Audiobook review: Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Not the cover the audiobook uses, but I much prefer this one, or any that don’t have an actual girl on the cover, some depicted in the way Humbert would see her (which a shocking number do, or maybe it’s not really that shocking.)

I’m about to get flooded with work, probably for a month at least, and between that and family obligations, the time I have to myself will be reduced to almost nothing aside from the only time I truly have to myself: when I’m sitting on the interstate stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic. And since I do get plenty of that kind of alone time, I’ve been filling it up with podcasts (a subject that I took up here) and audiobooks.

And since I’m taking on audiobooks now, I may as well get the most controversial by far out of the way. I’m not even that happy writing the title of this book on this site, considering all the implications it carries (no fault of the author’s, since a lot of them are totally false and against the spirit of the novel) but it is a great piece of work very worth a look if you can handle it.

Vladimir Nabokov wrote a lot of novels both in his native Russian and in English, but his 1955 work is by far his most famous or infamous depending on who you ask. Lolita tells the story of a “nymphet”-obsessed late 30s-aged French-British writer and academic who moves from Europe to New England, lodges with a widow near his age, Charlotte Haze, and becomes completely obsessed with her daughter Dolores, 12, whom he names Lolita. Humbert Humbert, as the protagonist names himself, pursues and sexually grooms Dolores, all while acting as her stepfather after marrying her mother under extremely false pretenses, then takes her on a tour of the entire lower 48 states after her mother’s sudden (and highly convenient for Humbert) death, where the abuse continues and escalates, eventually ending in his captive’s escape. Leaving some stuff out there, but that’s the gist of the story up until close to the end.

I read this novel in college, then much later listened to it in audiobook form as read by Jeremy Irons, who also played Humbert in the 90s film adaptation of the novel. I haven’t seen either Kubrick’s or Lyne’s adaptations, though I’ve heard they’re both lacking, but Mr. Irons does an excellent job reading as Humbert and as every other character. I used to have a few issues with these kinds of single-reader audiobooks, especially when the reader reads a character far out of their range, but it’s totally appropriate and even ideal to have one guy read all of Lolita considering that it’s framed as Humbert’s own account of his life in the US, written while in prison to be presented to a jury at his trial (though he’s not on trial for the crime you might suspect.)

This is also a post-mortem novel, both literally and figuratively — at the time of its release in the story’s universe, both the author and his subject are dead, but that subject may have already died in some sense earlier. As Humbert himself admits once, during their roadtrip while in a motel with Dolores, he feels as though he were sitting next to the ghost of someone he’d just killed.

These two dominate the story once Charlotte is out of the picture, but even our view of Dolores, as central as she is to the story, is obscure — we see everything through Humbert’s eyes, since he’s our only source aside from the brief foreword by a fictional psychologist who points out how morally deficient the author is. And this is where some readers seem to badly misinterpret what’s going on with this novel. It was always clear to me that Lolita is a love story only in a very twisted sense, from Humbert’s twisted perspective. From a more clear-minded angle, Lolita is a horror story written from the perspective of the monster, one made all the more dangerous by his old-world charm and eloquence. All Nabokov’s flowery language and fancy prose style work perfectly here for Humbert, who makes a ton of literary references and slips into French pretty often despite the American jury and readership his account is addressed to (good reason to get the annotated version if you have the luxury of being able to read the novel in print instead — I know about three words of French, but I think more Americans had a working knowledge of it back in the 50s.) Humbert is worldly and learned, but he’s also an arrogant, self-absorbed liar who uses that charm to commit vicious acts without facing the natural consequences aside from the paranoia he ends up causing himself.

Lolita is a criminal’s self-portrait, even if Humbert himself wavers over whether he’s actually a criminal or not. He makes weak attempts to convince the reader that his urges are totally natural and harmless, insisting that he only obsesses over young girls because he lost his own childhood sweetheart to a deadly disease when they were both kids. He points to Dante falling in a pure kind of love with the nine year-old Beatrice (and doesn’t mention that Dante was about the same age at the time.) He even cites a practice in Sicily between fathers and daughters that sounds like something he just dreamed up for his own benefit. It all comes off far more like he’s trying to convince himself that he’s not in the wrong, and he doesn’t even seem to succeed at that, since he also admits throughout the novel that he knew he was hurting Dolores. Even his name for her is his own creation — her mother and friends call her Dolly and Lo, but only Humbert calls her Lolita, and in one rare moment of real self-insight he recognizes that his “Lolita” isn’t a living being and has no connection to the real-life girl he claims to love aside from the pain that imposition causes her.

So it’s hard for me to get how Dolly can be depicted as a temptress based on a careful reading of the novel. Maybe this is a vulgar kind of comparison, but I watched some of those trainwreck TV Dateline predator trap investigations way back in the 2000s, and the argument of “she seduced me” (an exact Humbert quote) came up either explicitly or hinted at by some of the guys who got caught up in the show’s investigation. I guess this isn’t exactly a bold stance to take, but that argument is complete bullshit, an excuse used by people who give in to their darkest urges but still want to convince themselves they’re not really predatory or depraved. Humbert himself tells us that Dolores cried herself to sleep every night they were together on their trip after he pretended to go to sleep, but his selfishness combined with his sexual attraction always seem far greater than any remorse he might feel over them, even when he recognizes them in himself.

And if you want more clues that we’re not meant to sympathize with this man, look to that foreword, or even to Nabokov himself, who made it clear in a later afterword that Humbert’s thoughts and morals are not his own and that he is meant to be monstrous (yet somehow some still accuse the author himself, as if the protagonist must always represent the author — maybe those people only read self-insert power fantasies? They need to get some god damn media literacy, for sure.)

Lolita is a beautifully written novel about a horrific subject, and it’s worth either reading or listening to in audiobook form if you want a look into both a legally and morally criminal mind from the criminal’s point of view. All that said, it’s pretty obvious why some people wouldn’t want to read it. You probably already know if you’d be able to bear this book or not; even someone who hasn’t gone through the kind of trauma Dolores does in Lolita may find the text revolting just because of what it’s about, or they may not want to read the self-absorbed account of a man trying for hundreds of pages to make out like he’s more than just a pedophilic predator. There’s nothing pornographic in this novel, anyway — a false impression of the book a lot of people seem to have.

My next post may or may not be a look at another audiobook, but it will definitely not be on as heavy a subject as this. Until then.

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