Lolita

By Vladimir Nabokov

Completed on May 13, 2018

Lolita, the novel, is like sugar candy. It is beautiful and delicious, with poetic prose and metaphors that will remain with you long after you are done reading. If you are a lover of words as I am, you’ll be hooked right from the first paragraph.

But sometimes too much sugar candy can be sickening. You marvel at the prose, especially since English is apparently Nabokov’s fourth language, but soon it becomes monotonous. I feel Lolita is not a book you can read all day. It is best devoured in chapters. When I started, I felt this was a book that deserved 5 stars. By the end, I could only give it a 3.

And that does not, by any means, imply that Lolita is average. Au contraire, it is perhaps the most wonderfully written book I have ever read. But a wonderfully-written book may not be a wonderful book.

Perhaps the greatest flaw with the book is that it drags in the middle for 2 reasons. First, there are no strongly developed side characters aside from the narrator and the titular child. Among this pair itself, Lolita is a whiny, rebellious teenager for the most part of the book. Second, there is a dearth of major events, and the elaborate description of places on the road trip feels repetitive at times.

You may wonder why I haven’t gone into the controversial content that makes up this book, and that is because there has already been so much said and written about it. But the old adage still holds: don’t judge a book by its cover.

“I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.”