Lolita: Reading With Deliberate Discomfort
The Most Beautifully Written Book With the Worst Narrator
Lolita requires you to hold two things at the same time: the extraordinary beauty of Nabokov's prose and the complete moral failure of the person producing it. Humbert Humbert is a pedophile who presents himself as a lover and uses the language of literature to construct a case for his own victimhood. The novel is the most complete demonstration I know of the idea that beautiful language can be in the service of something monstrous, and reading it is a lesson in how literature can implicate you.
The beauty of the prose is the trap. Nabokov intended it and it works.
"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.
"Vladimir Nabokov
Reading Lolita
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The novel is frequently discussed as primarily a linguistic achievement. It is also a precise account of abuse framed to seem like love, and reading it critically requires keeping that distinction in view throughout.