Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Lolita
Book Review: psychologically insightful
Summary: 5 Stars
"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta . . . standing four feet ten in one sock."
From the very first sentence in the book, Nabokov showed amazing perception of the mind of the child erotist. Nabokov wrote these words in 1947, but it was not until 1990 that Segal & Stermac announced that pedophiles tend to idealize children.
Nabokov's hero sought a "princedom by the sea," an "enchanted island," or an "enchanted island of time." It was not until 1976 that R. Gordon, in "The normal and abnormal love of children," recognized the pedophile search for an earthly paradise.
Nabokov also beat the beat the professional writers when it came to the pedophile's most common rationalizations. Humbert checked into the hotel room and told the reader, "And she was mine, she was mine, the key was in my fist, my fist was in my pocket, she was mine." Decades later, in 1982, de Young commented on what we might call the "possession rationalization."
Humbert then tells his youthful heroine, "Look here, Lo. Lets settle this once for all. For all practical purposes I am your father . . . Two people sharing one room, inevitably enter into a kind, how shall I say, a kind . . ."Lolita interrupts, "The word is incest."
Humbert thereby committed the "love rationalization," which received its first professional comment from MacFarlane in 1978.
Humbert reads these words aloud from a book:
"The normal girl is usually extremely anxious to please her father. She feels in him the forerunner of the desired elusive male . . . The wise mother (and your poor mother would have been wise, had she lived) will encourage a companionship between father and daughter, realizing . . . that the girl forms her ideals of romance and of men from her association with her father."
In 1947, the same year that Nabokov wrote the novel, Hirning wrote on what can be called the "sex education rationalization."
Lastly, Humbert tells the reader:
"I am going to tell you something strange: it was she who seduced me . . . Suffice it to say that not a trace of modesty did I perceive in this beautiful hardly formed young girl whom modern co-education, juvenile mores, the campfire racket and so forth had utterly and hopelessly depraved."
This "seduction rationalization" received its first professional mention from Gebhard et al. in 1968.
Did Nabokov himself suffer from this mental discomfort? Or was Nabokov insightful into the minds of others? In 1992, Centerwall published an article arguing that Nabokov himself suffered from the malady. But we may never know for sure.