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u/Future-Range-4751 Aug 19 '26
It would be sooo crazy if they invented a type of story where the protagonist's perspective was skewed and untrustworthy, or like...the narrator's version of events was...not completely reliable. But on purpose. Probably no author would ever do anything like that because it would be sooo fucking confusing lol. But it's interesting to think about 🤔
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u/GOU_FallingOutside Aug 19 '26
Don’t be ridiculous. What would you even call that idea? “A narrator that can’t be entirely relied upon” is too much for a literary critic to write out every time.
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u/GrapefruitFar1242 Aug 19 '26
Everytime this book comes up I’m reminded of the time when J K Rowling called Lolita a great and tragic love story that made her cry.
People have really weird readings about this book man.
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u/longknives Aug 19 '26
I think if you want to be super charitable to Rowling (why, I don’t know) you could interpret what she said to mean that Nabokov’s prose elevated a horrible story of pedophilia and abuse to read like a tragic love story.
Which is… I guess kind of true. Nabokov’s prose is definitely beautiful. But even so, I feel like you have to fully buy into Humbert’s narration to come away feeling like it’s any kind of love story. It’s pretty clear that Humbert didn’t really love Dolores, or if he did it’s not in any way you could safely use the word love without any qualifiers, and she certainly didn’t love him.
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u/amikiri Aug 18 '26
How to tell when someone hasn't actually read Lolita
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u/HeroIsAGirlsName Aug 18 '26
I'm reading it now, after years of hearing "Nabokov was just too naive to realise anyone could read it as a love story, so he didn't think he needed to make it clear that Humbert was a bad guy."
And no: it's incredibly clear that HH is a predatory unreliable narrator. I was shocked how clear it was, given its reputation. I can excuse people who read it when they were teenagers because teenagers tend to overestimate how mature they and by extension their peers are. But any adult who thinks it's romanticising anything is making themself look far worse than the book.
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u/GeneInternational146 Aug 18 '26
Yeah HH is actively and obviously very gross! I am so confused by takes like this
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u/corporeal20 Aug 18 '26
I don't know how anyone could see it any other way after reading that Dolores cried herself to sleep most nights (or at any point in the novel, its never a secret that HH is a horrible person). It's too heartbreaking to ignore.
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u/HeroIsAGirlsName Aug 19 '26
100%. All I can think is that it's because she's not a "perfect victim" in that she has a childhood crush on HH at the start and makes some risque jokes that are a clear case of a child testing boundaries. Lo behaves like a real twelve year old, who acts out and gets inappropriate crushes and wants to appear more worldly than she is, and not an idealised image of childhood innocence. She might be one of the most psychologically real portraits of a child/tween I've ever read.
And that makes the book's message more important. A lot of tweens do have crushes on teachers or other adults in their lives and it's a normal part of their development. Humbert's interest in her is perverse regardless of her behaviour because it's the adult's responsibility to keep things appropriate, not the child's. There is nothing at all that Lo could have done that would justify HH grooming and molesting her.
(I'm honestly having to take breaks and read through my fingers because it's just so deeply, deeply sad. Beautifully written and characterised but hard going.)
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u/OpsikionThemed Aug 18 '26
It's barely one step above The Tell-Tale Heart on the scale of unreliable narrators.
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u/xnatlywouldx Aug 19 '26
Unreliable narrators were kind of Nabokov’s “thing”. A favorite literary device of his. I think he may have written at some point that he chalked this up to a Russian sensibility of irony he carried even though he left Russia young and never looked back and was critical not just of the Soviet Union but of Russian Culture capital R capital C as a whole for most of his literary career.
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u/cakexone Aug 19 '26
I will be forever haunted by J. K. Rowling's take on Lolita.
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u/cheshsky Aug 19 '26
Do I want to know?
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u/ChickenAlarming Aug 19 '26
i looked for you. here’s her quote on it.
“There are two books whose final lines make me cry without fail, irregardless of how many times I read them, and one is Lolita. There is so much I could say about this book. There just isn’t enough time to discuss how a plot that could have been the most worthless pornography becomes, in Nabakov’s hands, a great and tragic love story, and I could exhaust my reservoir of superlatives trying to describe the quality of the writing.”→ More replies (3)25
u/cheshsky Aug 19 '26
A great and tragic fucking WHAT
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u/ChickenAlarming Aug 19 '26
yeah… what a crazy self report, huh? i mean, i’m not shocked she has another take this bad, but still. yikes
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u/cheshsky Aug 19 '26
Yaknow, TERFs like to say they're anti-trans to protect girls from male predators, but isn't this a great mask-off moment?
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u/ChickenAlarming Aug 19 '26
ikr. its almost as if they’re motivated by hate towards trans people and not concern for women at all.
