Lo's Diary

After much controversy, including Dmitri Nabokov's filing of a lawsuit alleging Vladimir Nabokov's LolitaAfrom Lo's point of viewAis revealed as a compelling novel in its own right. Choosing Lo's journal (which reveals characters' "real" names) as her vehicle, Italian writer Pera embroiders on Nabokov's Lolita (last name now Maze), fleshing out her troubled childhood. Her little brother is electrocuted ("his hair stands up straight, like Peter Porcupine") and her father takes to electrocuting lizards before he dies, too. The onset of puberty and awakening sexuality is at once destabilizing and a source of new power. When Humbert Guibert becomes the Mazes' tenant, Dolores triesAor so she pretends to herself at firstAto catch him to be her mother's (alternately "Plasticmom" and "Shitmom") new husband. A bitter mother/daughter competition ends with Charlotte dead and Lo taken sexual prisoner by her new stepfather. Pera convincingly describes Lo's confused state of mind as the illicit pair travel America for a year, Dolores saving herself from suicidal despair by accepting Humbert's bribes of candy, clothes and money, while reminding herself that someday "every memory will lose its thorns, and Humbert Guibert will be forgotten." The eloquent Nabokovian Humbert is here rather humorously reduced to a mundane oppressor, a dull and pretentious aging man. Also fun in Lo's version are her filled-in details of encounters with the pair's stalker, Nabokov's sinister Clare Quilty, here called Gerry Sue Filthy ("Filthy Sue"), who eventually offers Lo dubious refuge. Readers expecting echoes of Nabokov's subtle and elegant prose will be disappointed by the journal's authentic adolescent tone, but this Lolita, in her own words, manages to express quite wonderfully the complexities of her experience. The finished edition, which PW did not see, will contain a publisher's acknowledgment by Barney Rosset, a preface by Dmitri Nabokov and an afterword by Pera. 40,000 first printing; U.S. and Canadian author tour. (Nov.) FYI: Dmitri Nabokov will receive half the royalties from the English edition (which he will donate to PEN), and Pera will share her half with her Italian publisher, Marsilio. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The notorious re-telling (originally published in Italian in 1995) of Lolita in the words of the nymphet herself who drove Humbert Humbert beyond all constraint. Result: a mix of wit and tedium in near-equal parts. The wit appears early, as 12-year-old Dolores Maze (as opposed to Haze) describes her 1946 home life in Goatscreek, New Hampshire, no seducer yet in sight. When Lo was four, her little brother of two was electrocuted (tossed like ``a piece of toast popped out of the toaster'' by a downed wire). Lo's father, before his own abrupt end in 1945, reacted by killing lizards in a miniature electric chair in the garage. Her mother, a widow at 35, stared at the ceiling while Lo herself explored the world of scent (``I had spent the whole summer sniffing my mother's feet and collecting spiders''). Into this world of wacky sadness enters the French academic gentleman Humbert Guibert as a paying roomera point after which much of the book's charm flees as the necessities of its inherited script take over: as Lo is transformed into a sexual veteran at summer camp; as Humbert marries her mother so as to keep access to Lo; as her mother then dies (was she murdered by Humbert?); and as Humbert picks Lo up from the summer camp to embark upon a year's car-odyssey across the US, during which time his ``sex-slave'' Lo is mostly bored by her keeper, though she does obediently keep the ``travel log''of sights that Hummie ``assigns'' her, sounding in it often far too old for her age, as she does also when the duo alights in Ithaca, New York, and Lo becomes struck by the stagebefore fleeing with a hyperbolically seedy practitioner of same. Nabokov's novel, with its own excellences and scandal, was also a thing of its real historic moment; while Pera's retake of it gains life, in the main, as an already dated curiosity. (First printing of 40,000) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Italian author Pera has rewritten Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita from the point of view of Delores (Lolita). The novel, which takes the form of Delores's diary, begins with a preface by the fictional publisher explaining how he got the diary and why he decided to publish it many years later. Initially, the diary is a vehicle for Delores to talk to her dead father, but as time passes she writes for the benefit of the future adult Delores. The diary entries stop shortly after she has escaped from both Humbert and her second abductor, "Uncle Gustave." Through the diary, the reader develops an understanding of why Delores would wish to seduce Humbert and the full extent of the destructive nature of her forced relationship with him. In this new narration of the sexual exploitation of a child, the ornate language of the English professor is replaced with the language of a 12-year-old. At least in its English translation, however, Pera's writing lacks the style and beauty of Nabokov's English. Nonetheless, this work will be of interest to readers of Lolita and will make for some lively classroom discussions. Lo's Diary is being published in this country following the settlement of a copyright dispute between the publisher, FoxRock, and Nabokov's son and executor, Dmitri Nabokov. Recommended for large public and most academic collections.ARebecca A. Stuhr, Grinnell Coll. Libs., IA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.