Lolita

Erm. So I had just read Humbert’s childhood travails with a girl named Annabel Leigh, and I felt, well, quite uncomfortable. When Humbert describes that night he went with her to the mimosa, I felt myself slightly squirming in my seat. Nabokov wrote the scene so graphic that I was forced to imagine the scene whilst reading, yet he wrote it so elegantly convoluted that I had to analyze what was actually going on beneath those words. Chapter 4, especially the mimosa scene, had a lithe, airy feel to it. However, I felt uncomfortable because in the back of my head I couldn’t help but keep thinking that this man is a criminal, and Annabel Leigh could have been Lolita. Words suggestive of the shattering of childhood innocence (e.g. “half pleasure, half-pain,” “her lovely live legs” “her open mouth”) certainly do not help mitigate that image.