She let just a dash of irony enter into it. “It’s his, you know.” As if she would keep such a well read copy of Lolita on her bookshelf entirely for the show of it. Even if i had forgotten, it was an easy path to retread: now an English major, then he was fixated on Stanley Kubrick — whose choice in novels turns her stomach in an entirely routine fashion. She’s seen most of them, courtesy of him, parts of which were presumably glimpsed from between fingers pressed over her eyes at the end of the first vignette of Jacket or at any point during the absolute horror of Clockwork (which i refuse to acknowledge as having ever been entered onto film).

I said something intelligent about him once. Kubrick, not the ex. Something about him choosing material that rendered his characters as objects… everything objectified. Lolita is exactly that, so far, and is entirely engrossing in its droll way — though i keep inserting graphic pictures for Humbert’s coy phrases. Slowly the story unfolds as the pitiful nymphophile is slipped into the world of the succulent young Lolita, and suddenly each page grips you as the narrator tries his best to stay satisfied by her charm alone. The tension is dense and sinewed as your literary mind sides with an otherwise likable narrator by force of habit while some other part of you is retching at the outcome that seems to be drawing inexorably near. What author could get so tangled up in the thread that his character drew along behind him like a clever spider that he could weave it so effectively, so that you are rooting for that old bitch of a mother to die and for those tiny sleeping pills to take their inexorable hold on the unsuspecting child sooner rather than later?


Rather than spoil the midpoint of the book for you, i’ll only foreshadow by saying that while you don’t always get what you want, sometimes getting what you thought you thought you needed is in fact not in your best interests… especially because it extinguishes any concept of want at all.

I don’t think it’s a very good book. Yet. Though, i have some hopes of escaping the especially dull clutches of the middle section any minute now. Maybe i won’t like it, though… maybe that’s why she’s dating me instead of him.