Now, in Pia Pera's controversial new book, Lolita speaks for herself in her own naked voice. Listening to her tale, readers enter a universe in which events, apparently the same as in Nabokov's novel, are radically different. Truths clash, collide, and ultimately diverge. Nabokov's Lolita is not Lolita's story, but her seducer's. The Lolita of that novel is a projection of Humbert's erotic imagination. Lo's Diary tells her story in her own voice, bringing into question the version told by her seducer in his account. Lo's Diary is an investigation into the myth that is Lolita. In Pia Pera's novel, Lolita uncovers her true self and tells us everything Humbert never told, never saw, and never imagined.
After much legal wrangling with Nabokov's estate, Pia Pera's
Lo's Diary has found its way to America. Imagining the inner life of Nabokov's Lolita, Pera shows a good degree of irreverent audacity, something that is often missing in feminist "re-imagining" of the patriarchal past--historical or literary. While American Women's Studies classes teach us that Lolita is a victim, caught in a terrible net of adult desire, in this Italian writer's version, Lolita is a petty, self-centered girl who is driven by lust, boredom, the desire to be looked at constantly. She's also a skilled sadist, torturing animals, men, her mother. When Lo leaves for camp, she runs upstairs to hug poor, pathetic Humbert: "he holds me away to see me better, with a tragic-emotional look (he's always getting that look, because of the gutless poetry he studies), and I bring my lips close to his. End of film." While the publishers claim Pera is seeing Lolita through the lens of a "new feminist consciousness," it reads more like that of fashion magazines, soap operas, bitchy girl talk.
In order to avoid a copyright infringement lawsuit, Pero's American publisher agreed that Nabokov's son, Dmitri, could write a preface. And it is a scathing statement indeed, issued from the heights of literary snobbery. Nabokov writes condescendingly of "Pia Pera (henceforth PP), an Italian journalist and author of some stories that I have not read." He ends with this statement: "Whether [the book] draws well or badly from Lolita I leave for you to judge." In e-mail exchanges with The New York Times, Pera called the preface "a disappointingly dull emulation of his father's mastery of irony and, on occasion, virtuoso contempt."
Lo's Diary is no masterpiece, by any means. Its prose is flatly realistic, pulling Nabokov's wildly poeticized characters down into a sticky, unglamorous world where Humbert can't even figure out how the condom works. This is clearly Pera's mission--to vandalize the literary institution that is Lolita, and in this she has succeeded. Her novel is like cultural graffiti that won't wash off the walls for a while, for at least a month or two. --Emily White
