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ALSO IN SALON: No more magic realism
A young Latin American novelist says no more flying grannies.
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____*lolita*
BY VLADIMIR NABOKOV,
BY MARY ELIZABETH WILLIAMS when word got out that Jeremy Irons was scheduled to star in a new film version of Nabokov's "Lolita," it was hard not to be optimistic. The time is certainly ripe to one-up Stanley Kubrick's unsexy interpretation of the book, and Irons' casting seemed a stroke of inspiration. In this actor, after all, coexist the ardent lover of "The French Lieutenant's Woman" and the creepy accused poisoner of "Reversal of Fortune." Who better to capture the fascinating, horrible Humbert Humbert -- a victimizer and a victim, a debonair aesthete and a bumbling criminal? Then it was revealed that Adrian Lyne -- the gimmicky, exploitative director of "9 1/2 Weeks" and "Fatal Attraction" -- was to helm the new movie, and a legion of bibliophiles gaped at the sacrilege. If only there were some way, they mused, to get Nabokov and Irons alone together. Fortunately, there was. The unabridged, 12-hour, eight-cassette audio version of "Lolita" is a one-instrument symphony, with Irons playing every part, every instrument, of Nabokov's devastating and haunting melody. It's a road trip to hell in a luxury sedan. Irons plays not a cinematic Humbert, living in the immediacy of each moment as it unfolds, but rather the Humbert of the book. This Humbert is an exhausted ruin of a man, piteously reliving all his crimes but knowing full well he wouldn't change a thing even if he could. And so as he dredges up every happy, sordid memory of Humbert's, Irons sighs, he snorts, he gasps, he sniffs -- he is a man who remains breathlessly besotted. He chronicles his passion for his 12-year-old nymphet in seductive purrs and malevolent hisses, sounding at once both painfully self-aware and woefully self-deluded. When Irons speaks in the voices of the other characters of the book, the effect seems at first jarring and odd. Humbert's voice seems so real and so right, yet Charlotte Haze, Quilty and in particular Lolita herself, are conveyed in hard, flat, cruel pastiches of the American dialect. Eventually, you realize why -- it's not Jeremy Irons speaking Lo's famous lines, it's Humbert, remembering her and parodying her. It's Humbert, the smug European who is equally adoring and contemptuous of the new world in which he found his love and his downfall.
Irons isn't just reading Nabokov's opus, he is confessing H.H.'s sins as H.H. must surely have sounded in Nabokov's own imagination. Whispering closely in our own ears, he is compelling and he is repulsive. And for that, we understand the heartbreaking emotional odyssey of the book's title character all the more deeply.
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