The Enchanter (1986)

The story that eventually led to Nabokov's classic tale about one Dolores Haze aka Lolita. Perverse, passionate, funny, and extremely well-written-- not to mention some of the most crude things said in the most delicate language-- it has all the markings of a Nabokov. ( )

O famoso precursor de Lolita, esquecido por Nabokov durante anos. Dizem que quando o autor o reencontrou, surpreendeu-se com a semelhança entre as duas histórias, embora apenas superficial. ( )

The Enchanter can only be described as a precursor to Lolita. Simply put, it is the story of a middle-aged man, who lusts after a young girl (who fits Lo's description with her nimble legs and chestnut brown hair). Her manages to seduce the mother, who dies rather suddenly and unexpectedly, takes the girl out of town with him, on a vacation. In her sleep he tries to touch her-and then she runs away screaming.

Sudden, blatant ending? Don't be surprised. This book lacks all the charm, wit and grace that Humbert Humbert presents to us in Lolita. Furthermore, the man, mother and girl's names are never revealed, nor is his profession, nor really anything else, apart from physical descriptions.

That is not to say that this is by any means a "bad book"; it is rather short and an easy read. It is just not Lolita, as we are so used to.

Having said that, fans of Nabokov and Lolita should not miss. It allows us to see how a great novel was built, and it is fun to notice the similarities between the two. ( )

A taste of "Lolita." ( )

Dmitri Nabokov's post-novella essay states that "Lolita is unquestionably the product of very new and different artistic stimuli" than The Enchanter, but the comparisons are hard to shrug off so simply when the work bills itself as the "Ur-Lolita."

To compare this work to Lolita is unfair: one would assume that the latter work wouldn't have been written if Nabokov felt he'd explored certain themes through pedophilia adequately here. What succeeds in this work is its subtlety: it feels like a straightforward story of obsession and the inability to harness one's desires, no matter how disturbing they may be, but can be read as so much more, with layers of imagery -- much of which is elucidated passably by VN's son in the aforementioned postscript.

That very essay, though, is one of the problems with The Enchanter. It feels more like a defense than a celebration, an explanation than an exploration, and fails to hit the mark as anything more than a long-winded recapitulation of, "This isn't the pre-Lolita, so stop calling it the pre-Lolita."

The text itself suffers from a similar woodenness, though, as the characters are multifaceted but predictable, the prose occasionally feeling uninspired. It's easy to see why Nabokov may have been compelled to write Lolita at a later time, and it's the brilliance of that second effort and our inability to extricate it from this predecessor that reveal The Enchanter's weaknesses.