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LAUGHTER IN THE DARK (292 pp.)-Vladimir Nabokov - New Directions...
This book, first published in 1938, is one of Vladimir Nabokov's prehumous works. Like The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Invitation to a Beheading, it was buried under critical neglect and popular apathy when it appeared, is now gaining a second life through the continuing Lolita boom. But Laughter in the Dark only superficially resembles Lolita; it is closer to the Heinrich Mann novel that became The Blue Angel, the famed Marlene Dietrich film of the same general setting and period. At its loftiest, Nabokov's theme is the degradation, by lust, of dignity and intellect...
...other distinctions: last year she won the "Smile of the Year" contest staged by the Los Angeles dental societies, and at East Hollywood's King Junior High School she played the cello. Her principal finds her "not bizarre," but if she is to play the role as Nabokov put it in the novel, she will have to be a "mixture ... of tender dreamy childishness and a kind of eerie vulgarity...
Although he knows less about moviemaking than the average scriptwriter knows about lepidoptery (one of Nabokov's scholarly specialties), the novelist himself wrote the movie adaptation. He had at first refused, but reconsidered after dreaming one night, while traveling in Italy, that he was reading the screenplay. Says he: "Almost immediately after this illumination, Mr. Kubrick called me again, and I agreed." He is pleased with his own job: "The screenplay became poetry, which was my original purpose...
Inevitably, while working there, the ever-observant Nabokov kept a roving eye on Hollywood, a dreamland for which Lolita herself used to yearn. The movie colony may be hard put to know what to make of his conclusion: "It is quietest, sweetest, softest place in the world...