Subject
More Lolita Progeny (fwd)
Date
Body
EDITOR'S NOTE. My thanks to Steven Kellman for the item below which adds
to the growing list of neo-Lolita books such as John Lancaster's Debt to
Pleasure, A. Holmes' The End of Alice, etc.
-------------------------------------------------------
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (November 11, p. 57) offers this description of
MARGINALIA, a first novel by Doran Larson scheduled for January
publication by Permanent Press:
"Evocative of Nabokov's LOLITA, this debut novel by Larson, a
professor of literature and fiction writing at the University of Texas
at San Antonio, evokes the life and times of Joseph Stoyanovich. He is
the emotionally troubled author of a celebrated series of children's
schoolbooks, who looks back over his ruined life following his trial for
and acquittal of the charge of having sexually abused a 13-year-old girl.
The namesake of 'Uncle Joe' Stalin, Joe, the firstborn child of ineffectual
activist parents, was sexually initiated at age 12 by the family housekeeper,
who later became his stepmother and the mother of his half-brother, Will. While
keeping his stance from the world, containing his tortured sexuality by
annotating vulgar paraphrases in the margins of his own books, Joe is
sometimes visited by the impish apparition of Dain, a younger brother
whom he believes he killed as a child. Joe copes with his sexual
hang-ups by choosing to live in Buffalo, N.Y., near the kind,
ultra-pedestrian Will, and Will's young family ("For only as an uncle in
cardigans can one take long walks with a blonde and freshly feminine
seven-year-old without raising an eyebrow"). Incest, pedophilia,
homosexuality, abortion rights and suicide visit Joe's circle of artists
and academics as the plot drifts in and out of time present and time
past, detailing sexual torments and desperate behaviors...."
Steven G. Kellman
The University of Texas at San Antonio
to the growing list of neo-Lolita books such as John Lancaster's Debt to
Pleasure, A. Holmes' The End of Alice, etc.
-------------------------------------------------------
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (November 11, p. 57) offers this description of
MARGINALIA, a first novel by Doran Larson scheduled for January
publication by Permanent Press:
"Evocative of Nabokov's LOLITA, this debut novel by Larson, a
professor of literature and fiction writing at the University of Texas
at San Antonio, evokes the life and times of Joseph Stoyanovich. He is
the emotionally troubled author of a celebrated series of children's
schoolbooks, who looks back over his ruined life following his trial for
and acquittal of the charge of having sexually abused a 13-year-old girl.
The namesake of 'Uncle Joe' Stalin, Joe, the firstborn child of ineffectual
activist parents, was sexually initiated at age 12 by the family housekeeper,
who later became his stepmother and the mother of his half-brother, Will. While
keeping his stance from the world, containing his tortured sexuality by
annotating vulgar paraphrases in the margins of his own books, Joe is
sometimes visited by the impish apparition of Dain, a younger brother
whom he believes he killed as a child. Joe copes with his sexual
hang-ups by choosing to live in Buffalo, N.Y., near the kind,
ultra-pedestrian Will, and Will's young family ("For only as an uncle in
cardigans can one take long walks with a blonde and freshly feminine
seven-year-old without raising an eyebrow"). Incest, pedophilia,
homosexuality, abortion rights and suicide visit Joe's circle of artists
and academics as the plot drifts in and out of time present and time
past, detailing sexual torments and desperate behaviors...."
Steven G. Kellman
The University of Texas at San Antonio