Alison Stewart: Coming up this year marks the 70th anniversary of the novel Lolita. We'll discuss the novel's legacy next with author Kaveh Akbar.

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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. This is Classics Week here at All Of It. It is one of our categories on the All Of It Summer Reading Challenge. Now, in a classic piece of work, one can marvel over the way language and words are used. Is it beautiful, like in Khaled Hassani's, A Thousand Splendid Suns, or is it terrifying like in Sinclair Lewis's It Can Happen Here?

Or does the language send your mind spinning or perhaps even trap you, as can happen in one of greatest classics that we'll be talking about today, Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov. As the main character, Humbert Humbert says, "Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with."

Nabokov uses alliteration, word scrambling, biblical references, language manipulation and so much more to tell you a story of sexual perversion and obsession and rape and murder and longing, all told to us in the first person by Humbert Humbert himself. Lolita is celebrating its 70th anniversary. Joining us now is author, poet, Professor Kaveh Akbar. He is the author of the recent novel Martyr Kaveh. Welcome back to All Of It.

Kaveh Akbar: Thanks so much, Alison. It's great to be here.

Alison Stewart: When was the first time you read Lolita and what was it about this book that it left a lasting impression on you?

Kaveh Akbar: I remember reading it in high school for the first time. I was the high school student who would find one of those read these hundred books before you die or else you're an intellectually impoverished garbage human. This was one of the books on one of those lists that I found I knew nothing about it. I knew nothing about Nabokov. I just pulled it off the shelf.

It just felt so much more illicit than the other books on that list. Also the language was an order of magnitude stranger than most of the others that I had read, the language throughout, the subject matter was equal parts thriller and novel of manners, like Jane Austen or something. It was very, very bizarre. I just remember being struck by how strange it felt.

Alison Stewart: You're a poet as well as a novelist, so obviously language is really important to you. What aspect of Nabokov's language in this novel do you admire?

Kaveh Akbar: It's a big question. I think what is compelling to me about Nabokov's language in this novel is how defamiliarizing it is as Humbert and Lolita drive through America. We see Humbert's descriptions of America. It is so acute and Martian and strange and strangering, the way that this character describes America. Because this is a character who feels nothing but contempt for anything that is not directly adjacent to his particular obsession, it is a novel about incuriosity more than anything else.

The way that that contempt manifests at the level of language, at the level of strangeness and defamiliarization and making us see things that we thought we'd seen, but making us totally see them again, the things that we just pass by every day, the things that we look at but don't actually see, the things that we don't notice. This is a novel that shakes the cobwebs off of everyday experience in this country.

Alison Stewart: He grew up trilingual. He spoke Russian, English and French at home. Can you see this in his writing?

Kaveh Akbar: He was the last of this very aristocratic Russian class who grew up polylingual and having high tea. His father was a Democrat, but not a Bolshevik. When he was assassinated in 1922, the Nabokovs all came to America and started living a very different life. Nabokov himself was very still and cultured by this very, very bourgeois upbringing.

That affect the way that Humbert tries to inhabit that affect and cudgel you into this feeling of his aesthetic and therefore moral authority is one of the overarching themes in the book. He's trying desperately to impress upon you how urbane he is and how smart and how sophisticated he is, especially compared to all the rubes in America around him. That is one of the loudest elements of his character.

Alison Stewart: Good use of the word cudgel. Listeners, we want to hear from you. Have you read Lolita? What did you think of the novel? What was the author trying to accomplish with this book? We want to hear your thoughts on lolita on its 70th anniversary. Our phone number is 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. My guest is poet and novelist Kaveh Akbar. We're discussing the 70th anniversary of Vladimir Nabokov's novel, Lolita. The book actually begins with a foreword from a fictional doctor, John Ray Jr. who introduces the manuscript written by Humbert Humbert who's in jail. We find out why. Why do you think this fictional forward, what is it meant to convey to the reader?

Kaveh Akbar: It lends to the narrative, which is a fictional narrative, the patina of a thinly veiled true story. It is again casting it as if these names were just altered but this is a salacious true crime story. I don't want to spoil this decades old book for listeners who haven't read it, but narratively it tells us how the book ends. It tells us what happens to these characters at the end of the foreword, which I won't get too into, but an attentive reader will see in the foreword it's spelling out exactly what happens and tipping the hand of the book itself.

