Word: pera
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...brilliant book, a wonderland of language and longing, with an undiminished capacity to enthrall, outrage and provoke litigation. Nabokov had to fight many obscenity battles when the book was published. Now a derivative novel, Lo's Diary (Foxrock; 292 pages; $22.95), by the Italian essayist and translator Pia Pera, has been issued--after the settling of a lawsuit brought by Nabokov's son Dimitri. He insisted that he be allowed to write a preface to the book and that 5% of its profits go to the International Pen Club. Deal...
...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...