Caught

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is hard to put down: It races, its language a mix of horror and poetry, its ending wildly uncertain till the last pages. The narrator, Humbert Humbert, seizes the reader as cleverly as he kidnaps and preys on Lolita. Obsessive, sly, cruel, he does not permit us to know Lolita except through his insanity and grabby addiction. We finish the novel shaken, wondering why we did not choose an earlier escape.