On Nabokov’s Lolita

A few days ago I finally finished Nabokov’s Lolita, and I have to say that I have rather ambivalent feelings in me about the novel.

There were parts of it, let’s say about half of the book, that I loved like hardly any other novel. These parts pulled me in deeply, because that part of the plot was an absolute page turner, and I was so eager to find out what was going to happen next that I felt I could not read fast enough. I was thinking about skipping pages just to see how things lead on and turn out. So these chapters of Lolita I adored and thought of Nabokov as a genius.

However, the other half of Lolita I found rather slow-moving and even boring. The first fifty pages was certainly not easy to get through, but it’s because Nabokov has his very own and pretty unique style that takes time and several pages to get used to. The last hundred pages I also found very long, probably because Nabokov writes about such things in  deep length that does not necessary help in the unfolding of the story. There were a number of pages I found boring and rather pointless regarding the story. I was thinking about skipping them, but in the end I fought myself through those parts too.

Nevertheless, Lolita is a well-written, really good book, no wonder it’s a classic. The parts when Lolita and Humbert Humbert spend their time traveling through the United States reminded me of Kerouac’s On the Road, for Nabokov tells the travelers adventures in a similar style and the trip itself occurs around the same time, in the same years. Not to mention, that it also really gave me the traveling bug, just like On the Road did. I am dying to take a road trip like the one Lolita and Sal did!