Woman Horrified After Reading Handwritten Message Inside Copy of ‘Lolita’

A second-hand copy of the controversial novel Lolita has gone viral for the unnerving inscription written inside.

The 1955 novel by Vladimir Nabokov revolves around a man who marries a woman to get to her 12-year-old daughter, Dolores, who he is obsessed with.

Despite its premise, Lolita has sold tens of millions of copies, and was twice adapted into film, by Stanley Kubrick and, later, Adrian Lyne. It regularly appears on lists of the best novels ever written, including Time‘s List of the 100 Best Novels.

Author Nabakov himself referred to protagonist Humbert Humbert as a “vain and cruel wretch, who managed to appear touching,” in a 1967 interview with The Paris Review.

But the novel is still sometimes interpreted as a love story, and a Reddit post recently went viral as it showed a found copy of Lolita with an inscription that the finder, Sarah, said shows “nearly everyone who gifts Lolita severely misunderstood.”

Sarah, who gave her first name only, told Newsweek she found the copy at an Airbnb in Vermont. She had previously tried reading the book as a teenager, as from what she had heard about it thought it would be “spicy and scandalous,” but she lost interest and never finished it.

Taking to the r/FoundPaper sub on October 14 on her account Diehoe1234, she showed a handwritten message on the inside of the book, dated 1980, which read: “Happy reading to my dearest sir-nymph, and happy 16th.”

The gifter had signed off with the name Vicki, along with a heart and kisses—having used a similar term to protagonist Humbert, who calls young girls “nymphets.”

Sarah told Newsweek that after finding the book, she reflected on a previous relationship with a considerable age gap, which began when she was 17, not long after she first attempted reading Lolita.

Having recently ended the relationship, “finding the book felt like a cosmic sign from the universe that I was making the right decision. Reading it really emphasized it for me,” she said, adding she was now close to finishing the story.

“I wonder about the relationship, with how I first understood the book and the subsequent older boyfriend I fell in love with a year later, versus my perception of everything now. If that makes sense. It put a lot in perspective,” she said.

Below the handwritten note on Sarah’s Reddit post was an introduction to the novel by American critic Lionel Trilling, who stated in his foreword that “Lolita is about love.”

And Reddit users responded in a big way, with the post gaining almost 3,000 upvotes, as one user commented: “Looking at the quote I don’t think Lionel Trilling understood what Lolita is about either.”

“Dear LORD people are so confident in being gross and incorrect,” another said, while one shared: “The abusive 28-year-old I was with at barely 18 recommended Lolita to me, so yeah this tracks.”

Sarah said she was unsurprised by the attention her post received, as she had seen other posts go viral with “egregious, telling on yourself inscriptions in Lolita.”

Referencing the introduction by Trilling, she said it is “not a romance as the review describes it but something closer to horror. I really don’t know how anyone could actually read the book, or even read a little bit of it, and decide to give some grace to Humbert Humbert.”

“Yes, the writing is poetic, but the poetic words are explicitly describing his attraction to minors,” she said. “Like the writing is only romantic to people who find flowery writing about children romantic.”

But, she said, this was lost on her when she first read the book aged 15 or 16: “It’s also why I couldn’t actually read/finish it then. It is not erotica like I assumed it would be, and unless you mentally prepare yourself for a first-person narration from a pedophile the book is unreadable.

“I think a lot of people who defend the book as a romance without having read it fall in this category.”

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