I fell in love with Lolita because of the way Nabokov uses language (This later developed into a full-blown fixation on multilingual authors and a particular use of English described as ‘native and foreign both’.) and also because obsession interests me greatly. When, many years later, the novel was included on a reading list for a creative writing master’s I was studying, I was genuinely surprised at people’s shock. Not that I didn’t notice the abuse, just that, to me, it wasn’t what most struck me about the novel. ‘The Enchanter’ preceded Lolita and they share the same brilliant, twisted premise: marry the ailing widowed mother of a young girl in order to later become her sole guardian. But what initially really fascinated me about this story, was how it came about. In Author’s Note One of ‘The Enchanter’, Nabokov writes: “As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage.” That this was where the idea for ‘The Enchanter’ and Lolita began, both makes a lot of sense and no sense, which is how the writing process feels a lot of the time, and also how the best ideas are born.
Included in A Russian Beauty and Other Stories, Penguin, 1975
A Personal Anthology 