Word: loing
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INJURED. DARREN ("Droz") DROZDOV, 30, professional wrestler known for his ubiquitous body decoration; with a neck fracture sustained during a match with rival D'Lo Brown; in Uniondale, N.Y. He is paralyzed below the waist...
...course, this too is fiction: a tribute to and ripoff of Nabokov. Pera gives Lo a younger brother, who died in a freak accident (tornado, live wire), and a lingering devotion to her dead dad, for whom Humbert is a sexier surrogate. Lo records scenes of innocent sapphic frolics, moviegoing (It's a Wonderful Life is about "how everything turns out right because the father didn't die after all") and quarrels with her bossy, desperate...
...concern for a child's innocence, Pera might have underlined the corruptive nature of a man's lust for a girl on the cusp of pubescence. Instead, her Lo is the aggressor, the seducer and, eventually, the dismisser. "I'm going to get this Humbert for myself," she tells her diary. She instructs him in the finer points of sex play. And when "Hummie-Dummie" devolves into a nagging "Mama Humbert," she leaves with Filthy--after giving the drugged Hum a goodbye sodomizing with the pen he'd used for his own diary...
There are only two reasons for such a book: gossip and style. Lo's Diary fails both ways. It would be nice to read of Lo's nasty times with Filthy, but per Pera, the pair never had sex, and he didn't force her to make stag films, as Humbert had said. The real problem, though, is in the narrative voice. In Lolita, Humbert, an educated European, could wax satyric in language as elaborate as any poet's or pedant's. Lo, 11 when the tale begins, and no scholar, must be limited in word power and storytelling skills...
Without question, Lo's Diary should be published. But it needn't be read. This slip of a thing never emerges from the shadows that tower over it: those of Humbert--that predatory wretch condemned to sing so beautifully of his sin--and his grand, glowering creator. It will have utility only if it leads readers back to the immortal original. Choir, please turn to page 9 of The Annotated Lolita. All together now: "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul...