Oh Lolita!

I suppose the fascination; this secret, almost amoral intrigue, the all too well known broad desire of uncertain and unsullied youth which makes it look with slant,unsure, fidgeting but intermittently riveted eyes at the lady in elaborate disrobe on the cover of magazines which invested too heavily in the aphorism, 'a picture is worth a thousand words'; about one of the most controversial books of all time started more with hearsay than with rationality. There it was, tucked away with almost unusual secrecy in one of the damp, dark, dreary passages of the library between other books by the same author which had been unfortunate enough to have not been controversial enough for me to remember their names now with any sort of clarity. There it was, 'Lolita', sinister and inviting in the blackness of its hardbound, evil and guilty in the deluge of its perverse reputation, smug and defiant in the light of its success but classy and confident in the quality of its prose. I had heard about it, I have been hearing about it, I heard that they made a movie on the story and I heard that Bollywood duly followed suit by copying it in one of those mind dumps which starred one of those mind dumps whose father had the foresight to give up the mighty good name of the Srivastavas. Oh! I can imagine how mediocre the movies must have been.

As someone said to me, good books make bad movies. And Lolita is far from being a good book. It's a brilliant book. One of the best I have ever come across in fact. Simply put, it's the testimony of a pedophile/murderer. Oh! how crass it sounds, how viciously unworthy a subject upon which the creative juices of an artist be spent, how overwhelmingly lopsided our emotions regarding the deviant fetishes of one so deranged and how swift our 'fair' implications and judgment. How warped and perverted must the story be! Well, it's not warped and it's not perverted. I'm sorry if it's too hard to believe but it is a beautiful tale of a person who belongs to a group who has had the terrible misfortune of having an interest which happens to have not had found any favor with the majority view of acceptable social conduct. I'm not advocating that his behavior must find a champion in one as vocal and might I say deranged as Ms. Roy. I'm just saying that in a society which is continually expanding its realms of what it finds acceptable, to use a term from Dawkins in this continuing moral zeitgeist where gays are allowed to be happy and gay the protagonist (or antagonist?) of this novel represents that portion which has been dealt a hard hand by nature. Tough luck, you deserve the consequences! we might say and move on. But this book stops where our sense of propriety dictated us to look in the other direction. And it's a worthwhile read. After all, is there is sense to our quest for knowledge if not for widening our horizons of rational thinking and sensitivity?

It's essentially a love story. A tale of unrequited love which sees its highs in vigorous, periodic, closely spaced but almost never narrated sexual encounters and its depressing lows in juvenile indifference and jejune preoccupations unmindful of love's shivering and hesitant supplications culminating in a subdued whimper in one of those agonizing moments which, given the poignancy of the situation and masterful exposition of heart's innocent cries, manages to leave a slight trace of moistness in even the most arid of eyes. Yes it's a heartbreakingly beautiful story and it ends up making you feel for the pains and travails and joys and miseries of the eloquent debauched. Such is the power and beauty of author Nabokov's narration that Lolita's final words ('No') stand as iridescent, incandescent reminders of all those times when one has felt completely helpless in the face of all those resolute but heartbreaking Nos. Except in this occasion while the reader's sympathy should have rested with the corrupted and defiled it instead embraces the corrupt and the defiler. The language is a spectacle to behold and is an added incentive if one is needed. I really am too incompetent and too small to even do justice to the brilliant shimmering blaze with which Nabokov's flamboyant prose is alight. Suffice to say, it's been one of the most satisfying reads. Both linguistically and as a really good story.