Lolita is perhaps one of the most disturbing novels of the century: it tells the immoral story of a middle- aged man who falls in love with a twelve year- old girl (a "nymphet," as he calls her) and has a sexual relationship with her for over two years, until she disappears with another more perverse middle- aged man. What makes this novel particularly disturbing is the fact that Humbert's sexual perversion is disguised in highly poetic garb and that the only monitor of virtue is the gifted pervert who narrates the story. Never before has sex been evoked as poetically or as erotically as in Lolita. The first erotic scene takes place between an adolescent Humbert Humbert and a girl of the same age, Annabel Leigh, who becomes the model for Lolita:"She sat a little higher than I, and whenever in he solitary ecstasy she was led to kiss me, her head would bend with a sleepy, soft, drooping movement that was almost woeful, and her bare knees caught and compressed my wrist, and slackened again; and her quivering mouth, distorted by the acridity of some mysterious potion, with a sibilant intake of breath came near to my face. She would try to relieve the pain of love by first roughly rubbing her dry lips against mine; then my darling would draw away with a nervous toss of her hair, and then again come darkly at me and let me feed on her open mouth, while with a generosity that was ready to offer her everything, my heart, my throat, my entrails, I gave her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of my passion." Annabel Leigh's name is of course borrowed from Edgar Allen Poe's "Annabel Lee," a poem that is mentioned often throughout the novel. The narrator is not so much trying to describe the erotic games of two children as to make us intimately feel their erotic excitement. Nabokov makes Annabel the focal point of the text, but not its reflector. The scene begins with an alliterative evocation of her legs ("her legs, her lovely, live legs") ...
