Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Finished September 11, 2026

Being an extremely controversial classic, I expected Lolita to be dry, pretentious, kinda disgusting.

At the risk of being judged as a pervert: I loved it.

Yes, it is gross, because it is (somewhat) about pedophilia. It is sad and tragic and sometimes uncomfortable. But it was also entertaining and intriguing and Humbert Humbert’s “voice” made him…not a lovable criminal, but an interesting one.

Unfortunately for both of us, I have a lot of quotes.

From page 1, Humbert Humbert was a charmer:

“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”

I think what gave Lolita staying power to a reader is the fact that H.H. is actually kind of (why do I feel horrible for saying this) funny. On his expedition to the arctic:

No temptations maddened me. The plump, glossy little Eskimo girls with their fish smell, hideous raven hair and guinea pig faces, evoked even less desire in me than Dr. Johnson had. Nymphets do not occur in polar regions.

And after a(nother?) breakdown where he ends up in an institution for a bit:

The reader will regret to learn that soon after my return to civilization I had another bout with insanity (if to melancholia and a sense of insufferable oppression that cruel term must be applied). I owe my complete restoration to a discovery I made while being treated at that particular very expensive sanatorium. I discovered there was an endless source of robust enjoyment in trifling with psychiatrists: cunningly leading them on; never letting them see that you know all the tricks of the trade; inventing for them elaborate dreams, pure classics in style (which make them, the dream-extortionists, dream and wake up shrieking); teasing them with fake “primal scenes”; and never allowing them the slightest glimpse of one’s real sexual predicament. By bribing a nurse I won access to some files and discovered, with glee, cards calling me “potentially homosexual” and “totally impotent.” The sport was so excellent, its results—in my case—so ruddy that I stayed on for a whole month after I was quite well (sleeping admirably and eating like a schoolgirl). And then I added another week just for the pleasure of taking on a powerful newcomer, a displaced (and, surely, deranged) celebrity, known for his knack of making patients believe they had witnessed their own conception.

And sometimes we have things that are unintentionally funny, at least by the characters themselves. In a letter from Charlotte (Lolita’s mother) confessing her love to H.H.:

—but I am nothing to you. Right? Right. Nothing to you whatever. But if, after reading my “confession,” you decided, in your dark romantic European way, that I am attractive enough for you to take advantage of my letter and make a pass at me, then you would be a criminal—worse than a kidnaper who rapes a child.

“worse than a kidnaper who rapes a child” do I have news for you what happens not too much later in this very book

But every now and then H.H. says something really kind of disturbing and gross that reminds us no matter how entertaining of a storyteller he is, he is fucked up. After marrying Charlotte (because he realizes that gives him more access to Lolita):

And although I felt no special urge to supply the Humbert line with a replica of Harold’s production (Lolita, with an incestuous thrill, I had grown to regard as my child), it occurred to me that a prolonged confinement, with a nice Caesarean operation and other complications in a safe amternity ward sometime next spring, would give me a chance to be alone with my Lolita for weeks, perhaps—and gorge the limp nymphet with sleeping pills.

As Charlotte becomes increasingly annoying, H.H. contemplates murder by drowning:

Simple, was it not? but what d’ye know, folks—I just could not make myself do it!

I laughed.

She swam beside me, a trustful and clumsy seal, and all the logic of passion screamed in my ear: Now is the time And, folks, I just couldn’t! In silence I turned shoreward and gravely, dutifully, she also turned, and still hell screamed its counsel, and still I could not make myself drown the poor, slippery, big-bodied creature. The scream grew more and more remote as i realized the melancholy fact that neither tomorrow, nor Friday, nor any other day or not, could I make myself put her to death.

Fortunately (?) for Humbert Humbert, he doesn’t have to. Not too much later, Charlotte discovers his little diary full of his contempt for her and love for Lolita and in her semi-hysteria she runs to send letters and gets run over.

Most significant problem solved, H.H. picks Lolita up from camp. (At this point Lolita has been told her mother is “ill” but not dead.) Now here is where I hit the unexpected:

We rolled silently through a silent townlet.

