V. Gangadhar's article on two forthcoming Bollywood
"Lolita" films caught my eye for a reason having little to do with his
essay. I notice that one of the
filmmakers, Nair, said Lolita was all about "a
teenager falling in love with a 45-year-old man".
Quite aside from making me wonder whether he had read the novel, his
comment lead to rumination on a curious lapse in (non-professional) Lolita
commentary. Humbert is, of course, only forty-two at the time of his death some
five years after the start of his escapade.
The sense that HH is literally "a dirty old
man" seems wide-spread. My question: Why do so many insist on thinking that
HH is on the edge of Altzheimers? He hadn't even gotten to middle age when he
launched his affair. I can vaguely understand the inclination to raise
Lolita's age from a
tender twelve but why Humbert's? I recall
from my teaching years when I would ask a class HH's age the answers were
almost always way high. Why?, I wonder.
I would also note that an Indian Lolita already
exists in a marvelous novel by Sanskritologist Lee Siegel: "Love in a Dead
Language." Not only does it focus on the Lolita theme but is loaded with
numerous allusions to "Pale Fire" and other VN works. For some samples, go to
Juan Martinez's Nabokov web site at:
Don Johnson