Lolita

So this might be the hardest book for me to rate or to review in any intelligible manner. At some point, I was ready to give it a one-star rating not because of the despicable subject matter but because of how hard it made me work. (I found the French passages quite tedious in that they trip me up in my reading, as I constantly had to look up unfamiliar phrases on trusty old google.)

Despite my annoyance with the over-the-top use of French, I admit that I was really drawn in by the beautiful, BEAUTIFUL writing. As many a reviewer have said before, Nabokov really could write the fuck out of a sentence. And those delightfully witty word-plays! (Which I probably understood only half of the time.)

Notwithstanding the very murky morals of this novel, I think it was successful in what it set out to do–that is, describe an obsessive love (lust?) through the eyes of a very unreliable yet very eloquent narrator who obscures and obfuscates his more deplorable acts through hazy, dreamy language. And yet it manages to be more than the sum of its parts (in the way great works of fiction are). For although it may be regarded as a story of forbidden erotic desires, Lolita is also a tale of contrasts between the young and the old , about the crumbling European world and America, the unsettling subject matter and the enthralling beauty of language. After all, every good book contends with problems greater than the mere facts of its narrative.

Also, knowing what happened at the end, it is quite interesting to see how various things have been foreshadowed throughout the book. This is definitely worthy of a closer reading and one that I will revisit in the future just to see how my reading of the text has evolved.

**Upgrading this to a 4-star rating because I can't get it out of my mind and because it is definitely NOT a mediocre book.