsis alone, it is a nastly little book: The story of Humbert Humbert, a twisted pervert who essentially kidnaps his precocious twelve year old stepdaughter Lolita, takes her on a road trip across America, and turns her into his sex slave. Not for puritans, this novel. Which is, of course, is why Vladimir Nabokov couldn’t find an American publisher for Lolita – not until 1957, two years after the book had already been published to much acclaim in France.

Even for a self-styled urban college sophisticate like me, Lolita was shocking, the first book I’d read that made me physically uncomfortable with the emotions it dredged up in me. I was, after all, being asked to sympathize with the misdeeds of a pedophile – often, to even laugh at his mishaps. And the genius of Lolita is that I did: I found myself rooting for repellent Humbert Humbert as he tried to win the affection of his poor corrupted nymphet and wreak vengence on his depraved double and sexual competitor Clare Quilty — even as I also loathed him (almost as much as he loathed himself). I spent hours poring over the annotations, trying to deconstruct Nabokov’s literary wordgames – or were they Humbert’s? – and marvelling that something as simple as a list of schoolgirl’s names could be a portal into a whole world where nothing could be trusted and everything suggested something else.

Lolita introduced me to the concept of the unreliable narrator, and it taught me that the most compelling literary journeys are the ones that take us to unnerving places we never would otherwise have gone. As a novelist, even now, deeply flawed characters are still my favorites, both to read about and to write about – not the nice girls and well-behaved boys, but the corrupt and the amoral and the emotionally complex, the Humbert Humberts and the Alexander Portnoys and the Holly Golightlys.

Towards the end of Lolita, Humbert begs the reader: “Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let’s even smile a little.” This, for me, is the ultimate manifesto of great literary creations — their plea to be understood; for you to look into their black souls, and to love them anyway, maybe even as much as as Humbert loved his Lolita.