Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo.Lee.Ta.
Do you find yourself saying it? I did, over and over again. Lo-lee-ta. I traced it out the same way that the novel’s anti-hero protagonist, Humbert Humbert, did.
Banned Books Week ended two weeks ago, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still talk about controversial books this week. The book in question — Nabokov’s classicLolita. Upon its publication, London’s Sunday Times called the book one of the best of 1955. In response,The Sunday Expressdecried it as “sheer unrestrained pornography.”With all the talk of “loins” it’s not hard to see why so many are inclined to agree with theExpress. However, I tend to throw my lot in with the Times.
One reason why — at the end of Lolita, Humbert asks: “Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank Lasalle, a fifty-year-old mechanic, had done to eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?” This oft-forgotten sentence is a deliberatethread left by Nabokov for the reader. And it wasn’t until reading Sarah Weinman’s The Real Lolita that I learned Sally Horner was a real child who was kidnapped and raped for nearly two years by a man posing as her father. Lolita is a character. Sally Horner is not. Throughout the book, it’s easy to get charmed or blinded by Humbert’s descriptions of his adolescentstep-daughter. However, this comparison is an adroit reminder that Humbert is a predator and Lolita a victim — giving the novel a multifaceted depth.
To learn more about Sally Horner, and the influence she had on Nabokov’s novel, check out The Real Lolita. The author Sarah Weinman will be speaking at the WNBA’s National Reading Group Month Panel: The Art of Writing Non-fiction.
By Rina Mody
Rina’s a marketing assistant at a publishing company in NY. She’s an avid traveler and loves to go to new places – both real and fictional.
How interesting! Makes me love Nabokov even more.