Book 0138

Lolita is a love story. Of course Humbert Humbert is a reprehensible lech, a child molester, and a murderer, but the feelings he feels are the ones we all feel. In fact Humbert probably feels more deeply, passionately, poetically, and articulately than most. Nabokov's seminal novel of the 60s is an emblem of art's freedom from morality, it does not teach us a lesson, instead it plunges us head on into the essence of what it is to be human. It is all of us at our basest and most eloquent. And one of the most beautifully written books in the English language.