Delicate snares are everywhere in Lolita, and the tread of 50th anniversaries can be as crushing as Hallmark (and middle age). So let’s insist on this: The book is still brand-new, drying on the page, filled with play, prescience and humor. But if you want a new angle, think of it as a novel about Read More
An intriguing development on the Nabokov front, a crypto-scandal widely reported in Europe, but not much here: Lolita is causing trouble again. At least, that’s been the way it’s been portrayed in the European press, which has overheatedly raised the specter of “plagiarism”: Did Vladimir Nabokov lift the controversial plot, indeed the very name of Read More
It’s no longer news that the Victorians, notwithstanding their reputation for prudery, propriety and sublimation, were possessed-like all human beings-of sexual appetites and the means of satisfying them in a wide variety of ways. If we ever doubted it, the historians and biographers who have lately devoted huge labors to the study of Victorian sexuality Read More
Harald Zwart’s One
Night at McCool’s , from a screenplay by the late Stan Seidel (1952-2000),
is the kind of movie that, as I was watching it, I was preparing to dismiss as
a broad, cartoonish sex farce, straining for
as many cheap laughs as it could get this side of Three Stooges–like
smuttiness. That Read More
Atlas, named for the human pillar of the universe (it’s also one of the world’s largest moths), is in a former dentist’s office on the ground floor of a 1940′s apartment building on Central Park South. When I arrived for dinner one evening, white napkins were neatly spread along the bar, each place set with Read More
O.K., I’ll play. You know, the Century-Slash-Millennium List Game. I admit I was reluctant to get into the whole Man -of-the-Century, Movie-of-the-Millennium enterprise. But a couple of things changed my mind: calls from two networks and a newsmagazine on the Hitler question–was he the “most evil” man of the century? should he be Man of Read More
A Taste for Freedom: The Life of Astolphe de Custine , by Anka Muhlstein, translated from the French by Teresa Waugh. Helen Marx Books, 391 pages, $16.95.
One of my failings as a reader–and as a citizen–is a tendency to sympathize with doomed aristocrats. Given a choice between the democratic hordes at the barricades and Read More
“My Lolita does not speak in Nabokov’s language,” said Pia Pera.
It was 4 P.M. on a Friday, about the time one’s blood sugar faints away, and Ms. Pera was at New York University’s Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, on West 12th Street, for an “espresso talk.” The subject was her new novel, Lo’s Diary , Read More
Something rare and beautiful happened the other evening at the Nabokov celebration at Town Hall. Actually, the whole evening was quite lovely for word lovers, a commemoration of the centenary of Nabokov’s birth (sponsored by PEN, The New Yorker and Vintage Books) with remarks by admirers such as Elizabeth Hardwick, Martin Amis and David Remnick, Read More
Adrian Lyne’s Lolita , from a screenplay by Stephen Schiff, based on the novel by Vladimir Nabokov, received its New York premiere at a benefit for the Film Society of Lincoln Center, hosted by Showtime Networks Inc. at Alice Tully Hall on July 28 at 7:30 P.M. This comparatively low-key klieg light and paparazzi event Read More
