https://youtube.com/watch?v=HXebJUq53p0
TL:DR Humbert (the guy telling the story in his memoir) is intentionally acting subversive and attempting to win the reader to his side by painting things through his view. His attraction, instead of being immoral and illegal is framed instead as pure love, despite him not even seeing Dolores as anything but a child to molest and use. He's an unreliable narrator trying to seem innocent in his kidnapping and molestation by blaming the young girl and spends the book trying to be buddy and playful with the narrator to get them to see things from his view (as it's his memoir he's writing)
And the people who think for some reason it's a proper romance book need to be 
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!bookworms Lolita discussion
Well yeah, what's funny is that Humbert himself says that if he was the judge he would have given a 35 years prison sentence for r*pe. So my take is not that he's "sick", rather he's just evil and a psychopath.
Another cue of Humbert's lack of empathy is that he mentions Dolores crying every night and he doesn't understand why. And remember that his "confession" is his effort to paint himself in the best possible light before the jury.
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Humbert is a horrid writer too. His prose is purple and pedantic. Nabakov deliberately wrote his style to be as gross as possible (this is most pronounced in the first half of the book which is more based on erotic and sensationalist lit while the second half is more Nabakovian) you can esp tell this if you've read other his other books and know how his style usually is. There is an anecdote from libraries that when Lolita dropped people rushed to check it out but ended up returning it early once they passed the first half and the book ceased any pretensions of being "romantic".
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How did anyone read the first part thinking it was "romantic"? That honestly baffles me.
Humbert is a creep from the beginning, on the first chapters he monologued about his nymphets and talked about how he made a girl he used to frick to dress up as a school girl. He marries Charlotte, a woman he despises so he could frick her 12 year old daughter, and I'm sure he killed Charlotte as the "accident" was too convenient and he confessed having tried to kill her at the lake.
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I think people fall for his obscuring ie the term nymphet, not calling himself a p-dophile, stuff like that.
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He defines nymphet as a girl between the ages of 10 and 14
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Yeah but between the two sentences
and
nymphets is less direct which makes sense since he's trying to appear like not a bad p-dophile man but instead a wholesome big chungus nymphet lover.
Really it's the same thing as people on twitter saying their Lolicons, it avoids the bad words that are direct as to what they want
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also women probably were reading it a lot too and I mean they like 50 shades
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Honestly still better than McCarthy's prose
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