The seduction of language

Amy Sackville explains why one of the most controversial and beautiful novels ever written, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita’, is one that rewards if not demands re-reading

- Amy Sackville

I first read Lolita about as many years before now as the age Dolores Haze was when she died you can always count on a fan girl for a fancy prose style). That is, I was a schoolgirl, and utterly seduced. I was in the process of discovering that what I loved in literature above all was language more than character, concept, or plot and I loved the richness of the prose, the relishing of each syllable’s mouth-feel: “Lo. Lee. Ta.” When asked, at a university interview, what I had read and enjoyed, this was the book that came first to my mind – because, I said, it is so beautifully written. But is that, in itself, problematic, they asked? Are we not being sweet-talked by a monster, whose hyperbole makes of his ecstasy and agony something grander than the sordid cr