Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer

>Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer.
>You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

wtf so how old is he? what is he trying to say?

He was as old as it was years before her birth.

So if she was born in the year 2000 and he's looking back to 1970, he was 30 years old then.

The book was published in 1955

Was he old?

WTF I hate Nabokov now

It's an example, you idiot.

"Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style." (Pt. 1, Ch. 1)

It's a little math problem: Assuming that Humbert's age when he met Annabel Lee is about the same as Dolores Haze's age when Humbert first meets her, that makes Humbert three times as old as Dolores when they first meet.
Humbert soon writes "I was born in 1910, in Paris" (Pt. 1, Ch. 2) and two pages later, "The only definite sexual events that I can remember as having occurred before my thirteenth birthday (that is before I saw my little Annabel)..." (Pt. 1, Ch. 2) Later in that paragraph, he says that he met Annabel in the summer of 1923. She is "a lovely child a few months my junior" (Pt. 1, Ch. 3), which would make her 12 or 13.
The main action of the novel begins in 1947, when Humbert is 36 or 37 (depending on when his birthday falls in the year). We first know that Humbert meets Dolores in 1947 when he writes about Annabel "until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another" (Pt. 1, Ch. 4). The year 1923 plus 24 is 1947.
He writes in a notebook that is imprinted "with a golden year, 1947, en escalier, in its upper left-hand corner" (Pt 1, Ch. 11). He reports that he moved into the Haze household a "few days before" May 30, 1947 (Pt. 1, Ch. 11) and the diary entries cover "most of June."
Dolores Haze, he notes, was "Born 1935" (Pt. 1, Ch. 8). We learn later that she was born on January 1, 1935. "She would be thirteen on January 1" (Pt. 1, Ch. 15). That's January 1, 1948. Sometime later: "On Lo's twelfth, January 1, 1947..." (Pt. 1, Ch. 19).
It is the summer of 1947 when Dolores goes to Camp Q. Humbert's "mad year" is very explicitly "August 1947 to August 1948" (Pt. 2, Ch. 1). She leaves him in the summer of 1949; he spends the time "between July 5 and November 18" (Pt. 2, Ch. 23) searching for her, up "to the end of 1949" (Pt. 2, Ch. 25).
Humbert meets Rita in the summer of 1950 when she "was twice Lolita's age and three quarters of mine" (Pt. 2, Ch. 26). It's another math problem but a simple one: In 1950 Humbert is 40; Rita is 30; Dolores is 15. Humbert and Rita "cruised together for two dim years, from summer 1950 to summer 1952" (Pt. 2, Ch. 26). The letter he receives from Dolores is "dated September 18, 1952" (Pt. 2, Ch. 28).
We know from the indispensable satirical Forward by "Dr. John Ray" that Humbert Humbert "died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was to start," and "Mrs. 'Richard F. Schiller' died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day, 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest," that is, a week before her 18th birthday.

this is the nobakov prose ppl fawn all over? really? this is good? just seems a bit purp to me

So Nabokov fucked Poe's bitch? I thought Annabel Lee was a real girl who dies, Nabokov seems like a newfriend, tbqhf

>there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child
how could he possibly understand this if he wasnt a actually a khv hebephile

he is /ourguy/

well it's fairly obvious he's an unreliable narrator. If pushed for details about a lot of things, he usually does throw up some prose filled evasion of the question.