Nabokov's Lolita: must you have read all the books Nabokov alludes to in this novel..

First time I read Lolita I read it literally, like fundamentalists like to read their holy scripture. But the book "The Annotated Lolita" tells us that almost every line of this book is harboring a second, invisible one, referring to mythology or Nabokov's contemporary writers. So must you really read all those books he supposedly referred to, to fully gain insight in this novel? How multi-layered is Nabokov's cake really? Are we not giving him too much credit?

I had some thoughts about this novel, that may contribute to the layers. For instance Humbert Humbert...the double or twin name itself....it sounds like a latin name for an animal, as in the binomial nomenclature as once proposed by Carolus Linnaeus. Maybe even Alois Humbert has something to do with it. Hummingbird Hummingbird.

Literally taken from the book itself:

"when two bearded bathers, the old man of the sea and his brother, came out of the sea with exclamations of ribald encouragement, and four months later she died of typhus in Corfu."

Some writers refer to "the old man and the sea" by Ernest Hemingway but I do not see a link there with Hemingway's brother. I think this text much rather refers to Poseidon and his brother Hades, the latter of which, according to mythology, once kidnapped a girl and placed her on an island for the time being.

The problem is....if every goddamn page of Lolita is to be read between the lines how can one rest when her only writer is dead to check it for sure? I once hated to read this book but started to love to hate it at the same time and read it all over again and again and every time I did I saw new things, that probably Nabokov himself must have overlooked. Yeah Right.

My question boils down to: was Nabokov's intention, writing this book, ambiguous, in the sense that he knew he wrote a book that was rather perfect without the reader even having to try to read between the lines? I once promised myself to read James Joyce Ulysses....but really... how safe am I from hidden messages in latter book compared to the former? I want to read a book but not a book by a writer who tries to encipher his intentions with hidden allusions to other books on every page. That is like reading a Wikipedia page that got you mouseclick on every blue word in the scripture....forming a rip curl that moves you from the original subject bit by bit until you can no longer see the shore and makes you type corny **** "how the hell did I end up in this ****e?".

The scary part of Nabokov's work here is: even when read literally, it's still a very good book. Scary as it may be, I believe a lot of people can write such a novel at first notice. All it takes is a good novel as a backbone, and then you add some subliminal gestures about mythology and some nasty stuff about your contemporary writer colleges....a witches brew if you will. Practice makes perfect. Funny to see that Lolita today really knows no follow up to this very day. I always laugh at myself when I condemn people who read this book and said its a book a pedophile would have in his library. I am sure a lot of pedophiles have this book because they read it literally and are totally unaware of the yummy layered cake that lies underneath all its apparent superficial pedosexual banality.

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Nabokov's Lolita: must you have read all the books Nabokov alludes to in this novel..