“Say, wouldn’t Mother be absolutely mad if she found out we were lovers?”

I about spit out my drink. Not saying this makes things okay but there was a shift in my perception. “Oh. She knows.”

“Good Lord, Lo, let us not talk that way.”

“But we are lovers, aren’t we?”

“Not that I know of. I think we are going to have some more rain. Don’t you want to tell me of those little pranks of yours in camp?”

Their first stay in a hotel:

“Look here, Lo. Let’s settle this once and for all. For all practical purposes I am your father. I have a feeling of great tenderness for you. In your mother’s absence I am responsible for your welfare. We are not rich, and while we travel, we shall be obliged—we shall be thrown a good deal together. Two people sharing one room, inevitably enter into a kind—how shall I say—a kind—”

“The word is incest,” said Lo—and walked into the closet, walked out again with a young golden giggle, opened the adjoining door, and after carefully peering inside with her strange smoky eyes lest she make another mistake, retired to the bathroom.

Ohhhh she knows.

As it turns out she really does know because much to H.H.’s surprise, Lolita has “been there, done that.” In this realization, we get to see some more of his fantastic disdain for therapists:

The whole point is that the old link between the adult world and the child world has been completely severed nowadays by new customs and new laws. Despite my having dabbled in psychiatry and social work, I really knew very little about children. After all, Lolita was only twelve, and no matter what concessions I made to time and place—even bearing in mind the crude behavior of American schoolchildren—I still was under the impression that whatever went on among those brash brats, went on at a later age, and in a different environment. Therefore (to retrieve the thread of this explanation) the moralist in me by-passed the issue by clinging to conventional notions of what twelve-year-old girls should be. The child therapist in me (a fake, as most of them are—but no matter) regurgitated neo-Freudian hash and conjured up a dreaming exaggerating Dolly in the “latency” of girlhood. Finally, the sensualist in me (a great and insane monster) had no objection to some depravity in his prey.

Anyway, here we are:

Frigid gentlewomen of the jury! I had thought that months, perhaps years, would elapse before I dared reveal to myself to Dolores Haze; but by six she was wide awake, and by six fifteen we were technically lovers. I am going to tell you something very strange: it was she who seduced me.

So in this strange way (and I did wonder for a moment if H.H. was an unreliable narrator here, but I don’t think that’s what the author was going for) Lolita knew what she was doing while simultaneously not knowing what she was getting into.

In the midst of all this, I laughed at:

Her kiss, to my delirious embarrassment, had some rather comical refinements of flutter and probe which made me conclude she had been coached at an early age by a little Lesbian. No Charlie boy could have taught her that.

I debated whether to include this since it’s a bit long, but I keep going back to the fact that, although he can faux-rationalize it, H.H. knows he is disgusting. He knows it’s wrong. He can argue in his defense but we do see self-loathing peeking through from time to time. Even if then he follows by trying to convince himself otherwise:

I am trying to describe these things not to relive them in my present boundless misery, but to sort out the portion of hell and the portion of heaven in that strange, awful, maddening world—nymphet love. The beastly and beautiful merged at one point, and it is that borderline I would like to fix, and I feel I fail to do so utterly. Why?

The stipulation of the Roman law, according to which a girl may marry at twelve, was adopted by the Church, and is still preserved, rather tacitly, in some of the United States. And fifteen is lawful everywhere. There is nothing wrong, say both hemispheres, when a brute of forty, blessed by the local priest and bloated with drink, sheds his sweat-drenched finery and thrusts himself up to the hilt into his youthful bride. “In such stimulating temperate climates [says an old magazine in this prison library] as St. Louis, Chicago, and Cincinnati, girls mature about the end of their twelfth year.” Dolores Haze was born less than three hundred miles from stimulating Cincinnati. I have but followed nature. I am natures faithful hound. Why then this horror that I cannot shake off? Did I deprive her of her flower? Sensitive gentlewomen of the jury, I was not even her first lover.