I think fundamentally it's there to lend the entire book this this garment of reality. It immerses you in it. There's also all these funny anagrams inside of it and weird little makeups of Nabokov's name and the characters names. You can tell that he's just a writer who's having fun too.

Alison Stewart: It becomes clear that Humbert Humbert is not a narrator that we should necessarily trust.

Kaveh Akbar: Absolutely. That's right.

Alison Stewart: Can you give us an example of a sign that, "Wait a minute. Wait a minute," as you're reading the book.

Kaveh Akbar: This is a child abuser, kidnapper, murderer. We know this from the very beginning of the book. He opens the book by inviting you to participate in naming Lolita, Lo-li-ta he says, and he's making you put it on your mouth. He's trying to get you into this experience of obsession with him. He has this vile, contemptible, repellent-- There's no interesting reader for whom this is a character who is anything but vile and repugnant morally or ethically.

You can tell that he's, in this arachnoid way, spinning a web immediately to draw you into his world, his mind. Then he starts to tell you that Lolita had a precedent, that there was this other girl from his youth, but that wouldn't be the question in your mind, really. If someone is abusing a child, the first question you have isn't, "Oh, did she have a precedent?" But because he plants that question now, you're like, "Oh, what is that story?"

There are all these ways in which he's trying to juke you immediately and invite you into his way of looking at things before you even really had a chance to form an opinion about him. You can tell it from the first page of the book, that this is someone with an agenda. He calls you the jury. He calls the reader the jury. Semi explicitly, semi farcically, naming the entire novel as an effort towards personal exoneration.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a call. This is Marie, who is calling in from Woodstock, New York. Hi, Marie. Thanks for taking the time to call All Of It.

Marie-Helene: Hi, Alison. It's so nice to talk to you. Hey, Kaveh, it's Marie-Helene.

Kaveh Akbar: Oh, no way. Marie-Helene Bertino, transcendent American author of Beauty Land and a new book of short stories as well. Truly, truly, truly incredible writer.

Marie-Helene: Oh, my gosh. Love you. Love that you're talking about Lolita. Share a similar love for the language level of this book. I was curious to know if you had a favorite line that you could share with us or some language that you truly loved.

Kaveh Akbar: The second chapter of part two, where they're just going through America. I don't want to do this live on air to pull it up. I apologize. I don't have it immediately memorized. If you think about the second chapter. Oh, Alison has it. You can just point to a paragraph in the second chapter of part two, and it's just them riding through America, Humbert describing what he sees at the gas stations and describing his disappointment with the Appalachian Mountains and et cetera, et cetera. If you point to any paragraph in there.

Alison Stewart: I was also interested in that her name is Dolores, which means, like pain.

Kaveh Akbar: Oh, Dolores. Yes.

Alison Stewart: That, to me, was the first thing that caught my attention.

Kaveh Akbar: Sure. Absolutely. Humbert has his famous regime of calling her, she was Lolita naked in one sock, she was Dottie at school, et cetera, et cetera. That passage.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Jerry in Larchmont on line two. Hi, Jerry, thank you for taking the time to call All Of It. Jerry: Hi. I have a question about-- Lolita, with all its beauty of language and historical biblical references and so forth, at its center is a concentration on a fascination of an older man with a younger person. As a matter of fact, a young girl. I'm wondering, how does that scan with our focus recently in the news on the Epstein business?

Kaveh Akbar: Sure. I think that one of the projects in which Nabokov is most interested in this book is showing us how we can be charmed and seduced by language, by rhetoric, when you're shot with this fire hose of deeply, deeply, deeply strange, defamiliarizing, uncanny language, you find yourself wrapped. It's like Humbert is the snake charmer.

You find yourself flipping the pages quickly despite the fact that what he's describing and also euphemizing and also not describing importantly are some of the most heinous acts that one could conceive of. Pedophilic rape is what he's describing. Yet in these passages of prose, he's playing this song that makes you want to euphemize or that makes you want to continue along.

I think that few things could be more germane today when the great weapon used to stifle critical thinking in this country is a raw overwhelm of meaningless language, and we are all being shot with a fire hose of language and endless scrolls and we say words like these, and we're being taught to not pay very much attention to what the language is actually describing or what the language is euphemizing.