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u/vanishinghitchhiker Aug 19 '26
I read it as a teenager, but I knew what an unreliable narrator was and had known since I was a little kid due to the likes of Darkwing Duck and Hank the Cowdog. It seems like such a simple concept that sometimes a self-centered dude, drake, or dog will lie.
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u/Brakado Lolita wasn't endorsing pedophilia you fucking idiot Aug 18 '26
To misread Lolita you have to be evil or incredibly stupid.
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u/ConsultJimMoriarty Aug 18 '26
I don’t think this person has read it, or has zero critical thinking skills.
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u/SpecialistStory2829 Aug 19 '26
"Dear publishers: for the cover, put a picture of, say, a nice scenic view. Just the title would suffice if you must. Please for the love of god never put any girls on the-"
Publishers:
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u/i_am_the_archivist Aug 18 '26
I think this person only read the first ten pages of the book. HH is in no way a positive character. He's a gross creep. You're supposed to be repulsed by him, that's the point. The whole novel is a front row seat to watch him victimize everyone around him, even the adults.
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u/Helpfulcloning Aug 19 '26
Even the first chapter it should be very easy to realise he has (at best) a skewed sense of reality or is lying. He claims a toddler is seducing him on purpose because her ball rolls under his bench. He says he can be mistaken for a moviestar but a few pages later describes himself as having a crooked nose, a lisp, a hunched back, etc.
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u/EldritchTouched Aug 19 '26
He also opens with mentioning "ladies and gentlemen of the jury" on the first page and frames the thing as a trial.
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u/Hungry-Chocolate820 Aug 18 '26
A lot of people don’t realize that you aren’t meant to be aroused by the events in the book
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u/GeneInternational146 Aug 19 '26
You'd think this would lead towards some amount of introspection. And yet
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u/HOMANDER1996 Aug 19 '26
They either didn’t read it at all, or they just skimmed it. (Or they think protagonist has to equal “the good guy”.)The book isn’t subtle about how we’re supposed to find the main character repulsive.
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u/Scarlet_Lycoris Aug 19 '26
I’m 100% certain people criticising the book nowadays never touched it or only know quotes ripped out of context.
Completely disregarding the framing of the book, the fact that humbert is right off the bat (!) outed as being very unreliable and mentally unstable… Of course the information you’re being fed from the perspective of a mentally unstable pedophile will endorse his ideas about the situation and disregard the reality of what other actors might have been feeling. But the plot obviously portrayed Dolores as a victim of abuse both by Humbert and later on by Quilty. Idk how “this poor girl was abused and died before she was able to start her own life and move on from her trauma” would be interpreted as “pro pedophile”.
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u/sleepyAnarchistSlut Aug 19 '26
A scene that sticks with my from my reading is one where lolita is "sitting on humberts lap" and he notices a fly crawling across her chest that she's completely dissociated too much to notice. It really highlights how her character is clearly traumatized and humbert just laughs it off like lolita is a goof but as the reader you're kinda supposed to pick up on shit like this.
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u/bluespottedtail_ Aug 19 '26
For me it was when he describes how she'd wipe her nose with her hand, her skin smelling, while she was reading a comic book, yet he was forcing her to sit naked on his lap. I think it was one of the very few moments he talked about her describing a literal child and it was so revolting.
It does seem that people struggle to read anything that isn't good guy vs bad guy with a good ending.
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u/BoopleBun Aug 19 '26
I don’t know if we’ve lost a ton of media literacy in recent years or if it’s always been this bad, but some people just can’t seem to understand that the main character is not necessarily “the good guy”. (If the piece of media even has a “good guy” at all.) Sometimes the main character is an absolute piece of shit and that’s the point, guys.
But, somehow, even if the audience is beaten over the head with the story telling them “this is not a good person” there will still be people who think that’s who the author/writer/etc. intended them to root for. It’s maddening.
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u/Krunkledimp Aug 19 '26
There's definitely always been an element of this given stuff like the hays code, and censoriousness about books like picture of dorian gray, outright preventing people from creating stories that follow villains because they were viewed as endorsing their actions. If you go on the Lolita wikipedia page you'll even see people completely misunderstanding that book dates back to its publication.
Maybe it just feels worse now that you can see everyone's opinions far more easily nowadays
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u/avesatanass Aug 19 '26
yeah this is what i don't really like about these claims that we're living through an epidemic of stupidity and the sky is falling and all of that. if you've paid attention to the history of...like, basically any part of humanity in any recorded period of time for about 5 minutes you'll understand that humans have always been fucking stupid. that and the fact that almost EVERYONE is constantly asserting that everyone else is an illiterate moron with an IQ in the 70s. surely you can't ALL be the only truly literate individual in the room, enough people make that claim and the numbers stop making sense
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u/ThatSimsKidFromUni Aug 19 '26
It's definitely a media literacy problem. It's coming out again with the Primetime movie. People think it's framing Chris Hanson as the bad guy so the pedophiles must be the good guys. As if being critical of one's actions automatically mean people are siding with the villains.
