No Thanks, Mr. Nabokov

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Don't remember which p-lister suggested this book a while back:

The Two Lolitas, by Michael Maar

A leading German scholar reveals the secret history of Nabokov's infamous novel.

>From Amazon site:

"Does it ring a bell? The first-person narrator, a cultivated man of middle age, looks back on the story of an amour fou. It all starts when, traveling abroad, he takes a room as a lodger. The moment he sees the daughter of the house, he is lost. She is a pre-teen, whose charms instantly enslave him. Heedless of her age, he becomes intimate with her. In the end she dies, and the narrator—marked by her forever—remains alone. The name of the girl supplies the title of the story: Lolita.

We know the girl and her story, and we know the title. But the author was Heinz von Eschwege, whose tale of Lolita appeared in 1916 under the pseudonym Heinz von Lichberg, forty years before Nabokov's celebrated novel took the world by storm. Von Lichberg later became a prominent journalist in the Nazi era, and his youthful work faded from view. The Two Lolitas uncovers a remarkable series of parallels between the two works and their authors. Did Vladimir Nabokov, author of an imperishable Lolita who remained in Berlin until 1937, know of von Lichberg's tale? And if so, did he adopt it consciously, or was this a classic case of "cryptoamnesia," with the earlier tale existing for Nabokov as a hidden, unacknowledged memory?

In this extraordinary literary detective story, Michael Maar casts new light on the making of one of the most influential works of the twentieth century."  

And of course, there's Slothrop/Bianca.

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
.
>   
>  Trump card to Lolita doubters: much circumstantial evidence that OBA likes Nabokov, although, of course, that doesn't mean everything just something.
>
>Johnny Marr <marrja at gmail.com> wrote:
>  I was considering Lolita earlier this morning. A lot of critics praise Nabokov's 'unnerving' ability to make us emphasise with Numbert Humbert's attraction to Dolores. Personally I find no such empathy; she's only presented as a gormless bratty 12 year old who he happens to lust after in a very deluded fashion. Typical of Nabokov's inability to show any sensitivity. 
>As for the prose, I found it strangely variable: some of it ranks among the greatest I've read (describing her playing tennis, describing her 'accidentally' fallen across his knee) but some his hideously clunky. I find that Nabokov is fantastic at descriptions but weak at metaphors.