Reading Lolita in Shelby

The title to this blog is a play on the title of another book "Reading Lolita in Tehran" by Azar Nafisi that is a non-fiction book about a book club that meets in Tehran to read banned books. As you can imagine there are many books banned in Tehran, I seem to recall that Pride and Prejudice was one, some seem very innocent to our western ideals, Lolita on the other hand, well I can kinda understand that. I just finished reading Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, let me go ahead and say I enjoyed the book before I add that I can't completely fault those that would censor it. Lolita deals with a touchy subject, pedophilia (poor choice of phrasing there, but humorous enough not to change) and deals with it in a sensuous and at times comic manner. The narrator and protagonist is Humbert Humbert a pedagogical pedophile who, after spending time in several sanitariums, comes to live as a border in the home of a widowed women and her young daughter Dolores ("She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning... She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.") Humbert is immediately enraptured by Lolita and begins trying to get as close to her as he can. I've heard in the media of young girls with older men referred to as Lolitas but as far as I know those girls were all older teens young Lo is but 12 when the story begins. That was one of the shocks that came with reading this story, a story that I had only a hazy idea of what it was about. The first misconception I had dispelled  as I began to read was that Nabokov was  a  Russian writer in the vein of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. While, yes, he was from Russia and had written in Russian Nabokov became an American citizen in the 1940's and taught at a number of American universities and wrote in English. Lolita wasn't translated from Russian it was written in English (the first shock, to keep with the theme) . The home where Humbert meets Lolita is in Virgina not some Eurasian metropolis. The second shock was the afore mentioned age of Lolita. The third was the sensuousness of Humbert's narrative concerning Lo, you'd read these wonderfully written lines about his passion for her and then remember he's talking about a kid and be disgusted with it. Something wonderful that Nabokov was able to pull off was making Humbert a sympathetic character without ever letting you forget he was a villain and a perv and more than a little insane with lust. Humbert is writing his memoir from a jail cell so all along you know the long arm of the law eventually catches up to him and he does at the end feel remorse for his actions, I think this is how Nabokov saves Humbert from absolute villainy. There's a great passage near the end in which Humbert relates a scene in which he has stopped on an over-look to get some air, this is after Lolita has left him, and he can hear the sounds of children playing rising from the city below and he writes -"I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's absence form my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord." Wow, isn't that amazing literature? He realizes that his real crime was stealing Lo's childhood away from her. It's writing like this that rises this book to 'classic' level and saves it from what, by all means, is a terrible idea for a story. There's a postscript on this edition written by Nabokov and I like that he says he doesn't write books with a purpose or to teach a lesson, he writes them for the "aesthetic bliss" of the story. He said he first had the idea for, an wrote, a short story about a pedophile who marries a sick widowed woman to get close to her daughter and that story then evolved into Lolita. As you may well imagine he had, at first, a hard time getting the book published and it was originally published by a French publisher in 1955. That was the final shock, that a book about a sexually active 12 year old (she had experimented with a boy and a girl) and her pedophile step-father touring the country together having romps in sleazy hotels and then her leaving him for another pedophile (yes there was an even worse villain than Humbert, and he gets his in the end too) was published in good old 1955. They say each generation thinks they've invented everything, all the swear words, all the lasciviousness, all the perverts but let's face it from the dawn of civilization there have been those making rules and those breaking rules. To quote a good cliche - there's nothing new under the sun. At the end of the story when Humbert is driving away from the scene of the murder (I'm not telling whose murder) he writes that he felt, "I had disregarded all laws of humanity, I might as well disregard the rules of traffic.", where upon he switches over to the left lane and drives until he wrecks, a last final act of anarchy that he calls an "almost spiritual itch". Again, wow, great writing. I look forward to reading more Nabokov, hopefully something without such a perverse nature.