Our Traveling Shelf discussion

I had a hard time reading this book. I'd hear a lot about it through the years and I've always been curious to read it for myself and see if I think it's the greatest love story of all time, or it's just a story about a pedophile and his horror. The interesting part is what a scholar Humbert is but you can still see his underlying ticks, or honestly craziness. Throughout the beginning of the book as he's trying to explain his past, all it felt like was that he was trying to justify what he did while at the same time convince us that he wasn't crazy. It's interesting because it seems like the whole time he understands it's wrong and we have a direct comparison in Quilty, who is also a pedophile but sees nothing wrong with it and is almost glorified since he's famous. I struggled a lot with Lolita's character throughout the book. She seemed very rebellious which I felt stemmed from the fact that her mother clearly disliked her and favored her dead brother and also the fact that she never had a father in her life and saw this in Humbert at the beginning when he first showed up. Finally someone was paying attention to her. I did have to keep reminding myself that we were seeing her through Humbert's eyes and what he created her to be, not who she really was or her true feelings. There is only one point in the entire book that I can recall where we saw a glimpse of what she was feeling; otherwise it seems she was just trying to survive. Humbert creates everything about her, down to her name really and even though at the end he claims to still love her as a 17 yr old, I can't help but feel like he was still only in love with his creation and interpretation of her. We will never know what the real Dolores was like or would have been. One final note: her name means pain in Spanish which I felt really represented her entire existence.