Lolita
Review by Jackie Wullschlager
Published: July 13 2007 09:07 | Last updated: July 13 2007 09:07
Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov
Cover by Balthus
Penguin 1995
Through
my twenties, I treasured Lolita in the classic Penguin edition, with
its famous cover shot from Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 movie showing
lollipop-licking Sue Lyons as teen sexpot, her heart-shaped scarlet
sunglasses matching her lipstick. But I reread what the tagline called
“the greatest novel of rapture in modern fiction” so often that the
paperback fell apart, so when Penguin updated the edition in 1995, I
bought the new version. That ditched pop-art insouciance in favour of a
fin-de-siecle, awkward, nervy vulnerability with a cover image of
daring, poignant appropriateness: Balthus’ 1938 “Girl and Cat”.
Balthus made a career depicting clumsy pre-pubescent girls, including the violent and disturbing “The Guitar Lesson”, which showed a teacher abusing a pupil and had scandalised Paris in 1934. When he painted “Girl and Cat”, both he and Nabokov, who was experimenting with The Enchanter, a novella he regarded as the “germ” of Lolita, were living in Paris. Both came from east European/Russian aristocratic families, and both were creating works that expressed the edgy, ill at ease, amoral milieu of the late 1930s. This is, of course, the corrupting old Europe which Humbert represents as he rapes his way across young America.
Balthus’ gauche charming subject, reclining on a chair with one foot raised to reveal her knickers, taunts the viewer with exactly the mix of innocence, casualness and provocation with which Lolita torments Humbert Humbert. Warm light flows over the child’s legs and thighs, making them the centre of the painting; just beneath her is the pussy-cat - we can’t miss the titillating symbolism, though the book design allows us to see only the animal’s sharp ears and claws. But it is enough: as the girl gazes beyond us, half-aware that we are watching her, we are implicated and pulled into the most intoxicatingly erotic yet high-moral novel of the 20th century.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
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