The sheer amount of times I thought “she knows what she’s doing but doesn’t know what she’s doing”:

I glanced at her. Thank God, the child was smiling.

“You chump,” she said, sweetly smiling at me. “You revolting creature. I was a daisy-fresh girl, and look what you’ve done to me. I ought to call the police and tell them you raped me. Oh, you dirty, dirty, old man.”

I have so much to say about this I can’t even put it into words.

Lolita and H.H. go on their cross-country road trip. And this is where, by his own narration, I started thinking that H.H. is not in love with Lolita herself but the concept of Lolita, the Lolita in his mind. The way he describes her, she’s not exactly likable. For one, she’s a pre-teen, and a bratty pre-teen at that. (And if you’re saying “well, yes, she’s been kidnapped and raped daily by her stepfather, of course she’s snotty” you would somewhat have a point but she was kind of annoying even before all that happened.)

I was not really quite prepared for her fits of disorganized boredom, intense and vehement griping, her sprawling, droopy, dopey-eyed style, and what is called goofing off—a kind of diffused clowning which she thought was tough in a boyish hoodlum way. Mentally, I found her to be a disgustingly conventional little girl.

Neither one of them knew what they were getting into, apparently.

This fucking guy:

Oh, do not scowl at me, reader, I do not intend to convey the impression that I did not manage to be happy. Reader must understand that in the possession and thralldom of a nymphet the enchanted traveler stands, as it were, beyond happiness. For there is no other bliss on earth comparable of fondling a nymphet. It is hors concours, that bliss, it belongs to another class, another plane of sensitivity. Despite our tiffs, despite her nastiness, despite all the fuss and faces she made, and the vulgarity, and the danger, and the horrible hopelessness of it all, I still dwelled deep in my elected paradise—a paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flames—but still a paradise.

And then every once in a while he says something that really makes you go “ew, you’re fucking disgusting.” I wasn’t going to include this, but it’s so gross I had to:

I now think it was a great mistake to move east again and have her go to that private school in Beardsley, instead of somehow scrambling across the Mexican border while the scrambling was good so as to lie low for a couple years in subtropical bliss until I could safely marry my little Creole for I must confess that depending on the condition of my glands and ganglia, I could switch in the course of the same day from one pole of insanity to the other—from the thought that around 1950 I would have to get rid somehow of a difficult adolescent whose magic nymphage had evaporated—to the thought that with patience and luck I might have her produce eventually a nymphet with my blood in her exquisite veins, a Lolita the Second, who would be eight or nine around 1960, when I would still be dans la force de l’âge; indeed, the telescopy of my mind, or un-mind, was strong enough to distinguish the remoteness of a time a vieillard encore vert—or was it green rot?—bizarre, tender, salivating Dr. Humbert, practicing on supremely lovely Lolita the Third the art of being a granddad.

Dude! Yuck.

So realizing his control is slipping, that Lolita is slipping away from him, he takes her back out of school for another road trip, promising whatever she wants. In the course of the trip, she is stolen/runs away and he cannot find her—or the savior/kidnapper (depending on POV)—for three years.

And he wouldn’t have but for a letter from Lolita:

Dear Dad:

How’s everything? I’m married. I’m going to have a baby. I guess he’s going to be a big one. I guess he’ll come right for Christmas. This is a hard letter to write. I’m going nuts because we don’t have enough to pay our debts and get out of here. Dick is promised a big job in Alaska in his very specialized corner of the mechanical field, that’s all I know about it but it’s really grand. Pardon me for withholding our home address but you may still be mad at me, and Dick must not know. This town is something. You can’t see the morons for the smog. Please do send us a check, Dad. We could manage with three or four hundred or even less, anything is welcome, you might sell my old things, because once we get there the dough will just start rolling in. Write, please. I have gone through much sadness and hardship.

Yours expecting,
Dolly (Mrs. Richard F. Schiller)

Reading this again it’s heartbreaking in so many ways. Lolita was 14 when she disappeared so she’s married and pregnant at seventeen in this letter. The trailer-trash dream of “once we get there, the dough will start rolling in.” The factually true but still manipulative-sounding “I have gone through much sadness and hardship.”

