This book's about the confessions of a middleaged man's sexual obsession with a 12yearold girl, Lolita. How very very very poignant and distressing. I'd spend my breaks in the staffroom, embroiled in the erotic ardor of Humbert. And leave with an aching heart. Sometimes so acute and caustically sour, sometimes dull and giddy. I think Vladimir Nabokov must be almost racked with throes of emotions when he wrote it hahaha.

"She trembled and twitched as I kissed the corner of her parted lips and the hot lobe of her ear. A cluster of stars palely glowed above us, between the silhouettes of long thin leaves; that vibrant sky seemed as naked as she was under her light frock. I saw her face in the sky, strangely distinct, as if it emitted a faint radiance of its own. Her legs, her lovely live legs, were not too close together, and when my hand located what it sought, a dreamy and eerie expression, half-pleasure, half-pain...I gave her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of my passion. "

The book describes his torment due to his unaccepted sexual appetite, more than his lust per se. How sweeet. And what started from lust at first sight ended up as love at last sight. The pangs of his unrequited love at the end is almost tangible, like the frustrations of unsatiated salacity in the beginning.

"When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past."

Everyone can relate to the pains of unreturned love. (Except certain asexuals haha) And some will understand the difficulities of supressing desires that will label them perverse if expressed. The potent combination of the pin-point accuracy and the subtlety of his descriptions seems to cut away the flimsy flesh of the character to reveal the bare brittle bones of his nature.