You must get your intelligence and discernment from your father, Love4OneAnother. Get a friend to borrow it for you. To be honest I wouldn't have got that much out of it at 15, but maybe you're more advanced than I was!
Lolita is a phenomenon, for all sorts of reasons. It is one of the few literary novels of the 20th century (along with the likes of
Catch-22 and
Nineteen Eighty Four) that has put a new word or phrase into the common language. It is the work of a man writing in not his first or second, but third language. It is responsible for the worst rhyming couplet in musical history*. And its subject matter, of a paedophile 'relationship' is utterly contemporary - so it doesn't fade and date like other fifty-year-old books (
Lucky Jim, anyone?) - and also makes it hard to believe that it was published in the prudish 1950s. Of course, it almost wasn't: like that other great "obscene" novel
Ulysses, it was first published in Paris. Nabokov in his afterword writes:
[American publishers'] refusal to buy the book was based not on my treatment of the theme but on the theme itself, for there are at least three themes which are utterly taboo as far as most American publishers are concerned. The two others are: a Negro-White marriage which is a complete and glorious success resulting in lots of children and grandchildren; and the total atheist who lives a happy and useful life, and dies in his sleep at the age of 106. Some of the reactions were very amusing: one reader suggested that his firm might consider publication if I turned my Lolita into a twelve-year-old lad and had him seduced by Humbert, a farmer, in a barn, amidst gaunt and arid surroundings, all this set forth in short, strong, "realistic" sentences ("He acts crazy. We all act crazy, I guess. I guess God acts crazy." Etc.)
The other reason why it has not dated is because of its innovative language, which while nowhere near Joycean - or even, to me, Marquezian - complexity, does take a bit of getting used to. (Nabokov described it as "a record of my love affair with the English language.") The supple and witty language is never better displayed than in the scene at the end between Humbert and Quilty, which comes at the start of Kubrick's film version (another distinction: great book becomes great film shocker), and which I had presumed was mostly Peter Sellers' improvisation ("You will only wound me hideously and then rot in jail while I recuperate in a tropical setting"): but it's all there on the page.
Lolita is, as you surely know, and whatever the naysayers may claim, a love story. And there are plenty of naysayers, even in the 21st century, where you might expect sophistication enough to understand the difference between writer, or reader, and character. One saddened Amazon reviewer states "If you want to read erotic descriptions of children and sickeningly-detailed depictions of child molesting, the law is apparently powerless (or at least unwilling) to stop you, but please, please, don't hide behind "art." Admit, at least to yourself, what you're really doing; admit what you are." Needless to say, there are not really any erotics or sickeningly-detaileds in Lolita. Yes, unsurprisingly, it's all in his mind.
Humbert Humbert relates his love story from jail, where he awaits trial for murder. It has been edited by "John Ray, Jr." after Humbert's death, who also provides a foreword where he gives away all the protagonists' fates without the reader realising. The name Humbert Humbert is significant: it is the narrator's own choice of fictional name - the "double rumble" which Nabokov felt carried the right amount of sinister intent - and reflects his two personas. There is Humbert the rapacious paedophile, with his authentic attention to detail and planning, and his enormous cruelty - the last sentence of Part 1 of the novel packed a punch like I hadn't felt since
A Handful of Dust. And there is Humbert the repentant regretter: filled with self-loathing and longing at the end of the book, in an exceptionally moving scene where he realises that he really loves the grown-up Lolita.
Humbert is a mesmerising narrator, charming, repellent, pitiable and witty. Despite its occasional forays into picaresque road-movie territory, there is not a single boring page in the book, for now I know where Martin Amis gets his ambition never to write a sentence that someone else could have written. (As Humbert warns us at the start: "You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.") If you're going to read
Lolita - and why wouldn't you? - I recommend the annotated version, which will not only give you more background and notation than you will ever require, but also enable you to identify who the hell they're talking about at one crucial point of the plot, and to spot the same character's preshadowings, as he appears and vanishes and vanishes and appears throughout the book's first two-hundred-and-fifty pages before he actually comes centre stage, rather like Brad Pitt in
Fight Club.
Time, then, to reacquaint myself with the other Nabokovs I have, and have surely read, but which I can't remember anything about either. They will hardly match the perfection of
Lolita, a novel for which I reserve the highest praise: that is, to shut up about it, and leave it to Martin Amis:
You read Lolita sprawling limply in your chair, ravished, overcome, nodding scandalised assent.
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* "He sees her / He starts to shake and cough / Just like the old man in / That book by Nabokov" - The Police, Don't Stand So Close To Me. For shame!
I had heard magnificent things about this book, so at the library today I attempted to check it out. 