The opening of the letter “Dear Dad.”

Of course Humbert Humbert tracks her down. He still somewhat deludes himself that she could return to him but perhaps even more importantly, he’s on a mission to kill the guy who saved/stole her from him.

He gets to the place and realizes immediately that her husband Dick is not the culprit.

Dick did not know a thing of the whole mess. He thought I was her father. He thought she had run away from an upper-class home just to wash dishes in a diner. He believed anything.

Have to admit, I had a moment of “holy shit, this reminds me of Kill Bill” (“Moving to El Paso, working in a used record store, goin’ to the movies with Tommy, clipping coupons. That’s you, trying to disguise yourself as a worker bee. That’s you tryin’ to blend in with the hive. But you’re not a worker bee. You’re a renegade killer bee. And no matter how much beer you drank or barbecue you ate or how fat your ass got, nothing in the world would ever change that.”)

In case you’re curious about the end of the whole thing, even after Lolita says there’s no way she’ll ever return to him, H.H. gives her the money she needs. All the money he has, actually, because he finally does get the name of the guy and he’s going to go kill him.

That murder scene was so brutally, comically realistic it was simultaneously painful and hilarious in a gross, sad way.

Also interesting that, as we’re “reading” the book from H.H. writing in prison, he’s not in prison for raping a girl from ages 12-14, but rather for murder. If he hadn’t gone and killed the guy, he’d theoretically still be free, likely molesting new girls. Or maybe not:

Somewhere beyond bill’s shack an afterwork radio had begun singing of folly and fate, and there she was with her ruined looks and her adult, rope-veined narrow hands and her gooseflesh white arms, and her shallow ears, and her unkempt armpits, there she was (my Lolita!), hopelessly worn at seventeen, with that baby, dreaming already in her of becoming a big shot and retiring around 2020 A.D.—and I looked and looked at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am going to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else. She was only the faint violet whiff and dead leaf echo of the nymphet I had rolled myself upon with such cries in the past; an echo on the brink of a russet ravine, with a far wood under a white sky, and brown leaves choking the brook, and one last cricket in the crisp weeds…but thank God it was not that echo alone that I worshiped. What I used to pamper among the tangled vines of my heart, mon grand pêché radieux, had dwindled to its essence: sterile and selfish vice, all that I canceled and cursed. You may jeer at me, and threaten to clear the court, but until I am gagged and half-throttled I will shout my poor truth. I insist the world know how much I loved my Lolita, this Lolita, pale and polluted, and big with another’s child, but still gray-eyed, still sooty-lashed, still auburn and almond, still Carmencita, still mine; Changeons de vie, ma Carmen, allons vivre quelque part où nous ne serons jamais séparés; Ohio? the wilds of Massachusetts? No matter, even if those eyes of hers would fade to myopic fish, and her nipples swell and crack, and her lovely young velvety delicate delta be tainted and torn—even then I would go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of your dear wan face, at the mere sound of of your raucous young voice, my Lolita.

I should end there, and you certainly can.


This particular edition included a bit at the end by the author “On a Book Entitled Lolita” and it made me like him all the more:

Teachers of Literature are apt to think up such problems as “What is the author’s purpose?” or still worse “What is the guy trying to say?” Now, I happen to be the kind of author who in starting to work on a book has no other purpose than to get rid of that book and who, when asked to explain its origin and growth, has to rely on such ancient terms as Interreaction of Inspiration and Combination—which, I admit, sounds like a conjurer explaining one trick by performing another.

Although everybody should know that I detest symbols and allegories (which is due partly to my old feud with Freudian voodooism and partly to my loathing of generalizations devised by literary mythists and sociologists) […]

I presume there exist readers who find titillating the display of mural words in those hopelessly banal and enormous novels which are typed out by the thumbs of tense mediocrities and called “powerful” and “stark” by the reviewing hack. There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction, and despite John Ray’s assertion, Lolita has no moral in tow. For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not many such books.

I love this guy.

Rating: 4.5 stars