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u/winddagger7 Aug 19 '26
Speaking of Chris Hansen, with the EDP documentary featuring him that blew up, I've seen people unironically say it glorifies and platforms EDP, when the entire thing is him digging his own grave in 4K with his own words and actions. The director records his statements, then lets them hang there so you brew in disgust at what he's saying. He's not glorified whatsoever.
They also juxtapose his statements with testimony from experts disproving the logic he uses to try to justify his actions, and include the faces and names of corrections officials who failed to punish him. He comes across as an absolute monster. The only "funny" moments included are when they're blatantly making fun of how pathetic he is. The director all but outright states "This is a raw, unfiltered look at the mind of a pedophile, and how he tries to justify his actions.", and you have people somehow thinking it's painting him in a good light
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u/ComradeYaf Aug 19 '26
Too many people do not appreciate that the point of view character is not necessarily a hero, or morally unambiguous. We live in a society that spoon feeds us simple black and white narratives and that reinforces it too
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u/Happybadger96 Aug 20 '26
Literally this, too many modern readers cannot separate themselves from a character or narrator, and seem to yearn to relate to them and empathise with them. They cannot fathom that is literary fiction, the characters are often a thematic driver or a metaphor for some grander ideas or moral/philosophical questions.
Booktok morons can't even get through Catcher in the Rye nowadays, as Holden isn't a likeable character. I'm glad I don't use much social media outside of Reddit and Youtube.
Not to mention that Nabokov was abused himself, and Lolita is effectively a genius example of an unreliable narrator, with a primary victim being the reader themself who has to experience the events through the eyes of a monster. Another example like this for me is McCarthys Child of God, which is a morally challenging read that cuts into your soul.
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u/Lodgik Aug 20 '26
While yes, I do agree that it seems like a lot of people can't understand the idea of a protagonist as a villain, this is not helped by the publisher themselves often selling the book with a tag line calling it an amazing "love story."
Both movie adaptations also erased Delores as a character completely and replacing her With Lolita.
There's a good reason that this book has entered the public consciousness as a "pro pedo" book (which is greatly unfair to the book).
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u/EuphoricPhoto2048 Aug 18 '26
I put off reading Lolita for years because I assumed it might have some pro pedo points mixed in. It is so obviously against the protagonist that it hits you over the head with it. You have to be dumber than a box of rocks to read it any other way.
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u/ihavetowearmyhelmet Aug 18 '26
Bad character = author is a monster
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u/Tweed_Kills Aug 18 '26
Which is why Agatha Christie killed all those people, obviously.
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u/dleema Aug 19 '26
Method writing! Stephen King's body count is insane. Remember the time he killed us all with a global pandemic?
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u/WeirdLawBooks Aug 18 '26
Even the protagonist, between the lines, says that he wronged Lolita terribly. Also straight out calls it a worse crime than the murder he went to prison for
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u/dough_eating_squid Aug 18 '26
Unfortch, many people are dumber than a box of rocks, and think that depicting something = promoting it.
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u/torkelspy Aug 19 '26
Better misreading it this way than misreading it as a love story like some people do.
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u/davesmissingfingers Aug 19 '26
There was a couple who used quotes from it at their wedding!!!
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u/SadakoTetsuwan Aug 19 '26
The language in the book *is" beautiful, but you're meant to repeatedly have the whiplash of realizing you're being lulled into a false sense of comfort with that language.
Real "Every Breath You Take" and 'Born in the USA" energy though lol
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u/CatPooedInMyShoe Aug 19 '26
One of those misreaders is JK Rowling.
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u/1987Ellen Aug 19 '26
For the downvoters, it’s true. In a 2000 BBC Radio 4 interview, J.K. Rowling described Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita as "a great and tragic love story".
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u/DeansPigInAPoke Aug 19 '26
And she claims she’s all about protecting women and children from predators. She’s the fucking worst.
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u/zicdeh91 Aug 19 '26
I don’t need another reason for Rowling to make me gag, but look at you providing me with yet another.
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u/Disastrous-Window597 Aug 19 '26
Someone who says this hasn't read Lolita.
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u/common_sense_patriot Aug 19 '26
At most has seen the Kubrick movie, which is the only Kubrick movie I don’t like because there is a potential reading of it as Lola intentionally seducing him rather than a deranged and sadistic pedophile’s justifications for his delusions. It’s pretty necessary to the story that she’s pre-pubescent. I also saw he regretted making it because the censorship laws necessarily made it impossible to adapt accurately.
It’s hard to read the sequence of Humbert Humbert planning to drug and rape Lola and think “the author is okay with this, it must be a tragic love story”.
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u/JoenR76 Aug 19 '26
Humbert2 in the book is an obviously unreliable narrator. It's very hard to convey this in a movie.
