Watching Lolita (directed by Adrian Lyne, 1997)

In the 1950s and 1960s Lolita became a word synonymous with a sexually precocious pre-adolescent girl, for Lolita made Lolita more famous than her creator, the author, Vladimir Nabokov. The book was first published in 1955 though not until 1959 in this country, and in 1958 was made into a film. A second version made in the more knowing culture of the late 1990s went on general release, and is a careful though disappointing interpretation.

The story is as much a matter of kidnap, sexual abuse and coercion as the absorbing passion of a lost enamoured soul, although the story appears to belong to Humbert Humbert, a paedophile and poet obsessed with ‘nymphets’. He travels from Europe to America and develops a terrible passion for the young daughter of his landlady. Circumstances lead him to the position of stepfather, widower and then sole guardian of the girl, and they travel back and forth across America staying together in motel rooms. After two years Lolita escapes from him with another paedophile and pornographer called Quilty -Humbert's ‘guilty’ doppelganger or alter ego. Three years pass before Humbert finds Lolita, now pregnant and married to a poor young man. Humbert murders the paedophile/ pornographer who took her from him, and writes the story from his prison cell. At the end of the film we are told that both died, Humbert in his cell and Lolita in childbirth.

The effect of watching the film was unsettling, much more so than reading the book; therefore following the contemporary injunction ‘Only deconstruct’, I would like to disentangle my after-thoughts. This then is hardly a film review, but that may be in keeping with Nabokov's book, the second title of which, The Confession of a White Widowed Male, is a parody both of a psychiatric or psychoanalytic case study and of a titillating confessional novel, raising the expectations of the reader who hopes the book will provide the pleasures of pornography. Inevitably the book's reputation among non-readers is of