Dec
30
An unconsummated childhood love leaves our narrator, an attractive French littérateur pseudonymed Humbert Humbert, victim to the temptation of seductively playful nymphets. Lolita documents Humbert’s relationship with himself, rather than that with the 12-year-old Dolores Haze. Although H. is too overwhelmed by his eroticism to actually care for the object of his affection, his charm is so great that the reader finds himself sympathizing with H.’s deviant romantic needs. What starts as mildly masochistic fetishism (for postponed desire) culminates in a desperate act of violence. Though tragic in plot, humor abounds in Nabokov’s style, which is pregnant with the wit of literary punnery and double entendre.Review of Nabokov's Lolita
