Finally finished the novel, and read Nabakov's afterword ( reminded me of TS Eliot's "explanatory notes on the Wasteland), then Professor Craig Raine's Afterword, and then the the fake Foreword again. he's a clever bigger, Nabakov, no doubt about that. I would sum it up, in the reductionist way that you have to do when you are writing a short piece, as ultimately about the destructive reflexivity of wanting/ sexual desire that is not reciprocated, but forced on Dolores. I find it strange that there are cribs and reviews that say the reader is drawn into sympathy for HH. I liked the language, I liked the sensuousness of the language, I liked some of the jokes and puzzles strewn through the book, but at the end I'm thinking, hmm time to read something else. I'd rather read John Updike, though I will read something else of Nabakov's to give me a sense of perspective - it was, after all, hearing two of Nabakov's short stories read aloud that made me reread Lolita. IN the end though I feel short changed, unenhanced, if not unimpressed.
I like Elizabeth Janeaway's summation:
Humbert is every man who is driven by desire, wanting his Lolita so badly that it never occurs to him to consider her as a human being, or as anything but a dream-figment made flesh - which is the eternal and universal nature of passion.''
(New York Times Book Review, quoted by Erica Jong)
In fact the more I read that it does ring true, except perhaps for the rather purple phrase "eternal and universal nature of passion" .
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