Light of My Life

I almost just finished listening to Lolita (performed by Jeremy Irons) and I'm not sure quite what to say about it.

The novel is brilliant, obviously. But having listened to it via audio book, what I really want is to read it via book book (visual book?). In other words Lolita makes me miss the textual, word-on-the-page experience of reading. 

Nabokov crams in gads of verbal puns and other delights, many of which I'm sure I didn't get. I suppose any reading of Lolita must also take into account the mean spirited nature of much of the humor:

"I had glanced at her as she smiled in her sleep and had kissed her on her moist brow, and had left her forever, with a note of tender adieu which I taped to her navel--otherwise she might not have found it."

Still hilarious.

And then there's the subject matter. I'm struck by the ease with which Lolita is transformed from a 12 year-old child to a 15 or 16 year-old adolescent, both in the film versions of Lolita (1962, 1997) and the imagination of the average person--a "Lolita" is usually well past puberty. The ease is striking because of the lengths that Nabokov goes to elucidate Humbert Humbert's interest in the physical immaturity of prepubescent girls.

This is all very unsettling--as it should be and as Nabokov intended it to be. Why then have we taken the book and turned it into the prototype for one of the conventional sex interests of men? Because it's more titillating and less horrifying?

If I could assign a few companion pieces to Lolita, I would assign a short story by Milan Kundera called, I think,  "Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead" and a short story by Doris Lessing called "The Habit of Loving."