"Yes," I said, "Yes. They are beautiful, beautiful, beautiful!"

When I first read Lolita - at the beginning of high school (quel convenable!) - I read it for its shock value. I read it to make a statement about who I was (or how I wanted to be perceived), not necessarily for a literary experience. I remember being charmed by it. I remember the book had me in its thrall for a weekend during which I lounged on the hammock or on the couch or in my bed and did little else than read it.

I remember how happy I was that some of the text was in untranslated Latin (a sign, I thought - surely, that I was an appropriate reader of this text!).

I may have missed some of the finer points.


This time around I had a fuller literary context on which I could draw. It struck me, decidedly as a love note to the novel in English. I had just finished reading Moll Flanders when I turned to Lolita and the two books work well together, with their flagrant claims to authenticity and their sometimes confessional mode. 

Nabokov touches on Austen (especially in one moment of the dissolution of his marriage): "'I'm leaving tonight. This is all yours. Only you'll never, never see that miserable brat again. Get out of this room.' Reader, I did" (89). 

He appropriates Ulysses (see the quote in the title of this post) and something of their wanderings reminds me of the book as well. 

And I'm sure there are hundreds of other references that I haven't yet identified.

Humbert Humbert is quite concerned, as a narrator, with getting the narrative right (he expects people to act like characters; he doesn't want to tempt fate because he feels the delicate balance of a narrative structure keenly). He wants readers to read the right way - and he tells them so: "Please, reader: no matter your exasperation with the tenderhearted, morbidly sensitive, infinitely circumspect hero of my book, do not skip these essential pages!" (119).

It is easy to suggest that HH is a character oriented toward his lust for an adolescent, but I think that claim ignores a large component of the book—one that is in love, line after line, allusion after allusion with the novel.