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Monikers
Lola & H.H. Yes, the surface level our fictional monikers is very easy to decipher. There is Nabokov’s Lolita, known as “Lo” or “Lola,” and his Humbert Humbert from the same novel. I am in awe of this Russian literary giant because his greatest works were written in English — his second language! — and not just English, but such English.
Pick up a copy of Lolita and read it through and you shall find that its language is as impenetrable as Humbert Humbert finds his Lolita the first time she gives herself to him. He writes a prose that is poetry. But whereas most poetry gains its power from the use of monosyllabic words and an immediate visual and visceral impact upon the mind, Nabokov’s prose employs some of the most rare, obscure, and multisyllabic vocabulary of any novel in English. And he does so without flaw. Each and every word, pompous and chock-full-of-syllables as they may be, fits perfectly and works toward fulfilling the thought rather than distracting from it. The true beauty of Lolita is not the story, the tragic plot, the characters; the true beauty of the book is the language. The main character is the medium through which the story is being told. This is an innovation on par with other modernists such as Joyce, Eliot, and Beckett. The language takes on a texture that is to the philologist what clay is to the sculptor.