I could hardly imagine a more difficult book than this one to read, and the word that comes to mind most often when I describe it to others is, “disturbing”. What is worse is that I think it’s a frequently misunderstood book - I think a lot of people read Lolita as a story about a young girl who seduces an older man.

Lolita is very much a book which forces us to rethink one of the most fundamental assumptions that we make whenever reading a book: that the narrator is someone we want to succeed and sympathize with. Moreover it challenges the somewhat less fundamental but still rather common idea that the narrator is someone we can trust. Because in this book the narrator is not someone who we actually want to succeed, and he’s definitely not someone we can trust. It’s not, after all, a story about a young seductress. Stripped of all of its fancy words and erudite references, this is a story of sexual slavery, an adult preying on a child in the most hideous way imaginable.

The reason so many people are fooled, I think, is that they gloss right over the “idea”, introduced early in chapter 1, that there are these creatures, called “nymphets”, who look like little girls, but are in fact little seductive demons. It’s the guiding assumption behind everything Humbert Humbert says and does, but of course it’s preposterous. When we see, by reading through the lines in Part 2, just how much Lolita is struggling to escape her captivity, and is striving for anything but the hellish life Humbert has constructed for her, we are reminded just how absurd the idea of the nymphet is. Like any girl of her age, Lolita is young and still learning about life. She has almost no agency, no power to decide what she wants in life or even, for that matter, to go where she wants. You could, if you like, read this book as the opposite of every other road-trip book: a frightening examination of captivity and constraint, a grotesque satire of the concept of freedom. And while it’s easy to take apart the idea of the nymphet - unfortunately, it is not so very far removed from the idea that beauty is goodness, a conceit that’s sadly, firmly entrenched in our lives and culture.

Beside the ridiculous conceit of the nymphet, this book is so deceptive because the narrator is exceptionally clever about creating distance between himself and his own actions. To begin with, there is his charming and scholarly persona. He’s a clever, well-read guy, someone who is just a shade exotic, equally conversant in European and American culture. He calculates his social position perfectly, and knows exactly how to put sufficient distance between himself and his neighbors. Then there is his name, a humorous pen name taken under the pretense of a legal defense, masking his true identity. And then there’s Lolita’s name, a salacious pet name that is meant to mask the fundamental fact that, true to her real name (Dolores), the girl he pretends to protect is actually in an exceptional amount of pain. The whole facade eventually crumbles, of course, as our faith in the narrator and his reliability plunges throughout Part 2 - it quickly becomes clear that he’s a delusional man with a tenuous grasp on reality.

To put it plainly, this book messes with your mind, albeit in a clever and fascinating way. It’s difficult to read, and not meant to be enjoyed, but it’s a tremendously important critique of modern literature, and definitely worth the read.