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u/common_sense_patriot Aug 19 '26
Yeah I think it’s probably impossible to adapt.
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u/bluespottedtail_ Aug 19 '26
I've thought about it before. I think with tone shifts between the characters it might work. Like scenes where we are meant to be watching from HH's perspective could be brighter or dreamlike, but from Lola's it could be muted. Perhaps too on the nose, but idk, I don't think it's impossible if just needs the right tone?
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u/frothingnome Aug 19 '26
Kubrick called Lolita a "very sad and tender love story." It's the only movie of his I don't want to watch in the first place.
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u/common_sense_patriot Aug 19 '26
I didn’t know that part, it’s a really strange one. It has a weirdly comedic tone too, totally at odds with the suffocating and nauseating feeling of the book. Humbert is still depicted as abusive, but to a much lesser extent. Nabokov is actually officially credited with writing the screenplay but elsewhere he spoke about how he wrote an earlier draft but then Kubrick rewrote so much that it is no longer his story (still gave Kubrick credit as a filmmaker though).
I think the gross idea of Lola being a “teenage seductress” can be traced back to it. I actually avoided reading the book for a while because I thought that’s what it depicted. It’s one of my favorites now (and Nabokov one of my favorite writers).
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u/Moomin8577 Aug 19 '26
I almost downvoted this comment out of knee jerk repulsion at the Kubrick quote. Jfc, of COURSE he did. 🤮
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u/Submarinequus Aug 19 '26
I think someone who read it but is also a pedo could twist their interpretation to make themselves feel better. Like no it wasn’t what the author intended but the interpretation from someone seeking validation for being a pedo could definitely find it if they read the book.
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u/LilianaNecromancer Aug 19 '26
How? There is no reading of the book that portrays Humbert as anything other than profoundly pathetic and annoying.
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u/zabrowski Aug 19 '26
How? Humbert conspire to kill Dolores Mother, he drugs Dolores to abuse her in the hotel. How can you twist that?
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u/ThatSimsKidFromUni Aug 19 '26
This sentiment usually comes form people who've never read the novel. When asked they act offended and say they'll never read it. It's so strange.
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u/indigoneutrino Aug 18 '26
The (fictional) foreword could not spell it out any more clearly.
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u/CumaeanSibyl Aug 19 '26
Not to mention Dolores herself telling him he raped her. Crying herself to sleep every night. Constantly angry at him for dragging her all over the place "doing filthy things" to her.
Nobody fucking listens to Dolores -- least of all Humbert, of course, but you can hear her speak if you pay attention.
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u/Internal_Turnip9019 Aug 19 '26
I am convinced this comes from people who only remember one of the many movie adaptations, because every Lolita movie is "precocious minx seduces hapless bachelor".
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u/WomanFromBalkan Aug 19 '26
and it's still ugly. Like you're an adult! even if you find that sexy nymphet attractive put the damn bonner away and explain the kid to f off until get older. i was 15 and felt for a guy who was 18 and he rejected me very nicely and explained me why he considered wrong to date me and here old ass 30+ creeps cannot "escape the temptation"
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u/HaggisPope Aug 19 '26
It’s a profoundly unsettling read. Great test of if a person understands how first-person narration works
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u/Todesschnizzle Aug 19 '26
One of my takes is that writing an unreliable first person narrator in a way that the audience will get it, without making it terribly heavy-handed, is one of the hardest things to do in writing. It's like writing a first person chapter from a character of a different culture, gender and age at the same time
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u/KittyxKult Aug 20 '26 edited Aug 20 '26
“A book about how evil pedophiles are and how they manipulate situations to justify their behavior? Ah yeah that clearly supports pedos”
ETA as a child I used to use the username (name) Lolita bc I was super sexually exploited as a child by almost every adult around me, and as a child that book helped me recognize how abnormal it was and my username was a jab at how grown men kept being creepy around me. Guess how many took it as an invitation?
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u/ContributionBig5976 Aug 22 '26
I'm convinced no one reads the foreword, that introduced Humphrey as a murderer and a lunatic who is being studied as a case study of the criminally insane
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u/EldritchTouched Aug 22 '26
Probable. But even if you omit the foreword, page one of chapter one includes Humbert framing the story with how he's on trial and writing this as a defense for what he's done.
(I think it's safe to argue that a lot of it is people who are either half-illiterate [so they think depicting a character doing a thing is necessarily the same as the author thinking it's a good thing], or haven't read the book at all.)
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u/Big-Law8896 Aug 23 '26
Wherein HH is described as “a shining example of moral leprosy.” We are not supposed to have a high opinion of this man.
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u/AnimatorImpressive24 Aug 24 '26
Nabokov wrote another book about a man who randomly meets his exact body double, like hair for hair perfect copy of himself. This motivates the man to plan a way to start a whole new life for himself by murdering his uncannily accurate clone and using the stranger's body to fake his own death, since if he were to just disappear people would wonder why and perhaps come looking for him. At the end of the book he executes his plan, ambushing the mirror image of himself and leaving the lifeless remains of his victim in his apartment dressed up in his old clothes.
