Chasing Lolita - How
Popular Culture Corrupted Nabokov's Little Girl All Over Again by
Graham Vickers
I’ve always had a curious relationship with
Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.
I love the book and yet detest the image of Lolita as she’s been used
in popular culture. The image seems to me to miss the point of the book
to point of distortion. So when I came across Graham Vickers’ Chasing
Lolita: How Popular Culture Corrupted Nabokov’s Little Girl All Over
Again, I grabbed the chance to review it. Vickers examines in
detail the way Lolita
has been translated in various media and pop culture, comparing these
incarnations with Nabokov’s construction. Along the way, he offers some
possibilities for Nabokov’s source material, other examples of stories
with similar themes and just enough gossipy bits about the making of
the films to keep the book from descending into academic dryness. The
book is a very readable treatise on the way Lolita has been used and
abused at other hands than Humbert Humbert’s. [. . .]