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A review by madeleinegeorge
The Real Lolita: A Lost Girl, an Unthinkable Crime, and a Scandalous Masterpiece by Sarah Weinman
4.0
In 'The Right to Sex', which I read yesterday, there was a chapter devoted to teacher/professor-student relationships and the bounds of consent. What I found fascinating was Srinivasan's argument that the failure there is not one of consent, but rather of pedagogy; the theory being that in establishing a sexual relationship-- between two consenting adults (as in collegiate occurrences) or one adult and one child-- the fundamental aim of education and the pure platonic patterns of instruction are violated. This is, of course, in addition to all the power and political pressures that are present there as well, but all the same. It was an angle I hadn't considered, but one that rang true and clear all the same.
After that, I was tempted to reread Lolita, but decided against it because I didn't want to.
Instead I decided to read Weinman's beautiful piece-- and I'm very glad I did. Uniting historical recreation and brilliant reporting (a lá Helen Macdonald), she traces the true-crime case of Sally Horner as it develops alongside Nabokov and his writing + publishing of Lolita. In this excavation, Horner's life is reclaimed from it's double-appropriation: first as she was indelibly tied to the fate of her abuser and then as she was immortalized by V.N. without sufficient recognition. Sally's life was tragically short and unimaginably brutal. But Weinman brings her to life with salient prose, meticulous research, and compassionate sensitivity. Where she was finally rescued from the hands of her kidnapper, her story has now been wrested from the bitter hands of history as well.
a PS on Lolita
It's a novel that everyone-- whether they've read it or not-- has an opinion on. Both filmed versions received meager box office returns (which... who thought putting it on screen would be a good idea? who)((even w Jeremy Irons, but we're moving past that)), as did the aborted musical.
I've read Lolita, but nothing else of Nabokov's. I knew very little (and suspected I wanted to know even less) about the writing process of it. If anything, though, Weinman's dig into their history, both his and his wife's, somewhat lessens the visceral, nervous knot that forms in the throat when attempting to imagine it. The fact that his decade-long compulsion seems to have been a literary and not a physical one is a small comfort, but a welcome one nonetheless.
After that, I was tempted to reread Lolita, but decided against it because I didn't want to.
Instead I decided to read Weinman's beautiful piece-- and I'm very glad I did. Uniting historical recreation and brilliant reporting (a lá Helen Macdonald), she traces the true-crime case of Sally Horner as it develops alongside Nabokov and his writing + publishing of Lolita. In this excavation, Horner's life is reclaimed from it's double-appropriation: first as she was indelibly tied to the fate of her abuser and then as she was immortalized by V.N. without sufficient recognition. Sally's life was tragically short and unimaginably brutal. But Weinman brings her to life with salient prose, meticulous research, and compassionate sensitivity. Where she was finally rescued from the hands of her kidnapper, her story has now been wrested from the bitter hands of history as well.
a PS on Lolita
It's a novel that everyone-- whether they've read it or not-- has an opinion on. Both filmed versions received meager box office returns (which... who thought putting it on screen would be a good idea? who)((even w Jeremy Irons, but we're moving past that)), as did the aborted musical.
I've read Lolita, but nothing else of Nabokov's. I knew very little (and suspected I wanted to know even less) about the writing process of it. If anything, though, Weinman's dig into their history, both his and his wife's, somewhat lessens the visceral, nervous knot that forms in the throat when attempting to imagine it. The fact that his decade-long compulsion seems to have been a literary and not a physical one is a small comfort, but a welcome one nonetheless.