robyn reads books

Reading Lolita

Originally published on Instagram, May 2026.

A discovery happening in real time.

I can already see the questions that would eventually lead me toward My Dark Vanessa, language, and authorship.

I’m leaving it here exactly as it was written.

Turns out I’m still catastrophically susceptible to a throbbing frontal lobe.

Very quickly, Lolita was the manipulation, seduction, performance, perception and intelligent language I wanted and needed from Nabokov. His prose is intoxicatingly sensuous and that first para completely captivated me.

Humbert cannot stop transforming existence into sensual and intellectual material: violence, longing, obsession, grief. He eroticizes everything he touches. His intellect is his camouflage. The intimacy of his language, while highly alluring, totally contaminates perception. Desire, beauty and horror become impossible to separate and that makes everything unbearably tense. 

And yet, when the delusion reaches certain heights, he creates distance from himself through third person slippage, compartmentalization, justification. He fractures his own consciousness to survive it. I was riveted by it all. 

I have circled how contemporary this one feels. And since I’m in my ‘existential becoming’, it raises lots of questions around this endless human impulse to aestheticize everything. Why the need to curate/romanticize/stylize experiences, longing, loneliness, suffering, etc. Is it all really to see and hold the joy and beauty in the everyday, or for attention, validation, atmosphere, identity, choose me? Who knows. But it’s compulsive and likely a slippery slope. 

I will surely see myself out because I inevitably turned this lens on me too. Blah. Digression.

Observing myself participate in the seduction in real time was the real experience of reading this book. Attraction and repulsion operating simultaneously, monitoring my own reactions and tolerance levels while still feeling intellectually and emotionally stimulated, was addictive. 

So yes. Psychological voltage remains very much my thing. Unreliable narrators, my thing. Lolita is a dangerously intelligent read about desire, perception and self-justification and I had a sublimely intense reaction to it. 

Fucking loved it.