Banned books: Vladimir Nabokov's infamous Lolita

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul... You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”

Nabokov had a lot of trouble getting anyone to publish a story about a grown man falling in love with a 12 year old. After multiple bans and scandals, Lolita caught fire in America, and is now considered perhaps his greatest work (altho you still cop some dodgy glances reading it on the train).

The great central tension is between Humbert Humbert the monster and HH the sensitive and sympathetic aesthete. How reliable is HH as a narrator? Is he deluding himself? Did he successfully hoodwink certain critics? Is he truly capable of love and redemption, or is everything staged for effect?

On the murder mystery: is HH really any better than his nemesis Clare Quilty? What's the significance of trying to kill one's shadow? Did we catch Quilty's lurking presence throughout these pages? Does he even exist at all?

What's the message of this story? On didactic vs aesthetic fiction, whether this book is meant to be moralising, Nabokov's instructions to the reader, and an overall vibe check on how we feel about his tricks after reading both Pale Fire and Lolita.

CHAPTERS

• (00:00:00) life imitates art
• (00:04:11) the two faces of Humbert Humbert
• 00:13:42) is HH an unreliable narrator?
• (00:26:32) Trying to distinguish between love and lust
• (00:36:50) Sympathy for the pedo
• (00:40:32) the questionable reality of Clare Quilty
• (01:04:49) Quilty vs HH
• (01:08:45) Does Lolita have a moral? (death of the author redux)
• (01:14:22) comparison to Pale Fire and Nabokov vibe check

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