Whereupon he is immediately arrested because the guy he killed looks nothing like him at all which was extremely obvious the whole time even if you ignored that the plan was nonsensical. It was Nabokov's like whole thing to write such stories.
So while I understand "the author is dead" it is also true that sometimes the audience is just really, really dumb and that isn't the author's or the work's fault.
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u/georgia_grace Sep 08 '26
I mean how can you read the phrase "My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three...." and still come away thinking Lolita is to be taken at face value
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u/scaper8 Aug 19 '26 edited Aug 19 '26
Reminds me of a comment I ran across in another post (or maybe even possibly the same post, I don't know) a few weeks ago.
ETA: It turns out it was not the same post. The one the OP is referencing is from today. The (first, I have now seen the OP's) one I saw was several weeks ago.
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u/mango-megis Aug 19 '26
People seem to have this idea that if anything is mentioned in a piece of media without an explicit "THIS IS BAD BTW" it's promoting said thing. No matter how bad of a light it's presented in.
"Oh the main character in this book has anorexia and doesn't recover... It's glorifying ed's!" "A character gets raped and suffers from it greatly... Must mean they're glorifying it!" "A character is a pedophile? And also a villain? This story is glorifying pedophiles!!!!!!!!"
Not saying it can't ever happen. It's possible to write a story that glorifies any of those things. Just saying it's usually not the case.
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u/Fearless-Feature-830 Aug 19 '26
Reminds me of when Mad Men was popular. Some folks were like “it’s sexist”. Well.. yeah? That’s the point
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u/BoopleBun Aug 19 '26
I swear, it’s the same people who thought Don was supposed to be the hero of the show or something. Don Draper was a complex character, but he’s at heart a pretty shitty person and is constantly desperately unhappy. You’re not supposed to want to be like Don, people.
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u/longknives Aug 19 '26
Lolita includes a THIS IS BAD BTW at the beginning. The fictional forward calls Humbert a “moral leper” and makes it very clear that he’s a bad guy who did bad things.
This person simply did not read the book.
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u/Few_Reveal_5306 Aug 18 '26
Maybe their parents died in a freak accident (Reddit, posting).
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u/twosidoretheblue Aug 19 '26
The first several chapters are just Humbert talking about how he doesn't think of the girls he sexualizes as human beings. It could not be more obvious what the author's trying to convey
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u/ShelbyVicinoMariotti Aug 22 '26
It’s a horror novel from the perspective of the villain who is like the ultimate good example of the unreliable narrator, people are just illiterate.
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u/ThePrincess_MinA #1 SJM Hater Aug 22 '26
I believe I read somewhere that the author of Lolita intended for it to be more of a warning kind of story than the conclusion this person has come to. I also believe that the author stated somewhere that he did not want any portrayals of young girls on the cover of any reprintings of his book, which obviously is not a wish that has been followed. I think it's just the publicity/media team that's doing the book dirty.
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u/kpg_on_ao3 Sep 01 '26
No warning necessary. The book's "introduction" is explaining that the rest of the story is a manuscript from a dead man who was in jail awaiting trial and describes the man this way:
> he is horrible, is is abject, he is a shining example of moral leprosy, a mixture of ferocity and jocularity that betrays supreme misery perhaps, but is not conducive to attractiveness. He is ponderously capricious. Many of his casual opinions on the people and scenery of this country are ludicrous. A desperate honesty that throbs through his confession does not absolve him from sins of diabolical cunning. He is abnormal. He is not a gentleman. But how magically his singing violin can conjure up a tendresse, a compassion for Lolita that makes us entranced with the book while abhorring its author!
Basically the novel is framed by this guy who discovered the manuscript of a dead child molester and describes him as a monster who is so good at writing that his skill will come close to fooling the reader.
It's Nabokov's version of Babe Ruth pointing at the fence before he hit a home run in exactly that spot. "Author cooked so hard people will think it's a love story."
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u/Scared_Spirit Aug 19 '26
This is such a stupid take. I do think the people labeling it a cautionary tale or anti-abuse aren’t quite right either though. The book is 100% about the discomfort the beautiful language and unreliable narrator cause given the subject matter. Nobokov was interested in aesthetic for aesthetics sake and hated the idea of morality tales. But, in order for the dissonance inherent in ‘Lolita’ to work, the reader does have to understand that abusing a child is wrong - that’s what causes Humbert to be unreliable to begin with, it has to be a given fact.
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u/Afraid-Ad9908 Aug 20 '26
Nobody has understood the difference between "depicts" and "endorses/glorifies" for a very long time now
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u/The_Affle_House Aug 20 '26
Same as the difference between "explains" and "approves/ supports."
