What did Jeffrey Epstein understand about Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita”? Pretty much nothing, Graeme Wood writes. theatln.tc/GEgLZ7DF
The late financier and convicted sex offender, who died in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on charges of trafficking minors, flaunted his supposed love of Nabokov’s novel, which is so closely identified with pedophilia that it spawned not one but two words, “Lolita” and “nymphet,” for girls whom grown men find sexually tempting. Epstein owned a first edition and ordered “The Annotated Lolita” for his Kindle 43 days before he was arrested; “Lolita” crops up here and there in the Epstein documents released by Congress.
“Still, I doubt that Epstein ever read ‘Lolita,’ or that he understood it if he did,” Wood continues. The novel’s protagonist, Humbert Humbert, is “one of the most odious and self-absorbed creations in all of literature. He is a rapist, a murderer, a world-class deflector of blame (‘It was she who seduced me’), and a pompous piece of child-molesting Eurotrash.” Humbert and Lolita spend much of the plot traveling in a jalopy and shacking up in motels—unlike Epstein, Wood notes, who flew in a 727 known unofficially as the “Lolita Express.”
“The end of the novel, however, is even more hateful to someone with Epstein’s predilections,” Wood continues. Humbert has become unattractive to himself, even remorseful about his crimes against Lolita; the reader is reminded that he is writing his tale from prison. Before he can face justice, he will be dead of a heart attack, a “parallel to Epstein, who, like Humbert, cheated justice through an early demise.”
“Epstein could, I suppose, have seen himself in Humbert, understood Humbert all too well, and simply not regarded him as loathsome. Epstein was, after all, Epstein, and did not inhabit the same moral universe as you and I do,” Wood continues. “More likely, Epstein confused ‘Lolita’ for some kind of Booker Prize–level version of ‘Penthouse Forum.’”
The Atlantic
What did Jeffrey Epstein understand about Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita”? Pretty much nothing, Graeme Wood writes. theatln.tc/GEgLZ7DF
The late financier and convicted sex offender, who died in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on charges of trafficking minors, flaunted his supposed love of Nabokov’s novel, which is so closely identified with pedophilia that it spawned not one but two words, “Lolita” and “nymphet,” for girls whom grown men find sexually tempting. Epstein owned a first edition and ordered “The Annotated Lolita” for his Kindle 43 days before he was arrested; “Lolita” crops up here and there in the Epstein documents released by Congress.
“Still, I doubt that Epstein ever read ‘Lolita,’ or that he understood it if he did,” Wood continues.
The novel’s protagonist, Humbert Humbert, is “one of the most odious and self-absorbed creations in all of literature. He is a rapist, a murderer, a world-class deflector of blame (‘It was she who seduced me’), and a pompous piece of child-molesting Eurotrash.” Humbert and Lolita spend much of the plot traveling in a jalopy and shacking up in motels—unlike Epstein, Wood notes, who flew in a 727 known unofficially as the “Lolita Express.”
“The end of the novel, however, is even more hateful to someone with Epstein’s predilections,” Wood continues. Humbert has become unattractive to himself, even remorseful about his crimes against Lolita; the reader is reminded that he is writing his tale from prison. Before he can face justice, he will be dead of a heart attack, a “parallel to Epstein, who, like Humbert, cheated justice through an early demise.”
“Epstein could, I suppose, have seen himself in Humbert, understood Humbert all too well, and simply not regarded him as loathsome. Epstein was, after all, Epstein, and did not inhabit the same moral universe as you and I do,” Wood continues. “More likely, Epstein confused ‘Lolita’ for some kind of Booker Prize–level version of ‘Penthouse Forum.’”
Read more: theatln.tc/GEgLZ7DF
🎨: Colin Hunter. Source: Patrick McMullan / Getty.
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