September 14, 2006
Finished reading Lolita. This was such a hard book, what with it being a story about a man who rapes a 12 year old girl for years. I tried reading the book in college, what with being a lit major at the time and Lolita being a famous novel, but I was never able to get far in the book because the subject caused me major distress. Suffice to say that having gone through something similar - being sexually abused for years - the book did a number on my psyche every time I tried to read it. So I gave up on it, until recently.
What made me attempt reading Lolita again? To begin with, I've always been curious and baffled as to why a book about the rape of a 12 year old was considered such a great work of literature. People revere Nabokov and Lolita is considered a classic, but why? Was there something in the story, a part I never reached, that made the subject redeeming? Did it eventually turn into a story that illuminates why child abuse is bad or was it just a sick tribute to a demented man's love of children? Navokov was gifted and I never thought of him as a perv and yet some reviewers have gone so far as to call Lolita the only true love story of our time. How sick is that? A man in his 40s holding a 12 year old captive and raping her continually. Not exactly my idea of love and I wanted to find out once and for all what this book really was about.
The second reason I was intent on reading Lolita is because I wanted to read the book
Reading Lolita in Tehran, but wanted to actually have read Lolita first. I'd heard great things about Reading Lolita, which is a true story about a female literature professor in Tehran who hand picks a group of women to secretly read and discuss books that have been banned by the Iranian regime. The theme alone intrigued me - great literature, banned books, secret readings - but the Lolita aspect also drew me in. Why was Lolita chosen for this secret book club in Tehran? And since the book would address the reading and discussion of Lolita, I figured it might help me understand Lolita as well.
Now that I've actually finished Lolita, my feelings and perspectives on it are different than the ones I had in college. I'm still not totally sure what Nabokov was ultimately getting at, but I think it had something to do with the adverse and destructive affects people can have on each other. Usually I have a much better idea what I think of a book and what the point was by the time I finish it, but Nabokov was a genius and he didn't make Lolita easy. Lolita makes you work, and at times makes you sick, and doesn't hand over its meaning on a silver plater at the end. It's easy to wish that Nabokov had made things more obvious but, if he had, the book wouldn't have been as realistic and in some ways, the point Nabokov was trying to make would have been lost, or at least less potent, had he spelled it all out.
Granted, there's still a part of me that wishes Nabokov would have made a statement about the book not condoning child abuse, but based on the insight Nabokov had for what it's like to be abused and the atrociousness he portrayed in the abuser, I don't think Nabokov really meant this to be a love story. Mind you, it offers great insight into the mind of child molesters and the damage they do, but how anyone could mistake that as love is beyond me. And maybe Nabokov felt that way, too. Maybe it never crossed his mind that anyone could see this story as a testament to love, maybe he thought it was so obvious that he never felt the need to explain it. Because it would be nice to think that people already know that abuse is never a form of love.
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