‘Don’t you know that last night
Turned to daylight
And a minute became a day
Last night
All my troubles
Well they seemed so, so far away
Searching my reflection
For a glimpse of, another me
I’ve got to get away from these high times
All these high high times
Cause these hight times
are killing me.’

That above are lyrics from the Jamiroquai song ‘High Times’ and they seem pretty apt seeing as how i’ve finally finished reading Lolita. For the un-initiated Lolita is a Vladimir Nabokov’s tale that details how the peadophile Humbert Humbert (an alias naturally) kidnaps a twelve year old girl, the titular Lolita (aka Dolores Haze) and proceeds to start a sexual relationship with her.

From a personal point of view what interested me most was less the taboo subject matter – which, due to be being so far removed from personal experience, is hard to comprehend – but rather the way Nabokov has crafted the novel. His writing is almost akin to prose poetry with it’s beautiful use of word play, anagrams, metaphors and general pomp and plushness.

As a poet it is these sort of novels that I tend to find most interesting, A Clockwork Orange is another. Novels that challenge linguistic heritage, molding and shaping it in new and fascinating ways always appear, to me at least, as the freshest and most challenging way that I can expand my horizons, at least in a literary manner.

Furthermore I think it says something about the novel, and possibly me, that the only time i was acutely aware that I was reading a novel was when Humbert appears most human in the closing pages of the book. The slight realisation of his guilt slash crime seems to pull the novel out of the heightened and hyperbole world in which 300 pages of Lolita seem to exist and although tis may be intentional to ease the reader out of the novel, one can’t but feel a little tinge of sadness for the fact that the gentile prose is starting to ebb away.

A must read, go check it out, and then read Pnin – also by Vladimir Nabokov, that one comes highly recommended by my English tutor haha