We're being taught that things like right to self defense. What right to self defense actually means is man made famines and concurrent genocides. We have phrases like Alligator Alcatraz, that is describing a concentration camp that we have built. This technology that the novel gives us to understand the intoxicating incantatory effect of language and the way that it can pave over the way that we can participate in a craven acquiescence to the authority of language is again, one of the most germane ethical things that I can think of that literature can teach us today.

Alison Stewart: I think it was Elie Wiesel said, don't say economic inequality when you can say a poor hungry child.

Kaveh Akbar: Absolutely, because every, every person starving in Gaza right now is a human being with a heart that could fit inside my chest. When we euphemize that, even words like genocide or famine pave over that. The whole project of this novel, or I don't mean to speak that generally, a major project of this novel is to show you the ways that rhetoric and intoxicating language can obfuscate the reality that is sat right in front of you.

Alison Stewart: This is a controversial book from the moment it was published, I think an American bestseller. People didn't want it initially. They finally did publish it and it became a bestseller. Why do you think readers are interested in this novel?

Kaveh Akbar: Any time there is as big of a controversy as there was around this novel and as much hand wringing and pearl clutching as there was around this novel, there is going to be a commensurate readership. The recently departed, incredible writer and critic Edmund White wrote, Nabokov's job in the book is to make you like the monstrous Humbert Humbert.

In the 1960s, readers were too swinging to see how evil he was, and now readers are too prudish to see how charming he can be. I think that the fact that the novel forces you to sit in that contradiction, that evil can be charming, which is as old as Milton in Paradise Lost. It's as old as Faustus by Marlowe. We know this, but sitting in what is not morally obvious, what is not ethically infantilized, is really nourishing for us.

You read Morrison and you get these characters that are infinitely, infinitely ethically complex. Not every character is thinking the morally or politically hygienic thing at the moment. I think that this book gives us the experience of sitting with a character who we find truly, truly, truly morally repugnant and also sometimes charming, and also he will make us laugh.

That is uncomfortable. Right? That is uncomfortable. I think that some people draw away from such discomfort and other people poke a little bit more into it to edify what is within us still molten.

Alison Stewart: What do you think of the movie adaptations that have happened as a result of this book?

Kaveh Akbar: I'm not a film scholar. The Kubrick movie, I think, is a little bit more salacious than the novel and maybe a little bit more-- I'm not a film critic, I don't want to render an expert take. The novel is the primary text for me. I have seen the Kubrick movie a couple times. It's not my favorite Kubrick. I don't want to wade into waters about which I don't know what I'm talking about.

Alison Stewart: Is Lolita something that you've taught before?

Kaveh Akbar: I've never taught the novel in its entirety before, mostly because I've spent most of my life as a professor teaching poetry. I do think that there is something, again, worthwhile-- I'm not saying that every teacher should teach it in every classroom or that a student wouldn't be wrong to want to exempt themselves from experiencing that, especially if they have traumas that align or in some way it would be unsafe for them to sit in that experience.

I do think, again, in a moment where so much of the pedagogical crisis in education is around students is offloading their curiosity into AI outsourcing their inquisitiveness about the world into artificial apparatuses, or availing themselves of those. This is, among other things, a horror story about what happens when you are mortally incurious.

Humbert doesn't care about any other human being. He has no ability to perceive the interiority of any other human being. Even when he speaks about Lolita as a person in the second act, the novel on, he's pretty repelled by what she actually likes, bobby socks and the music that she likes and the comics that she reads. He's constantly condescending to her about these things. What he likes is this mythologized version of her. This aestheticized, vacant version of her.

Even the object of his obsession, he can't really see as in possession of a vital and complex interiority. That extends orders of magnitude more so for every other human being in the world leading to the murder that happens at the end of the book. This is a person who is at the zenith end of the spectrum of incuriosity. Again, sitting in the moral complexity, the non-ethically infantilized reality that is so much more consistent with our own, I think is tremendously pedagogically useful.

Alison Stewart: This text says, I recently reread Lolita in my book club after a 40 year hiatus. This time I was blown away by the writing in the erudite vocabulary. Our guest has been Kaveh Akbar. You should read his book Martyr, by the way. He joined us to discuss the 70th anniversary of Lolita. Nice to talk to you again.

Kaveh Akbar: Thank you so much, Alison. I appreciate it.

Alison Stewart: There's more All Of It on the way.