"Lolita" (1955) by Vladimir Nabokov

Lolita, hard to swallow, pain in the backside. Rewarding pain, if anything. Let's put it out there first: there are the obvious controversial and outrageous contents - paedophilia, deceit, kidnap, rape, murder. It has all the thrills to warrant a Stanley Kubrick treatment. It is not difficult to see why it is highly and widely regarded as an important piece of literature despite the subject matter, but it takes a lot of effort to align your thoughts as you read on. The novel is famous for having an unreliable narrator - that is, the story of paedophilia, deceit, kidnap, rape and murder is told by the offender. The prose is written in some flowery language that is legitimately beautiful. It is full of double entendres, puns, literary references, allusions and metaphors, and French. It is a masterclass in the English language and in the art of narration. Because it is effectively written as a stream of consciousness, or the "memoir", of a beguiling criminal mind, you have to constantly peruse the text to distill out the "hard facts" and patch up the events in chronological order. It sounds like detective work, but it is worse as you need to keep judging. There are clearly no morals to the story, and the author makes it clear by appending a fictional foreward given by some "psychology scholar" at the beginning to "critique" the "memoir". Nabokov himself then published a genuine afterword to disown the foreword. It is not so much about messing up one's mind in terms of being factually confusing, but upon finishing, the more thoughtful and inquisitive readers are left with plenty of unsettled questions: in each scenario, who really are the victims and offenders given the readers only have one heavily biased perspective? Did event A happen before event B, which would change the order of precedence in terms of offence? Where do my own morals lie? In fact, are my comprehension skills intellectually sound? In any case, every character in this novel is a loser in a dystopia that inevitably collapses in a magnificent way. Fundamentally, this novel is a long stretch of good quality black humour. It is sufficient to merely say, "Haha, that was good."