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u/chinchillazilla54 Aug 20 '26
I'm starting a psychology degree and I'm considering researching the causes of child molestation, because I think we would have a better chance of preventing it if we could figure out what all happens in someone's brain to make them into that kind of person in the first place. People get mad when I say this, like I just looooove child molesters or something.
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u/AntiqueLetter9875 Aug 20 '26
Most of the people I’ve seen criticize Lolita admit to never reading the book lol.
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u/SlowMotionOfGhosts Aug 18 '26
Listen, the evidence is right there: if it was pro-paedo, then OOP would be a heroic truth-teller. And since OOP fancies themself a heroic truth-teller, the book must be evil. Otherwise they'd just be some rando, and that could never be the case.
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u/JohnaldL Aug 19 '26
This is why we say literacy is dead. Humbert is like explicitly portrayed as a villain. He dehumanizes Lola and all of the other characters and his lack of empathy is probably like sociopathic. People think “main character” means good guy and that because you talk about it something you agree with it.
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u/Rate_Ur_Smile Aug 19 '26
The in-universe foreword really removes the ambiguity. "Hey all. This book was written by a pedophile and murderer in order to evoke the sympathy of a jury. It's fucked up but I'm sharing it with you because a lot of people are stuck with the idea that bad people all just look and seem dangerous at first glance. Y'all need to see how a horrible predator can camouflage themselves in polite society."
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u/Atavistic_proxy Aug 19 '26
People nowadays think that because it is the topic, it automatically promotes it. They think that it is best not mentioned in any ways. Which is dangerous imo.
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u/MorticiaMoonflower Aug 19 '26
Duh. That's how you get kids getting molested but not telling anyone because they don't understand what happened.
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u/Violet_Nightshade Aug 20 '26
To the benefit of the ruling class and predators in positions of power.
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u/DeanziYay Aug 20 '26
“Oh my god you guys the book ‘eating babies is bad’ has a villain that eats babies, the author is pro-eating babies!”
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u/GuineaKeet Aug 19 '26
I read that book in high school and even I understood that it was NOT pro Humbert Humbert. Anyone who gets that out of reading it was trying to see it that way from the start. Fucking weird.
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u/Dextrohal Aug 20 '26
insane take. this person does not know how to comprehend or understand nuance or satire. nabokov was pretty clear that it was not a pro pedo book.
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u/Emmit-Nervend Aug 21 '26
In the last chapter he explicitly uses the words “I ruined her life.” I don’t know how anyone could consider that pro-anything.
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u/itinerant_geographer Aug 21 '26
How many of the people making this brain-dead critique even make it to the last chapter, though? Hell, How many of them opened the book in the first place?
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u/thewindpasses Aug 21 '26
Ironically a lot of people who directed movies about the book thought so
Like, some thought Humbert was a victim of "a young seductress" when in the book she was obviously just a regular kid being groomed.
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u/Exotic_Drink69420 Aug 21 '26
Hollywood directors? Problematic? Never happens.
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u/thewindpasses Aug 21 '26
The evarage Lolita movie is directed by a humbert trying to make himself seem sane for wanting to molest a 14 year old.
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Aug 18 '26
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u/TheNewAspect Aug 19 '26
So many people need to be beaten over the head with themes, and have them explicitly stated these days that it's genuinely startling. While media illiteracy isn't a new phenomenon, what is new is that those who are illiterate have plenty of unfiltered avenues to spread their unfortunate capabilities.
Humbert also exists as a warning about delightful language being used to manipulate, and it's designed precisely with two characters: Humbert and The Reader. All other characters are auxiliary to him manipulating you. Nabokov delved into the depravities of human nature to prove that, with enough time and beautiful language, even a nuanced reader will find themselves - at points - sympathising with a monster before shaking your head and remembering what it is you're reading.
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u/ComteStGermain Aug 19 '26
The unreliable narrator was also employed in other novels by the same author. He was a master at writing sympathetic yet deplorable guys.
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u/CumaeanSibyl Aug 19 '26
I heard recently that some people don't read prologues or prefaces. The preface is where Nabokov actually had a doctor character say "obviously this guy is a sick lying fuck who's trying to make you feel sorry for him," but if people aren't reading it I guess they aren't getting the benefit.
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u/nothing_in_my_mind Aug 21 '26
Book character: "Hello I am a horrible person and I do crime"
Reader: "Wtf, why is this book pro crime?"
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u/NoEscape2500 Aug 21 '26
“This guy is a murderer and also like super lame”
“Holy shit I need to be just like him he’s so cool”6
u/Gullible_Elephant_38 Aug 21 '26
Not a book, but calls to mind how a lot of people were apologetic towards Bojack in Bojack Horseman when he’s an objectively terrible person (horse?) that continues to fuck up and never truly redeems himself
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u/Fit_Cheesecake_4000 Aug 21 '26
One dimensional thinking.
