I leaf again and again through these miserable memories, and keep asking myself, was it then, in the glitter of that remote summer, that the rift in my life began? Every day, people lose loved ones and every day people suffer for it, but not how I suffered. The sympathy with which I had looked upon baby animals, I now turned upon myself. When I try to analyze my own self-absorption, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past. I am convinced, however, that in a certain magic and fateful way, the death of Annabel led me to Charlotte, and then, of course, to Lolita.
I also know that the shock of Annabel's death consolidated the frustration of that nightmare summer, made of it a permanent obstacle to any further romance throughout the cold years of my youth. Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the same dreams. We compared notes. We found strange affinities. The same June of the same year (1919) a stray canary had fluttered into her house and mine, in two widely separated countries. Coincidence?
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One man's chapter-by-chapter quest to remove the pedophilia from Nabokov's Lolita.
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Welcome. Perhaps you’re here because you and I share a love for the wit and poetry found in Nabokov’s classic, Lolita. For a book fan, Lolita is a trove of voice, alliteration, character, plot, assonance, and mood. It’s chock-full of references and culture. But—and for the morally discriminating reader, there’s always that but—it’s the account of a child rapist, told with fluctuating, insufficient remorse. The narrator’s moral depravity left this reader unsatisfied and I doubt I am alone.
My solution: put on my editor hat go to work, creating an alternate edition of Nabokov’s masterwork, Lolita, Scrubbed. In this new (and I hope, improved) version, I seek to retain the lovable poetry of the book’s original text while excising the book’s amoral core. And while I make no claims to be a writer of Nabokov’s caliber, I plan to “re-see” troubling scenes as the author would, were he convinced of the novel’s problematic nature. I also plan, in an effort to make the book more “of our times,” to apply light cuts here and there in areas where I feel the language goes a little overboard.
I ask fans of the original text to not confuse my re-seeing as “censorship.” I do not wish to see Nabokov’s book banned or burned. I only wish to humbly present a new version, to be enjoyed and evaluated on its own merit. And lest you think I’m a total buzz-kill, there’s still a juicy murder plot at the heart of the story. Enjoy!
- Gerard Kibbey, June 2009
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