Word: lolita
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Exhaustively portraying the events of a single day, June 16, 1904, in Dublin, it has comic exuberance, encyclopedic inclusiveness and a virtuoso display of diverse narrative styles that make most subsequent novels look like spin-offs. RUNNERS-UP One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov...
...phenomenon is influencing historical fiction. Even men are catching on to the imaginative possibilities. Earlier this year Ron Hansen dug deep for Hitler's Niece, a novel that cast the teenage Geli Rabaul as Lolita to the Fuhrer's Humbert Humbert...
...expect "I had sex in an outhouse...when I was 12 I masturbated with a stapler" and so forth), and the other intellectual material is less than insightful. The most interesting article on the site at present: Dmitri Nabokov's essay on copyright laws and his father's Lolita...
...Diary fails both ways. It would be nice to read of Lo's nasty times with Filthy, but per Pera, the pair never had sex, and he didn't force her to make stag films, as Humbert had said. The real problem, though, is in the narrative voice. In Lolita, Humbert, an educated European, could wax satyric in language as elaborate as any poet's or pedant's. Lo, 11 when the tale begins, and no scholar, must be limited in word power and storytelling skills. Yet the book's prose style, while undistinguished, is far too precocious and knowing...
...from the shadows that tower over it: those of Humbert--that predatory wretch condemned to sing so beautifully of his sin--and his grand, glowering creator. It will have utility only if it leads readers back to the immortal original. Choir, please turn to page 9 of The Annotated Lolita. All together now: "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul...