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----- Forwarded message from spklein52@hotmail.com -----
Date: Thu, 22 Sep 2005 13:48:07 -0400
From: "Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: SPKlein52@HotMail.com
Subject: cover for the 50th-anniversary edition ...
To: spklein52@hotmail.com
http://jam.canoe.ca/Books/2005/09/22/1230508-ap.html[3] Thursday,
September 22, 2005 10:04 AM PDT Lolita turns 50; publisher releases
special edition of Nabokov's classic
JAM! SHOWBIZ Thu, 22 Sep 2005 6:23 AM PDT
September 22, 2005
NABOKOV CLASSIC \'LOLITA\' TURNS 50
BY KIM CURTIS
THIS IS THE COVER FOR THE 50TH-ANNIVERSARY EDITION OF VLADIMIR
NABOKOV\'S NOVEL LOLITA. (AP PHOTO/VINTAGE/ANCHOR BOOKS)
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Lolita was 12 when Vladimir Nabokov brought her
to life as the obsession of her stepfather, a middle-aged man who
calls her "light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin. My soul. . . .
Lo. Lee. Ta."
After three generations, readers remain relentlessly drawn to
Nabokov's opening lines - more poetry than prose. They remain equally
repelled by Humbert Humbert, a child molester who essentially held his
stepdaughter captive; he is as despicable today as he was in 1955.
Lolita, a deceptively thin volume, has sold 50 million copies.
Vintage Books already has sold all 50,000 copies of a new, special
50th anniversary edition it released this month.
A close-up of a young woman's mouth replaces the previous cover
photograph, a black-white photograph of a girl's legs, in ankle socks
and saddle shoes.
"Lolita" and "nymphet" - another word Nabokov coined - have worked
their way into the lexicon. Two movie versions, first by Stanley
Kubrick in 1962 starring James Mason and later by Adrian Lyne in 1997
starring Jeremy Irons, have coaxed millions into theatres. Iranian
author Azar Nifisi penned her own contemporary best seller, Reading
Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, inspired in part by Nabokov, and
the Gothic Lolita is all the rage among teenage fans of Japanese
anime.
How is it that a pedophile protagonist remains sympathetic enough to
draw audiences? Why does this backward fairy tale - Prince Charming as
a monster - endure?
Literary critics say the explanation is simple: art.
"No one respected language more than Nabokov," said Stephen Parker,
a student of the author's at Cornell University in the late 1950s who
founded The Nabokov Society at the University of Kansas. "You don't
read it for his ideas, you read it for his presentation."
Parker says the Russian-born Nabokov, who made his fortune with
Lolita, was less concerned about teaching a lesson in morality than
he was in creating a long-lasting work of art.
"Get beyond the story, the entertainment and get into what was more
important," Parker said. "That's the case with Lolita. The reason
it's such a great work is because it has such great depth. . . . It's
endlessly revealing. And that's what the finest fiction should be."
Nabokov's son, Dmitri, 71, who lives in Montreux, Switzerland, and
for years served as his father's translator, exchanged e-mail with
The Associated Press about Lolita.
"A work of art, not its subject, remains eternally powerful," he
said. "The book exists on several levels, and in it there coexist
many themes: poetry, humour, tragedy, love. Perhaps its most moving
quality is that it is not black-white."
While Nabokov began writing Lolita in the late 1940s, he completed
much of it at his Ithaca, N.Y., home while teaching at Cornell. It's
the story of Humbert, a pedophile who is obsessed with his young
stepdaughter and essentially kidnaps her, travelling across the
country and holding her sexually captive. She eventually leaves him
for another man and Humbert goes to prison for murder.
Nabokov was a methodical researcher, filling hundreds of index cards
with pencil-written notes and drawings: statistics on the height and
weight of school-age girls, popular juke box tunes, details from a
gun catalogue about the murder weapon Humbert used to kill Lolita's
lover. He even spent hours on school buses, observing teen speech,
Parker says.
He knew it would be controversial; Nabokov called it a "time-bomb"
and hid the manuscript, writing notes to remind himself where he had
secreted the pages. At the time, he planned to publish the novel
using a pseudonym, to ensure it wouldn't sully Cornell's reputation.
In December 1953, Nabokov delivered the 450-page manuscript to
Viking Press in New York. He was told it was brilliant, but that any
publisher who accepted it risked being fined or jailed. Rejections
from five U.S. publishers followed.
Then Lolita made its way to Paris, to Maurice Girodias, founder and
owner of Olympia Press. Girodias's father had published Henry
Miller's Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn in the 1930s.
Following in his father's footsteps and eager to make money, Girodias
published English-language books that had been censored as pornography
elsewhere.
Ignorant of Girodias' sketchy reputation - Nabokov says he "knew
nothing about the obscene novelettes" Olympia Press was producing -
the author signed a contract and even agreed to publish it under his
own name. Lolita came out in Paris in September 1955.
Almost no one took notice at first; it was neither reviewed nor
advertised until the Christmas issue of London's Sunday Times, when
novelist Graham Greene named it one of the three best books of 1955.
By 1956, the book was banned in France. (That ban was overturned two
years later.) Lolita was published in the United States in August 1958
and immediately drew rave reviews from writers Dorothy Parker, William
Styron and others. It became the first book since Gone With the Wind
to sell 100,000 copies in its first three weeks. Kubrick quickly
snatched up movie rights.
The book got "extraordinary publicity" and was "an enormous best
seller" that made Nabokov's colleagues at Cornell immensely jealous,
says Parker. Students lined up at Nabokov's office to get their
copies autographed.
Parker says he admires Nabokov's "exquisite" use of the English
language, which is especially remarkable since Russian was his native
tongue. Dmitri Nabokov said his father "could even endow a shopping
list with an original rhyme or twist."
Far from being banned from publication in the United States as
Nabokov had feared, Lolita earned the author a fortune. He quit
teaching, moved to Switzerland and returned to full-time writing,
publishing several other novels and short stories, although none as
popular as Lolita.
He later told his son that he'd accomplished all he ever wanted to
as a writer. Nabokov died in 1977.
http://jam.canoe.ca/Books/2005/09/22/1230508-ap.html[4]
Links:
------
[1] http://jam.canoe.ca/
[2] http://jam.canoe.ca/Books/
[3] http://jam.canoe.ca/Books/2005/09/22/1230508-ap.html
[4] http://jam.canoe.ca/Books/2005/09/22/1230508-ap.html
----- End forwarded message -----
Date: Thu, 22 Sep 2005 13:48:07 -0400
From: "Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: SPKlein52@HotMail.com
Subject: cover for the 50th-anniversary edition ...
To: spklein52@hotmail.com
http://jam.canoe.ca/Books/2005/09/22/1230508-ap.html[3] Thursday,
September 22, 2005 10:04 AM PDT Lolita turns 50; publisher releases
special edition of Nabokov's classic
JAM! SHOWBIZ Thu, 22 Sep 2005 6:23 AM PDT
September 22, 2005
NABOKOV CLASSIC \'LOLITA\' TURNS 50
BY KIM CURTIS
THIS IS THE COVER FOR THE 50TH-ANNIVERSARY EDITION OF VLADIMIR
NABOKOV\'S NOVEL LOLITA. (AP PHOTO/VINTAGE/ANCHOR BOOKS)
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Lolita was 12 when Vladimir Nabokov brought her
to life as the obsession of her stepfather, a middle-aged man who
calls her "light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin. My soul. . . .
Lo. Lee. Ta."
After three generations, readers remain relentlessly drawn to
Nabokov's opening lines - more poetry than prose. They remain equally
repelled by Humbert Humbert, a child molester who essentially held his
stepdaughter captive; he is as despicable today as he was in 1955.
Lolita, a deceptively thin volume, has sold 50 million copies.
Vintage Books already has sold all 50,000 copies of a new, special
50th anniversary edition it released this month.
A close-up of a young woman's mouth replaces the previous cover
photograph, a black-white photograph of a girl's legs, in ankle socks
and saddle shoes.
"Lolita" and "nymphet" - another word Nabokov coined - have worked
their way into the lexicon. Two movie versions, first by Stanley
Kubrick in 1962 starring James Mason and later by Adrian Lyne in 1997
starring Jeremy Irons, have coaxed millions into theatres. Iranian
author Azar Nifisi penned her own contemporary best seller, Reading
Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, inspired in part by Nabokov, and
the Gothic Lolita is all the rage among teenage fans of Japanese
anime.
How is it that a pedophile protagonist remains sympathetic enough to
draw audiences? Why does this backward fairy tale - Prince Charming as
a monster - endure?
