Stan Kelly-Bootle: I’m
sufficiently intrigued to seek out Joanna Briscoe’s novel,
You*. Of course, the publisher seems to be over-exploiting the
Nabokov/Lolita connection considering that Joanna’s heroine is well into
puberty at 17... Joanna also confuses the complex HH/Lolita relationship by
writing: “After a strategic marriage to her mother, he spends the rest of the
novel chasing the elusive [my italics] girl, while attempting to thwart a
rival.” Why do so many readers ignore Lo’s lack of in-tacta-hood and HH’s
surprise when they first hit the sack?
JM: The italics for "elusive" are significant also
because they suggest that, initially, Lolita didn't try to seduce mommy's
husband (although she was soon disenchanted by the "real" oedipal
thing). In a recent discussion about "man-corrupting evil
beauty," the subject of otherwordly temptresses came up, among
them Venus in particular, as pictured in the story of Tannhäuser. In
Lolita, and in various short-stories as well, there are
references to the Venus di Milo (a plaster copy in a surrealist setting, for
example). However, more explicitly we find that Lolita was once
described as a "Venus febriculosa" and later Humbert
Humbert concludes: "Curious: although actually
her looks had faded, I definitely realized, so hopelessly late in the day, how
much she looked — had always looked — like Botticelli's russet Venus — the same
soft nose, the same blurred beauty." Perhaps Venus lay in the back of Nabokov's mind when he
fashioned his younger russet nymphet and
then, rather ironically, portrayed Humbert
Humbert's quasi-redemption (for he also seems to have opted for the
charms of fairly-land as in the folktale - like it happens to
Eichendorff's Raimund in "Die Zauberei im
Herbst").
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*Joanna Briscoe's novel, 'You', is published by
Bloomsbury