Word: humberts
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...Along Humbert's and Lolita's way, there are scenes of horrible irony. CHILDREN UNDER 14 FREE, says a sign at one hotel. But the most truly horrible part of the book is the intimate fashion in which the reader is made to see how from a monstrous relationship a kind of shadow of a good life emerges. Humbert, the false father, often becomes a truly tender pseudo parent; Lolita, the perverted child, becomes a true innocent. In the end-to Humbert's great agony-she is pregnant and happy with a young, goonlike husband...
Kingdom by the Sea. The novel's European narrator calls himself Humbert Humbert and the doubletalk name sets the note of self-mockery that runs-laughter questioning the validity even of despair-throughout the book. Humbert's ignominious, fatal obsession is for little girls in the 9-14 bracket-not ordinary little girls but a special kind he calls "nymphets." As Humbert explains it in a passage that is typical of his style: "You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins...
...Humbert's obsession began in a dreamily distant beach resort where he met and desperately loved a girl-both being unlucky 13. Since Humbert is given to puckish literary references, the girl's name, of course, was Annabel Leigh (Poe spelled it Lee). After Humbert's early love is interrupted by shame and death, he incessantly searches for a return to that lost, childish kingdom by the sea. He searches through the mail order catalogues of Paris whoredom, through a low-comedy marriage, through Central Park-until he finally finds Annabel's reincarnation in Dolores Haze...
...Final Farce. Humbert marries Lolita's mother in order to be near the child. The mother, through Humbert's diaries, discovers his true predilections, runs distraught out of the house and is killed by a car. Now begins the prodigiously clumsy business of Humbert's trying to seduce his own stepdaughter-the fumbling, phony-paternal tenderness, the elaborate scheming, the agony of longing which Author Nabokov manages to make at once ludicrous, terrible and utterly convincing. But in the end, as Humbert tells the event, "it was she who seduced me . . . Modern coeducation, juvenile mores, the campfire...
...last passages of Lolita, as Humbert waits for the police, he comes to understand the true nature of his crime. He recalls how, on a dark hillside, he heard from below a "vapor of blended voices, majestic and minute . . . divinely enigmatic . . . and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord." Thus it was when James Joyce's hero Stephen stood in the school study listening to the voices of boys at play. "That is God,'' said Stephen, "a shout...