The Los Angeles times
published a short but very positive review of Michael Maar's book. I send it
along below.
Carolyn
FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2005 The
lure of 'Lolita'
This year marked the
50th anniversary of the publication of Vladimir Nabokov¹s ³Lolita² in
Paris. By Sara Lippincott
December 4, 2005 This year marked the
50th anniversary of the publication of Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita" in Paris by
the intrepid Maurice Girodias' Olympia Press. Nabokov, then teaching Russian
literature to lucky undergraduates at Cornell, had been unable to persuade a
U.S. publisher to take up his controversial manuscript, so we can't legitimately
celebrate our own "Lolita" semicentennial until 2008. Nevertheless, there were
observances in this country ‹ including an English edition of German literary
critic Michael Maar's "The Two Lolitas" (translated by Perry Anderson;
Verso: 108 pp.; $23). It's an amazing little book. Maar has dug up what may have
been the source of Nabokov's inspiration: a 1916 short story titled "Lolita" by
an undistinguished (and forgotten) writer named Heinz von Lichberg, about a
cultivated middle-aged man besotted by a nymphet. The whiff of plagiarism in
Maar's title and the flap copy will appall Nabokov's many admirers, but Maar ‹
while drawing fascinating parallels between Nabokov's nymphet and her obscure
predecessor and speculating about Nabokov's haunting of secondhand bookstores
while he was living in Berlin from 1922 to 1937 ‹ concludes that if Nabokov did
read Von Lichberg, then it's simply a case of a great artist fashioning a
masterpiece from dross. ("[V]on Lichberg busied himself in his 'Lolita,' rather
awkwardly, with linen, wood, paper and string.... Nabokov used similar
materials. But out of them he fashioned a kite that would vanish into the clear
blue air of literature.") Von Lichberg's story is included in an appendix, so
readers may judge for themselves.
latimes.com/archives.
Copyright 2005
Los Angeles Times