You need to just not be a pedophile yourself. It's not subtext here, it's text. Your 50/50 regarding goth girls you knew liking it is accurate but in thst half were being transgression and the other half is the latter. I'd heard essentially what you had before and gave it a read, the Kubrick movie is what people are generally thinking of, not the book. There is no way you could read that book and take it as an endorsement of pedophilia
Nabokov never wrote one likable character in any book. Someone above said Lolita has a "narrator who you're not supposed to sympathize with", but you're not supposed to sympathise with anyone, his is a worldview where people are morally low and sadistic manipulators, or else pathetic rubes being manipulated
The void of the street, revealing nothing of my wife’s departure except a rhinestone button that she had dropped in the mud after preserving it for three unnecessary years in a broken box, may have spared me a bloody nose. But no matter. I had my little revenge in due time. A man from Pasadena told me one day that Mrs. Maximovich née Zborovski had died in childbirth around 1945; the couple had somehow got over to California and had been used there, for an excellent salary, in a year-long experiment conducted by a distinguished American ethnologist. The experiment dealt with human and racial reactions to a diet of bananas and dates in a constant position on all fours. My informant, a doctor, swore he had seen with his own eyes obese Valechka and her colonel, by then gray-haired and also quite corpulent, diligently crawling about the well-swept floors of a brightly lit set of rooms (fruit in one, water in another, mats in a third and so on) in the company of several other hired quadrupeds, selected from indigent and helpless groups. I tried to find the results of these tests in the Review of Anthropology; but they appear not to have been published yet. These scientific products take of course some time to fructuate. I hope they will be illustrated with photographs when they do get printed, although it is not very likely that a prison library will harbor such erudite works.
You need to just not be a pedophile yourself. It's not subtext here, it's text. Your 50/50 regarding goth girls you knew liking it is accurate but in thst half were being transgression and the other half is the latter. I'd heard essentially what you had before and gave it a read, the Kubrick movie is what people are generally thinking of, not the book. There is no way you could read that book and take it as an endorsement of pedophilia
is it worth reading?
yeah the prose is outstanding
Nabokov never wrote one likable character in any book. Someone above said Lolita has a "narrator who you're not supposed to sympathize with", but you're not supposed to sympathise with anyone, his is a worldview where people are morally low and sadistic manipulators, or else pathetic rubes being manipulated
It's actually pretty fucking good. The problem is being someone who has it around their house while you're reading it.