One of the briefs for my senior project class, taught by Scott Santoro, involved redesigning a cover for a book I've read, based on what I believe the book is really about. I chose Vladimir Nabokov's infamous novel, Lolita.
I had noticed that many covers, including that of my own copy, depict Dolores Haze as seen through the eyes of the unreliable narrator, Humbert Humbert, which is to say precocious and sexualized, if not overtly seductive. While those are completely reasonable interpretations, I wanted to focus on the stark reality of Lolita's core, revealing what Humbert Humbert glosses over with his flowery prose and linguistic sleights of hand. Lolita, to me, is about a destruction of innocence that's at once purposeful and careless. It's about the irrevocable damage that's done to Dolores Haze, a twelve year old girl, like a flower plucked from the ground and then crushed.
