This weekend I also finished reading Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, and it’s the most beautiful - but also unnerving - novel I’ve ever read.

First things first: the novel starts out with the best opening to anything ever in the English language.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.

Impressive, huh? But more importantly, the beautiful writing has an effect in the storytelling, working as a sort of aesthetic anaesthetic that dulls our gut-level revulsion to what the narrator Humbert Humbert does to secure control over his love Lolita. There are sections that sound like the most entrancing love-letter ever… until Nabokov reminds us a few sentences later that Lolita isn’t even in her teens yet. The effect is unbelievably disconcerting, and kept me on my toes throughout the early part of the novel.

Kubrick pursued a similar paradox in A Clockwork Orange, seeking to make the violence so beautiful that the viewer sympathizes - in a way - with the main character’s psychopathic behavior. He neglects others’ interests, but seemingly in the pursuit of a Greater Good like beauty, truth, etc. We’re seduced by Humbert Humbert’s artistic gifts, which were ironically insufficient to seduce Lolita herself.

But after the opening 100 pages or so, Humbert Humbert’s manipulation of the reader starts to fall apart. We see glimpses of his efforts at control, such as how he would physically force his former wife to agree. By the time Lolita is his captive prey, we’re familiar with his twisted logic and rationalizations for actions. Notable amongst these is one scheme to drug Lolita and fondle her unconscious body, as to not cause her psychic pain from an attempt while awake.

As the novel progresses, the horror shifts. Humbert Humbert isn’t in love with Lolita, but some twisted shadow of a fantasy that he resolutely associates with her. Pedophilia is troubling enough, but Nabokov reveals it to be layered on a vile brand of unrequited love. Humbert is willing to do almost anything to keep his power over Lolita, even when his willpower is good for nothing more than… well, I’ll just say that Nabokov knows all about Chekhov’s gun.

Despite the moral stomach-twisting that it puts me through, the prose really is fantastic enough to justify reading the novel all by itself. I devoured the novel’s 300 pages in less than two days, and I’ve found my own writing style to have sightly shifted since starting my read. My sentences tend to be longer and more gnarled, favoring the longer constructions that Nabokov occasionally slips into.

It sounds ridiculous but our finest prose-stylist of the English language may be Nabokov, who first started writing in Russian. He was trilingual in his childhood, though, which he shows off throughout the novel by throwing in snippets of French. It’s for those and other obscure references that I’m tempted to buy the The Annotated Lolita featuring translations and all sorts of explanatory footnotes. I’m glad that I went with the plain novel first, though, since I’ve heard that the annotations spoil later events in the novel. As is, I could just skip over the confusing references and just enjoy the beauty in the words.

Anyways, I’d recommend it to pretty much anyone. The book is over 50 years old, but reads as fresh as ever. I’m beginning to suspect that Pynchon and others started to play postmodernism’s games afterwards because you just can’t beat Nabokov in a straight write-off. He’s utterly amazing, and his other stuff (like the poem/story/?? Pale Fire) just shot onto my reading list.