I just finished the Lolita novel.
It added a lot more context that the movies did not have.
Humbert and Lolita are both awful people but i do feel sorry for them.
It isn't like the movies where my opinion is clear, Humbert is a narcissistic asshole who sees himself as better than everyone else and does awful things like repeatedly touch Lolita when she does not want it or lie to her but at the same time he also does good things like try to be a good father he takes her to movies and out to lunch he buys her a bike for her birthday and lets her hangout with friends.
Lolita obviously loved him at first but fell out of love with him once she hit her teenage years and went from being a typical tomboy kid to a bitchy teenage girl who seduces Humbert to get money from him.
Also, while Lolita to a certain extent is a victim there were parts where she clearly was the initiator and wanted it as well.
The author Nabokov called it a love story and when viewing it through the lens of 50s and 60s America when it first came out HH was seen as a tragic comedic anti-hero but when you look at it with the modern lens of 2024 it is seen as a book about abuse by an evil unreliable narrator to some people.
>while Lolita to a certain extent is a victim there were parts where she clearly was the initiator and wanted it as well.
This is probably what makes the book controversial nowadays. Since we usually expect victims to be blameless and innocent and children to be asexual. Its hard for people to accept that abuse isn't some night stalker jumping out of the bush or some horrible ordeal that the victim always hates and victims too can have hand in their own molestation. I'm pretty sure most kids who are trafficked or raped on camera for CP fappers don't think they are being hurt or think its normal because of all the positive rewards they get from their adult abusers.
Lolita is a good commentary for why modern sex and relationships suck. We are all Humberts now. Not in the sense of being molesters, but because our approach to relationships is always narcisstic and selfish. A partner is just a means to an end and therapy books, professional relationship advice, and self-help lit all encourage people to be self-interested narcissistic bastards.