Literary critics say the explanation is simple: art.
"No one respected language more than Nabokov," said Stephen Parker,
a student of the author's at Cornell University in the late 1950s who
founded The Nabokov Society at the University of Kansas. "You don't
read it for his ideas, you read it for his presentation."
Parker says the Russian-born Nabokov, who made his fortune with
Lolita, was less concerned about teaching a lesson in morality than
he was in creating a long-lasting work of art.
"Get beyond the story, the entertainment and get into what was more
important," Parker said. "That's the case with Lolita. The reason
it's such a great work is because it has such great depth. . . . It's
endlessly revealing. And that's what the finest fiction should be."
Nabokov's son, Dmitri, 71, who lives in Montreux, Switzerland, and
for years served as his father's translator, exchanged e-mail with
The Associated Press about Lolita.
"A work of art, not its subject, remains eternally powerful," he
said. "The book exists on several levels, and in it there coexist
many themes: poetry, humour, tragedy, love. Perhaps its most moving
quality is that it is not black-white."
While Nabokov began writing Lolita in the late 1940s, he completed
much of it at his Ithaca, N.Y., home while teaching at Cornell. It's
the story of Humbert, a pedophile who is obsessed with his young
stepdaughter and essentially kidnaps her, travelling across the
country and holding her sexually captive. She eventually leaves him
for another man and Humbert goes to prison for murder.
Nabokov was a methodical researcher, filling hundreds of index cards
with pencil-written notes and drawings: statistics on the height and
weight of school-age girls, popular juke box tunes, details from a
gun catalogue about the murder weapon Humbert used to kill Lolita's
lover. He even spent hours on school buses, observing teen speech,
Parker says.
He knew it would be controversial; Nabokov called it a "time-bomb"
and hid the manuscript, writing notes to remind himself where he had
secreted the pages. At the time, he planned to publish the novel
using a pseudonym, to ensure it wouldn't sully Cornell's reputation.
In December 1953, Nabokov delivered the 450-page manuscript to
Viking Press in New York. He was told it was brilliant, but that any
publisher who accepted it risked being fined or jailed. Rejections
from five U.S. publishers followed.
Then Lolita made its way to Paris, to Maurice Girodias, founder and
owner of Olympia Press. Girodias's father had published Henry
Miller's Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn in the 1930s.
Following in his father's footsteps and eager to make money, Girodias
published English-language books that had been censored as pornography
elsewhere.
Ignorant of Girodias' sketchy reputation - Nabokov says he "knew
nothing about the obscene novelettes" Olympia Press was producing -
the author signed a contract and even agreed to publish it under his
own name. Lolita came out in Paris in September 1955.
Almost no one took notice at first; it was neither reviewed nor
advertised until the Christmas issue of London's Sunday Times, when
novelist Graham Greene named it one of the three best books of 1955.
By 1956, the book was banned in France. (That ban was overturned two
years later.) Lolita was published in the United States in August 1958
and immediately drew rave reviews from writers Dorothy Parker, William
Styron and others. It became the first book since Gone With the Wind
to sell 100,000 copies in its first three weeks. Kubrick quickly
snatched up movie rights.
The book got "extraordinary publicity" and was "an enormous best
seller" that made Nabokov's colleagues at Cornell immensely jealous,
says Parker. Students lined up at Nabokov's office to get their
copies autographed.
Parker says he admires Nabokov's "exquisite" use of the English
language, which is especially remarkable since Russian was his native
tongue. Dmitri Nabokov said his father "could even endow a shopping
list with an original rhyme or twist."
Far from being banned from publication in the United States as
Nabokov had feared, Lolita earned the author a fortune. He quit
teaching, moved to Switzerland and returned to full-time writing,
publishing several other novels and short stories, although none as
popular as Lolita.
He later told his son that he'd accomplished all he ever wanted to
as a writer. Nabokov died in 1977.
http://jam.canoe.ca/Books/2005/09/22/1230508-ap.html[4]
Links:
------
[1] http://jam.canoe.ca/
[2] http://jam.canoe.ca/Books/
[3] http://jam.canoe.ca/Books/2005/09/22/1230508-ap.html
[4] http://jam.canoe.ca/Books/2005/09/22/1230508-ap.html
----- End forwarded message -----