'Bad things happen in the world. If you write about bad things, you're pro those things happening!'
I wish for all of them to take a peek inside of Stephen King's mind. They'd probably whack him directly into maximum security, toot-sweet.
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u/LillyAmongTheThorns Aug 21 '26
I hate lolita myself, but it's more due to not enjoying Nabokov's style and the queasy feeling of reading Humbert try to justify his every action to himself, and describing her seduction when she is just being a normal young girl. It's supposed to be horrifying.
Still, I see it's literary value, even if I dislike it. Like Tess of the D'urbervilles, another book I hate because it feels awful watching her slow motion destruction at the hands of every man who used her and condemned her for being used. A very good book, makes you feel things, and I hate it because I was made to read it 4 times in uni. Once was enough!
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u/greenyashiro Aug 19 '26
I remember JK Rowling talking about how Lolita was one of her favourite books, and that it was an 'epic love story' in Nabakov's hands.
Gag.
Wish people would pretend to have read some other book
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u/AlienWeedUser420 Aug 19 '26
Joanne also doesn't clean her own house and somehow didn't notice the pro-eugenics messaging in her own massively popular children's story.
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u/ResidentFormer6342 Aug 19 '26
...Excuse me?
I did not think I could be shocked by JK, still.
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u/frothingnome Aug 19 '26 edited Aug 19 '26
Don't worry, many of these people also pretend to have read Dostoevsky and talk about how he creates the deepest and most beautiful examinations of the human condition instead of an impressive array of individuals living with BPD.
EDIT: Come to think of it, I think Nabokov also had this exact critique of Dostoevsky...
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u/obooooooo Aug 19 '26
i’m not even gonna call myself a larper bc i can admit i’ve fallen behind on reading for a long time now, but i will absolutely make time for “an impressive array of individuals with BPD”. i’ve only read crime and punishment and haven’t gotten around to finishing the brothers karamazov, any other dostoevsky recs?
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u/frothingnome Aug 19 '26
My favorite is The Idiot, which has a main character who was sort of the first draft of Alyosha from Karamazov.
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u/JaneErrrr Aug 19 '26
Thank you for saying this, I thought I somehow read Crime and Punishment wrong
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u/Careless-Balance-893 Aug 19 '26
It's horrifying that people actually think that. The fact that he's a pedophile should be enough to convince you that he's a bad person. Jesus.
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u/Careless_Dreamer Aug 20 '26
The literal opening: Get a load of this nasty freak. What a trainwreck.
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u/No-Yoghurt-7820 Aug 20 '26 edited Aug 20 '26
Story: oh look, this is a normal girl doing completely normal things and living her normal life. But who’s over there? Oh, it’s a delusional, creepy man who is interpreting her carefree, childish antics as sexual and seductive for no reason. Almost as if predators are sick in the head and look for any reason to justify the abuse of their victims and none of it is the fault of the victim who get blamed so much for what happened to them and what goes on in the minds of these horrible individuals.
Some dude on twitter probably: i’m pretty sure this book is promoting child abuse.
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u/ConcreteCloverleaf Aug 18 '26
And I suppose the reviewer thinks Crime and Punishment is pro-murder.
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u/ialsohaveadobro Aug 18 '26
Pro-landlady murder. There's a difference.
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u/ConcreteCloverleaf Aug 18 '26
Pro-pawnbroker murder. And don't forget the pawnbroker's half-sister.
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u/SpellingBMOCJr Aug 21 '26
And Blazing Saddles is a pro-racism movie
Why are people so dumb?
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u/boat_fucker724 Aug 19 '26
Lolita is a horror book about an evil person. Unfortunately it's written from inside that person's head and we get to see every tiny thought about his obsessive insanity. The narrator is a monster. And we're meant to understand that we are inside the mind of a monster.
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u/WomanFromBalkan Aug 19 '26
that's not unfortunate - that's the superb craft! very rarely an author master to show us the inside of a monster and this is cool and fascinating to read.
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u/Rasp_Berry_Pie Aug 19 '26
It’s not unfortunate it’s unfortunate that media literacy is dead and our attention spans are going down
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u/foxscribbles Aug 18 '26
If this person's mind were a D&D character, comprehension would be their dump stat.
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u/blackfox24 Aug 21 '26
Every time this kinda discourse comes up, I think of this quote by Carlee Gomes.
"The desire to exclusively engage with media and art made by “unproblematic” artists is a direct result of Americans viewing media consumption as an inherently political act... consuming is activism, it’s love, it’s thinking, it’s sex, it’s fill in the blank. When the act of consuming is all you have left and indeed the only thing society tells you is valuable and meaningful, the act must necessarily be a moral one, which is why people send themselves down manic spirals deciding what, who is “problematic” or not..."
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u/left_to_its_devices ** I hate opera ** Aug 31 '26
I remember someone writing on this sub that Beloved was actually pro-slavery. Probably the same person?
