Recommended by: Gabi, Literature Professors, Sting and the Police
Read because: I have always meant to, to see what the fuss was about, especially after reading Reading Lolita in Tehran last year. I want to read everything the girls in that book read, although I don't know that I can bring myself to read The Great Gatsby again, having suffered through it in school for academic purposes.

Wow. This book. Wow. I understand now why this is considered such an amazing work of literature, simply because of my experience with it. Before today, when I finished it, I was ready to be all, "I did not care for Drink Deeply, Horse, about it, because OH MY GOD HUMBERT HUMBERT, YOU ARE A NASTY DISGUSTING SON OF A BITCH.

This book, in case you don't know, is the book Sting is talking about in Don't Stand So Close to Me when he says that the teacher in said song shakes and coughs like "the old man in that famous book by Nabokov." This is that book. This is that book.

I first picked it up at the end of January, around the same time I picked up The Kitchen God's Wife, and I started several other books while reading Lolita just because it was so difficult for me to read. I don't mean the language, either, although I did have some trouble parsing some of it at first. However, once I got into Nabokov's style, the problem dissolved. The language is beautiful. Utterly, heartbreakingly gorgeous. One of the comments on the back of my copy is a quote from John Updike: "Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically."

This is so very true. The prose is beautiful, and honestly, it's a good thing it is, because otherwise I never would have made it ten pages into the book proper. The protagonist, we are warned in the foreword, is a reprehensible, disgusting pervert of a man, and warned thusly, I was ready. Even then, even before Lolita herself even shows up, the descriptions of Humbert, the protagonist, and his plots to position himself just so on a bench so that little girls will touch him when a marble rolls under the bench or something... OH MY GOD. OH MY GOD VOMIT. I would read about ten pages of the book, and have to put it down and go take a shower, no fooling. GOD. Until today, when I read the last pages of the book, I didn't want it in my house once I was done with it. I would read a particularly gorgeous metaphor, like the description of a chessboard the way an expert sees it, and consider dogearing it for later, and then tell myself I never want to open this book again, so no.

It got worse when he actually met Lolita herself, and did all these revolting calculated things to touch her, and it got even WORSE when he actually got his nasty nasty pedophile hands on her and had sex with her on a regular basis, threatening her with reform school if she doesn't let him, and later bribing her with things like participating in plays at school, and an allowance, provided she continues to, you know, fuck him. It is terrifying and gross, and I don't give a shit how many times he says "you will never believe it, but SHE seduced ME," you REVOLTING OLD ASSHOLE, SHE IS TWELVE. UGH.

The other quote on the back of the book made me so angry, so very very very angry, almost the entire time I was reading the book. It is from Vanity Fair, and it reads that this book is "the only convincing love story of our century." I cannot tell you how many times, during the course of reading the book, I screamed, "FUCK YOU VANITY FAIR, ARE YOU INSANE?" Because for the most part, right up until the very end, there was not a single slice of anything I could call love in this book. When you describe how the twelve-year-old you're sexing up nightly cries every single night after you pretend to go to sleep? That's not love. When you describe how you must act quickly to sex her up before she reaches the disgusting and wizened old age of FIFTEEN? That is not love. When you go into her classroom and make her touch you under her desk while you fantasize about the girl who sits in front of her? YOU ARE DISGUSTING AND IT ISN'T LOVE. When the entire time you're having sex with her, you're fantasizing about also perhaps molesting her cute friends? YOU ARE A DISGUSTING GROSS ASSHOLE AND IT ISN't LOVE. When you describe how you are considering marrying this girl, and having a child with her SO THAT YOU CAN ALSO HAVE SEX WITH THE CHILD WHEN IT TURNS EIGHT OR NINE, YOU ARE THE MOST DEPLORABLE DISGUSTING BASTARD THAT HAS EVER LIVED AND I HATE YOU AND IT IS NOT REMOTELY LOVE.

... and then she leaves him. She's fifteen. She gets away and he can't find her, and I'm all, "HA HA GOOD ON YOU LOLITA," and pointing and feeling no sympathy for Humbert whatsoever, and then she writes him a letter at seventeen. She's married and pregnant, and he goes to see her, and suddenly the love happens, and I was kind of pissed off. Because I was sort of enjoying hating him, because he's a gross old pervert, but when he goes to see her and she's seventeen, and he realizes that he does, in fact, genuinely love her, despite the fact that now she's seventeen and huge with another man's child, and he realizes that he has completely ruined her life completely and forever, that there is no hope whatsoever of her ever letting him touch her again, that he TOOK HER CHILDHOOD and warped her into this weird, brittle thing, and I actually felt bad for him. I felt kind of sorry for the gross perverted old man, and it made me mad, because I didn't want to. It was brilliant. I sort of hate him for it. This book is brilliant. I sort of hate it for that.

Well played, Vladimir Nabokov. Damn.