Lolita Film/Book Splice

The next instalment comparing books to their film adaptations

Lolita is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, written in English and first published in 1955 in Paris, in 1958 in New York City, and in 1959 in London. The novel is notable for its controversial subject: the professor obsessed with the 12-year-old Dolores Haze, with whom he becomes sexually involved after he becomes her stepfather.

Lolita quickly attained a classic status; it is today regarded as one of the prime achievements in 20th century literature, though also among the most infamous. The novel was adapted to film twice, once by Stanley Kubrick in 1962, and again in 1997 by Adrian Lyne. It is to the latter adaptation that the comparison is to be made in this article.

Its assimilation into popular culture is such that the name "Lolita" is now often used to describe a sexually precocious girl, or one that adopts the childish costume roleplay and/or sexual power play games.

The classification of Lolita being an ‘erotic novel’ has often been disputed. Malcolm Bradbury writes "at first famous as an erotic novel, Lolita soon won its way as a literary one – a late modernist distillation of the whole crucial mythology." Samuel Schuman says that Nabokov "is a surrealist, linked to Gogol, Dostoyevsky, and Kafka. Lolita is characterized by irony and sarcasm. It is not an erotic novel".

The plot:

If you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last fifty or so years, you won’t have heard about Lolita. For those that have emerged, blinking and bearded into the literary light only now, here’s the plot.

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Read the rest of the comparison in the article later today on www.blog.theprose.com