Lolita

I started the audiobook of Lolita one day at the gym while “Jersey Shore” played on one of the big TVs in the cardio section, and found myself thinking there was some sort of irony there, listening to Jeremy Irons' silky tones narrate a tale of a man whose behavior goes past the bounds of decency while images of people engaging in more banal forms of debauchery played in front of me. This is all a round about way of expressing my own trepidation when I began Lolita, the first-person account of one man's criminal relationship with a 12-year-old girl. Yet, Lolita is less about the narrator's crimes than about his own mental derangement. The spirit of Poe hangs over the novel, from the beginning when we learn that Humbert Humbert (our narrator) mourns for a childhood love named Annabel Leigh, and I found myself thinking much of The Tell-Tale Heart. Nabokov takes all of the sickness, literary style, rationalization and guilt of that short tale and stretches it out into a strange, haunting aria of obsession and memory, with a healthy dose of black comedy. Yet he does not let us completely off the hook, and we often see through Humbert's narration, though he is blind to it, the terrible impact of his actions. It's the sort of novel that lingers long after the last page, like a vivid dream whose images continue to haunt long after wakefulness has returned.