Matthew Ted's Reviews > Lolita

As I’m working my way through Nabokov’s early Russian novels, I felt compelled to consider Lolita again. Or more importantly, because I cannot travel anywhere at the moment, remember my time in Aston in 2018, where I read it. Classically, recalling from memory, they will perhaps come out as vignettes, so to speak.

Firstly, it was a read of coincidences. Nabokov was a great butterfly enthusiast and the father of family I was staying with (old English family friends, who have lived in France for some twenty years now), is also a great lover and studier of butterflies. The area, southwest France, is rife with countless species of butterflies, species that are not seen in other places; G., the father, claimed that one of the reasons of moving there was down to the butterfly species. (He also told me one night, playing table-tennis together under the eaves of the house, or rather, in the sort of garage, that he had seen a television program as a boy and his talkative-pet spoke about the south of France or moved there themselves and ever since knew, “knew”, he would move there himself.) Near the end of the trip I was caught in the small study on the ground floor of the house with Père G., and he took down a book and told me I must read it: Papillion. Butterfly. And throughout my reading of Lolita (it was hot, summer, a visit for walking and not skiing) there were butterflies everywhere. During picnics by quiet tumbling rivers, one was surrounded by them. And Père G. saw that I was reading Nabokov and told me that the Russian Master himself had walked around the local area, apparently, making use of its rife selection of species.


A photograph of Nabokov with a butterfly net from Sebald's novel The Emigrants. In some way or another, Nabokov haunts all four parts of Sebald's book, here is one example of his sudden, elusive, appearance.

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My edition of the book had a slightly more promiscuous looking Lolita on the cover, a painting of a girl with her underwear partly showing. On the flight to France I attempted to keep the cover flat against a surface at all times, and when walking, against my chest/bag/anything. At university a fellow student often declared he would never read it on principle: it is about a paedophile. Once, another lady from university (far older than us, but became a good friend), hosting us at her family home, told us at the table that reading Lolita changed the way she looked at her own daughter; and she didn't like the new light it spun on her. Despite this, she didn't speak poorly of the novel. I began reading it tentatively (it was my first Nabokov experience), but was quickly sucked in.

The problem with the novel is that in a certain way it is a story of doomed unrequited love. The other problem is that it's so startlingly well-written (to this day, some of the best prose I have read), that it is hard not to be enchanted. The last of Nabokov's novels written in Russian, but published by Dimitri posthumously, was The Enchanter; it dealt with hebephilia and Nabokov called it his "pre-Lolita". Drimitri claims in an essay on the novel that his father specifically translated as "enchanter" and not anything else like "magician", "conjuror", etc. Because the enchanter is slightly different; there's a key difference. And when we get to Lolita, Nabokov himself becomes The Enchanter, outside of the characters in the novel.

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It was the same trip to Aston that E. was there, the eldest daughter of the family, whom I had not seen since we were children. It was discussed beforehand: E. and I would either get on handsomely or we would butt heads. I hadn't seen E. in previous trips because she had moved to Scotland to go to the University of Edinburgh and she was finally home again at a time that corresponded with a visit of my own. She brought her boyfriend, D., a tall Lithuanian, whom I had met, funnily enough, as he stayed at our place in England for a weekend en route to France the year before, with his precious cargo: E.'s guinea pigs. D. and I got on, he had a rather sly humour which appealed to me, and his English was excellent, down to speaking with such English idioms that I often forgot it was his second-language. E. and I butted heads. She was reading Huxley's The Doors of Perception but seemed disinterested when I started a conversation about Huxley. When we set out, just her, D., and me, down the river with the dogs one late afternoon, she said she was very fond of English literature. I attempted to start a conversation about Ted Hughes with her but she flippantly told me she hadn't heard of him. Hadn't heard of him! I thought. I was ignorant and arrogant enough at this time to presume she wasn't as smart as she made out, not having heard of Ted Hughes, when in fact she speaks about five languages, one of them being Mandarin (which she was reading at university). E. and her sister spoke to one another around the house, moving without warning between English, French, Spanish, Italian... I sat bitterly in the armchair and read Nabokov, or played with the dogs outside.

Just last year however, E. was living in Paris and I was attempting to procure an invite to stay with her, despite our less than friendly experience in Aston. Sadly, her relationship with D. has now ended and he is now living in Berlin and working with computers. E. has now left Paris and is back working in Toulouse and living at home.

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It took me the entire stay, around two-weeks, to finish Lolita. It is a slow novel and the beauty of the prose forces one to read it slowly. I read it whenever I could: in the armchair, on the floor beside the dogs, by the rivers, on the balcony, and by a dim light at night—it was so hot that I slept on the large first-floor veranda of the house under a giant mosquito net. (I had tried first a tiny tent in the garden but the insects were too many.)

The ending of the novel is staggering, something I still think about today. Once I've read the rest of Nabokov's books I will return to this haunting, dazzlingly piece of fiction. Part credit goes to Véra, who apparently saved its beginning from fire when Nabokov considered ditching the whole idea.

One of my favourite novels. I'll review the novel properly when I read it again. To dismiss it seems foolish to me. It is hard to put the novel's feeling into words because one is slightly free from the enchantment once they have finished. I think elements do linger for a long time afterwards though, so perhaps Nabokov is forever The Enchanter.

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Original Review:
Haunting, uncomfortable, difficult with its emotion and wholly not what I had anticipated. Most of all, beyond everything I am blown away by Nabokov's writing - utterly staggering.