Should I read Lolita?

It is extremely disturbing, mostly because one does feel sympathy for Humbert. Somehow you are led to wanting him to succeed. For this reason it is also brilliant, but I don’t want to read it again.

It's an amazing book and worth reading if you want to read amazing literature. The subject matter is sort of irrelevant with that in mind. The film versions are both atrocious and miss the point of the novel in my humble opinion.

I've never understood how anyone could read it as Nabakov having sympathy for Humbert. He gives him all the rope he needs to hang himself.

I read it as an older teenager and again in my 20s and enjoyed it. I then read it again almost 30 years later and found it incredible. There was so much I missed as a younger reader. So many signs of the distress of the child that went completely over my head previously.
I thought it was an amazing book. It would be a shame to discount it because of the subject matter. It is deeply shocking, but it is intended to be.

I found it disgusting.

It’s one of the greatest novels ever written. It’s often misinterpreted as condoning paedophilia, but that is a misreading of the text (and also partly the fault of the films which totally misunderstand the book in portraying Dolores as sexually precocious). Humbert is a witty and compelling narrator, which can be very uncomfortable for the reader, but the sympathy of the book is always with Dolores herself.

But there is deep compassion for the child in it. Not in Humbert, but the novel is more than Humbert.

It's not amoral as a novel. A novel is more than the morality of its protagonist. Nabokov is inviting you to notice how easy it is to be seduced by Humbert as a reader, not affirming that it's morally right that you should be. Humbert's moral realisation is trite and shallow. The novel's isn't.

Ultimately we could go seven postmodern layers deep on the death of the novelist, blah blah blah. Whatever. But I don't want to live in a world where art has to affirm its Upright Moral Correctness at every turn and a narrator can never do anything bad without Learning A Lesson and Recognising His Failings. If it deeply unsettles you to read it... it's doing its job as art.

I’ve read it many times - wrote my dissertation on it, etc.
I suppose I would have agreed with JaneyGee. Now I find her position naive.

OP it is a highly erotic and titillating novel where you identify against your will with the paedophile, not least because he is very funny - think Richard III. As said above the first part is more fun - because that is the seduction bit. As a reader you are willing him on.

Nabokov’s wife angrily denied there was anything wrong with it, saying anyone who suggested there was failed to see the compassion for the child in every page. Again, choosing not to see what’s in front of you.

@ANightmareBeforeChristmas great synopsis.

It is really well written but it made my skin crawl - I'll never read it again.

The first half is tense and harrowing - the second half is dreary and depressing.

Of course you should read it. Lolita is one of greatest English-language novels of the 20th-century. Harold Bloom ranked it alongside Joyce’s Ulysses, D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, and a handful of others. Is it an evil or immoral book? Oscar Wilde said that there’s no such thing, “books are either well written or badly written, that is all”. Anthony Burgess agreed. He said there are two kinds of good - artistic good and ethical good. Lolita is a work of art, not a political pamphlet.

It's an incredible piece of literature. Well worth reading. But no, it doesn't use "framing or distancing". Nabokov was not out to give the reader a nice moral glow. That's rather the point.

If you think you'd find it deeply upsetting to read, that's up to you; it's certainly not mandatory.

We read it for my English lit class. It was and uncomfortable read but it's beautifully written. I think it is worth a read for sure.

There's no framing or distancing, he's an unreliable narrator that aims to gain your sympathy.

I certainly didn't sympathise with him! Lolita is a classic but if you don't want to read about a paedophile then give it a miss.

The book is from a paedophiles point of view and is very graphic in parts about touching Lolita. - Also features passage at the start about how he wasn't convinced the French child prostitute he paid for in Paris was really enough of a child. So probably wouldn't if the thought of that upsets you