RECOMMENDED READING
Nymphet notesBY PETER TERZIAN
STAFF WRITER
May 30, 2004
This summer, read "Lolita." Twice. First, get a plain old copy of
the book (preferably the Everyman's Library edition, with its vivacious
introduction by Martin Amis). You know the deal: Suave Swiss narrator Humbert
Humbert seduces (is seduced by?) American tween Dolores Haze, then takes her on
a harrowing, sex-drenched cross-country road trip.
Finished? OK, now pick up "The Annotated Lolita" (Vintage, $19 paper), with its whopping 138 pages of jaunty explanatory notes by Alfred Appel Jr., a Northwestern University English professor and author of sundry books about modernism, photography and jazz. Flipping back and forth between text and annotations, you'll marvel as a new, infinitely richer "Lolita" appears.
Appel turns what could have been stodgy scholarly apparatus into a highly entertaining song and dance. (Don't worry: The notoriously fussy Vladimir Nabokov gave his stamp of approval.) Appel illuminates references "literary, historical, mythol! ogical, biblical, anatomical, zoological, botanical and geographical." He highlights Nabokov's copious allusions to Poe and "Annabel Lee" and Lewis Carroll's Alice; he points out the author's persistent pokes at Sigmund Freud and props to James Joyce and Prosper Mérimée and long-forgotten, early 20th century tennis players. He explains the novel's motifs of mirrors and doubles and spots the many disguised appearances of the mysterious Clare Quilty, Humbert's archrival. Appel, bless him, translates all of the language-mad Humbert's many French (and Latin and German) phrases and defines all of his 25-cent words ("etiolated," "melanic," "phocine," "rill," "telestically"). And just what does our narrator look like? Appel unearths a period ad for Viyella bathrobes identical to the one that smitten Lolita posts in her bedroom because the model so closely resembles swoon-worthy Humbert.
And you thought it was just a naughty book. Appel shows us a "Lolita" that instead resem! bles "[a] Byzantine edifice, [the] verbal equivalent of an ordered (di vinely ordered?) universe."
Finished? OK, now pick up "The Annotated Lolita" (Vintage, $19 paper), with its whopping 138 pages of jaunty explanatory notes by Alfred Appel Jr., a Northwestern University English professor and author of sundry books about modernism, photography and jazz. Flipping back and forth between text and annotations, you'll marvel as a new, infinitely richer "Lolita" appears.
Appel turns what could have been stodgy scholarly apparatus into a highly entertaining song and dance. (Don't worry: The notoriously fussy Vladimir Nabokov gave his stamp of approval.) Appel illuminates references "literary, historical, mythol! ogical, biblical, anatomical, zoological, botanical and geographical." He highlights Nabokov's copious allusions to Poe and "Annabel Lee" and Lewis Carroll's Alice; he points out the author's persistent pokes at Sigmund Freud and props to James Joyce and Prosper Mérimée and long-forgotten, early 20th century tennis players. He explains the novel's motifs of mirrors and doubles and spots the many disguised appearances of the mysterious Clare Quilty, Humbert's archrival. Appel, bless him, translates all of the language-mad Humbert's many French (and Latin and German) phrases and defines all of his 25-cent words ("etiolated," "melanic," "phocine," "rill," "telestically"). And just what does our narrator look like? Appel unearths a period ad for Viyella bathrobes identical to the one that smitten Lolita posts in her bedroom because the model so closely resembles swoon-worthy Humbert.
And you thought it was just a naughty book. Appel shows us a "Lolita" that instead resem! bles "[a] Byzantine edifice, [the] verbal equivalent of an ordered (di vinely ordered?) universe."
