Lo's Diary

Rating:
Summary: Entertaining on one level, but mostly drek.
Review: It's revoltingly unfaithful to Nabokov's original text.

The "real" names and so forth- Goatscreek, Dolores Maze, Gerry Sue Filthy- are hokey and rather unbelievable. The protagonist's diary, allegedly begun when she was about ten or eleven, is so far beyond precocious that it loses all its credibility.

Pera has decided, perhaps wisely, to keep it so deeply in Lo's focus that the entire affair with Humbert seems inconsequential; a nothing. I found myself squirming and skipping through the many esoteric bits of American pre-teen lore, instead looking for some scraps of story.

Oh, right- it has no ending. There is no conclusion, no closure. Even in a diary format, some kind of ending could have been scrounged up.

Alone, "Lo's Diary" might have been a very interesting and peculiar text. However, the only purpose it currently serves is to pervert the excellent original writings.

Rating:
Summary: Amusing read;
Review: Lo's Diary is Lolita (Delores Haze's) side of the events that Humbert Humbert told in Lolita. Once again, John Ray is presented with a manuscript this time from the hands of the famed nymphet herself.

She tells Mr. Ray that some of the details of Lolita were just over-romanticized lies thought up by Humbert, but then she sort of recants and decides that maybe Humbert was so deluded he really thought those things happened. So, we learn the "true" story of what happened starting with Lolita's diary a few months before Humbert Humbert entered the picture.

I really, really disliked Humbert Humbert while reading Lolita, and I don't think I was supposed to like him. This book was quite a jewel since Lolita's assessment of Humbert coincides with they way I felt he really was in Lolita, a bumbling fool.

This wasn't written in the same style as Nabokov's Lolita. This is quite a bit more down-to-earth. You don't have to go through pages and pages of description about one minute detail. Lo just tells it like it is. Sometimes, Lolita seems a little too mature for her age, and sometimes she seems a little childish, just as she's presented in Lolita, though. I thought it was an amusing read.

Rating:
Summary: Disapointing
Review: Rarely do we find a unanimity of opinion in reviewer circles. Yet it happened for Lo's Diary. Every reviewer worth his column in the book supplement bashed and destroyed the book. I had to pick it up and read it.

The premise seems promising enough, Lolita from her own perspective. Obvious issues in freedom, feminism, etc. This is most obvious, not by what the book says, but by the fact that the book exists. It is carried through in such an unpolished way that you're better off reading straight criticism, or better yet, another Nabokov novel.

One wonders, especially after reading Pale Fire, whether Nabokov meant it to be a book about Lolita told by an egomanical Humbert, or rather, what Nabokov meant by it. Questions of betrayed promises of freedom (or whether promises of freedom are always betrayed?) about the silence of the opressed?

Still, people don't disappear silently. Want the real Lolita? Read the original again. Save your money.