Happy Birthday, Nabokov

"Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator. Don't stop to think, don't interrupt the scream, exhale, release life's rapture. Everything is blooming. Everything is flying. Everything is screaming, choking on its screams. Laughter. Running. Let-down hair. That is all there is to life." -Vladamir Nabokov

Memories of My Melancholy Whores

Wow. I loved this book. I'm not sure I can even call it a book because it's five chapters and 115 pages but it is considered a book... and I loved it. I love it in that weird way that I love Lolita. But actually, I don't love it the same way I love Lolita. I suppose I am ashamed to love it in the way I am ashamed to love Lolita. Because it's great, but has a disturbing premise.

Ok - enough of my cryptic elusiveness. This novel is about an old man who has never been in love and on his 90th birthday decides the one thing he would like to gift himself is an underage virgin. Said virgin turns out to be 14 and said 90-year-old falls in love with her before he ever makes love to her. Creepy preface, I know (hello comparison to Lolita!) but this mans love for the young girl, who he begins to call Delgadina, prompts him to reconsider and evaluate the conflict of growing old but feeling young, death, love and beauty. Ultimately the old man is forever changed by his love for Delgadina.

But then, I'm not sure if he even loved her at all. I'm not sure if we're meant to believe he did. Maybe he did, or maybe it was just the idea of her. After all, the title of the book is Memories of My Meloncholy Whores and I think thats what this man feel in love with; his memories of this girl. The fact that in his own mind she was whatever he wanted her to be. He romanticized the idea of her and didn't really get to know her at all. Upon the girl's 15th birthday the old man comments, "It troubled me that she was real enough to have birthdays". And later:

"From then on I had her in my memory with so much clarity that I could do what I wanted with her. I changed the color of her eyes according to my state of mind: the color of water when she woke, the color of syrup when she laughed, the color of light when she was annoyed. I dressed her according to the age and condition that suited my changes of mood... Today I know it was not a hallucination but one more miracle of the first love of my life at the age of ninety.

Which of course, lends itself to the idea that the very thought of someone and how you make them out to be in your head can actually become an ideal version of that perons. That maybe you have fallen in love with the idea of someone, or the person that you create them to be, rather than the actual soul behind the pretty face. Again, while the premise itself is a bit disturbing, the ideas and feelings behind this novel are very real and very relatable. In a strange way that I can't describe Marquez invited me into this sick and twisted love story and left me thinking "oh my God... this is soooo fantasic". We are never meant to understand the old man as unbalanced or dangerous - he is simply a man who has never been in love and has found it in this girl.So, I recommend this book to anyone who can get passed the 90-year-old obessed with a 14 year-old girl.

Published by: Vintage

Year of First Edition: 2004

Quotables: Vladimir Nabokov

"Style and structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash." 

Book Review: Lolita

A rejection of pedophillia, this novel hardly glamorizes or justifies the actions of Humbert Humbert. Rather, the novel offers a look inside the mind of a tortured soul. The moral abombination of paedophilia is delivered as almost acceptable, developing conflict in the reader who feels both revulsion towards this trully terrible act and empathy for this character Humbert who is seduced by Lolita, falls in love and ultimately has his heart broken. 

However, Humbert understands his obsession is driving him insane as he contemplates a poem he wrote and reveals, "By psychoanalyzing this poem, I notice it is really a maniac's masterpiece. The stark, stiff, lurid rhymes correspond very exactly to certain perspeciveless and terrible landscapes and figures... I wrote many more poems. I immersed myself in the poetry of others. But not for a second did I forget the load of revenge". While Humbert recognizes his struggle, he is content with pursuing it. Reading on, I actually began to pity Humbert and his tortured soul; his insanity and most of all his humanity. Humbert begins to understand the full extent of the damage he had inflicted upon Lo. "I happened to glimpse from the bathroom, through a chance combination of mirror aslant and door ajar, a look on her face... that look I cannot exactly describe... and expression of helplessness so perfect that it seemed to grade into one of rather comfortable inanity just because this was the very limit of injustice and frustration--and every limit presupposes something beyond it--hence the neutral illumination."

Spoiler Alert: It is the ending that truly reveals the inner-struggle Humbert has within himself. Humbert tracks down the man who took Lolita away from him- another man who has committed the same sins that Humbert has- and brutally kills him. Because this man represents what Humbert hates most about himself, Humbert is symbolically destroying another man for the same sins he hates himself for committing.

While I struggled through the first half of this novel (describing the most lecherous manipulation on Humbert's part) by the end I was consumed by it. It is an examination of the destructive nature of selfish love: selfishness kills love- it is a black hole that can never be satisfied- it is self-pitting and never looks outside itself. Lolita's words to Humbert years later sums this idea up; "He broke my heart, you merely broke my life".

On the shelf to read next: something a little more uplifting.

Reading Now: Lolita

After running across many references to this novel I decided to pick it up.  I am about half-way through it and am thinking of putting it down for good (I almost never do this). While Nabokov's wonderful use of language is something to be praised, the perverse subject matter has been leaving a sick feeling in my stomach. 

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins." Nabokov begins this novel with these words, spoken by the aging Humbert Humbert, in which he is describing the "nymphet" Dolores Haze.  From the very start of the novel I have hated the speaker Humbert. His obsession with nymphets, a term used to describe girls between the age of nine and 14 who posses "the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limb, and other indices which despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate," is sick to a point of illness. Not only does he claim these nymphets have the ability to cast a spell over a man, but to be fully appreciated "the student should not be surprised to learn that there must be a gap of several years, never less than ten I should say, generally thirty to forty, and as many as ninety in a few know cases, between maiden and man". A little too twisted for my taste...

While I am tempted to throw this novel in the trash and never look at it again, I feel I have some sort of obligation to Lolita. I can't just leave her hanging in the balance of Humbert... Perhaps this reaction was one of Nabokov's aims; just as the main character is conflicted with his own impulses and desires, the reader is conflicted as well. Just as much as this book is terrifying, it is also gripping to the point where I feel I can somehow help Lolita. 

Regardless, the novel is truthfully written and examines the mind of predator obsessed with this prey. I am going to keep reading, for now.