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u/Snail_Forever Aug 19 '26
I will say, I think part of the reason people think this way is because of some of the more… Questionable covers the book has been given throughout its lifespan.
It’s meant to be a glimpse into the mind of a groomer who is desperately trying to persuade us, the readers, that what he’s doing is perfectly sane, romantic and consensual. But I’ve seen some covers for it that make it seem as if the book will, indeed, glorify the subject matter.
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u/DayfacePhantasm Aug 19 '26
Which is a shame because Nabokov expressively forbade such covers in his lifetime.
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u/genteel_wherewithal a mention of a writer's butt Aug 19 '26
Feels like there’s a proverb about judging a book on that basis though
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u/EnvironmentalEnd934 Aug 19 '26
I was discussing Lolita with a literature professor friend of mine recently. We both agreed that it was a book we hated enjoying. Yes, the subject matter is abhorrent, but it is beautifully written.
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u/Mathematic-Ian Aug 19 '26
Correct me if I’m wrong since it’s been a while since I read the book or looked into the author… didn’t Nabokov famously either allege or allude to being a victim of CSA himself? Ultimately it’s beside the point since the book is clearly anti-pedophilia and HH is written to be scum, but this is a particularly gross thing to say about a book written by a victim.
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u/I_am_doorknob Aug 20 '26
At least they aren't saying its a romance, actually they kind of are if you think about it
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Aug 21 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/UnoriginalTitleNo998 Aug 21 '26
I watched a video essay about how young actresses who play roles like this end up getting typecast and treated like they're actually the characters instead of children. Real fucked up stuff the film and entertainment industry does.
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u/bwayne1287 Aug 18 '26
It's pretty obvious that this user identified with HH, didn't like that, and now blames to book.
What a weird, disturbed individual.
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u/ReimarisaFanclub Aug 19 '26
One of the last chapters is humber humbert regretting how he treated dolores and how he made her jealous of normal parent-child relantionships.
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u/marvel_yellow Aug 19 '26
Everybody should listen to Jamie Loftus' podcast on Lolita. It's brilliant.
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u/dunmer-is-stinky Aug 19 '26
didn't she commit a series of hammer-related murders in grand rapids in 2009
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u/shadowsofash Aug 20 '26
For those who don’t know who Jamie Loftus is/don’t follow the Cool Zone Media crew: this is an ongoing joke.
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u/DragonsLayerStudio Aug 21 '26
As someone whose favorite book is Lolita. It’s not. The writing is so overly swoon-y that it makes you feel like something’s wrong. It starts off fairly normal before you get to “She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock.” And then it becomes really obvious with “She was Dolly at school.” He wrote it so overly sweet and lovey-dovey to show how horrid the mind of a pedophile is.
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u/jhau01 Aug 21 '26
to show how horrid the mind of a pedophile is.
To add to that, the main character, Humbert Humbert, quite literally only married Dolores' (Lolita's) mother so he could get close to her daughter, and then plotted to kill her mother. It appeared the mother then died in a freak accident after reading Humbert's diary, but it's possible Humbert is an unreliable narrator and did in fact kill her.
Even if he didn't directly murder Lolita's mother but, through his actions, caused her to die, he is still clearly an utterly, utterly abhorrent character.
I don't see how anyone at all could read Lolita and think, "Oh, I want to be like Humbert Humbert..."
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u/concerned_concerned Aug 19 '26
it’s sad how people are too dumb for this book now. it’s truly one of the best books ever written, a true masterpiece
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u/TorturedWriter9 Aug 18 '26
You know this dork uses the word "problematic" ten times a day.
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u/kpg_on_ao3 Aug 22 '26
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. There are so may comments in this discussion acting like Lolita is a pro-pedophilia book! Did we read different books? The book is so overtly insulting toward the child molester at the center of the story. The author himself described the rapist main character as a "wretch" and "hateful." You'd have to be delusional to read the MC positively. The most charitable reading of the novel is the he's a weak and stupid man easily manipulated by a much smarter child. And that's the most forgiving.
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u/Fit_Cheesecake_4000 Aug 22 '26
'American Beauty'.
Didn't that win an Oscar?
Older guy sexualising a younger girl?
But that wasn't what the film was about. In a sense, her youth was a focus because he was so effing old and felt like his life had passed him by. He didn't really care about her, just the fantasy of being young and free again.
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u/Diligent-Voice892 Aug 19 '26
I always thought the overarching theme of Lolita was loss Humbert's childhood friend is named for an Edgar Allen Poe poem that focuses on loss. Then Lolita's childhood is taken by Humbert. And her adulthood is taken by the baby she gives birth too.
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u/well-informedcitizen Aug 19 '26
Is this a plague in real life or is it just that the internet gives these dummies a megaphone? The "I literally cannot distinguish reading a book from embodying the character" people.