| Title | : | Los Diary |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0964374013 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780964374010 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 336 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1995 |
Los Diary Reviews
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As it very often happens, I came to this book through another one. When I first started
Due vite I thought I was handling a novel, but as I progressed, I realized Emmanuele Trevi had written a double elegy on his friends Pia Pera (1956-2016) and Rocco Carbone (1962-2008), both of whom had been writers. In his book, Trevi mentioned Pera’s
Diario di Lo and so I followed the literary trail.
Written in 1995, Pia Pera presents an alternative account of Nabokov’s Lolita. Hers is the diary of Dolores Schlegel (formerly Maze - not Haze), that she, who is well alive, brings to John Ray for publication. She wants her view of things to be known. The diary is written as a continuous narrative, divided in chapters, and with no Calendar headings. What creates the texture of a diary is Lo’s tone - very spontaneous and direct.
When the novel was going to be published in the Anglosaxon world, Vladimir Nabokov’s son, Dmitri, sued to stop the sale of the book. This was in 1998. Pera’s publishers (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux) held back until the legal matter was solved. Solved, in a way, it did, with a monetary settlement and with the agreement that Dmitri Nabokov would include a preface of his that could not be read by Pera until publication of her novel. But it seems that Preface never saw the light.
The Italian edition I have is from 2018, that is, a couple of years after Pia Pera’s death from multiple sclerosis, but it includes a postface titled “A moral critique of Lolita in the shape of a Nabokovian scherzo”. I don’t know the date of this postface but in it Pera makes a defense of rewritings of famous literary works presenting ten arguments, which I will not reproduce here. I will however select the one that seems most obvious of all, and which belongs to what the French call ‘l’imaginaire collectif”. To reuse Nabokov’s mythical Lolita can easily be ranked to the same category as earlier remakings – Euripides’s dramatizing the Trojan Women, Shakespeare using Bandello or Plutarch, Jean Rhys relying on Brontë, or Pat Barker modernizing the Trojan saga (Homer and Virgil). This edition is prefaced by Emmanuel Trevi.
Another aspect is to what extent do rewritings offer much interest. Trevi thinks that they do not; he considers it a major hinderance that the reader needs to know the original work, limiting its appeal. This criticism he elaborates In Due Vite and uses as an example of the absurdity of producing “derivative literature” precisely a book that had been recently published, and which I have read and
reviewed recently - Pat Barker’s
The Silence of the Girls – the retelling of the Trojan war from the point of view of Briseis.
Trevi, however, in the preface to Pera’s novel also makes a very strong defense. The end of Nabokov’s Lolita awakens in the reader the suspicion that Humbert’s account may not be reliable – that the whole story is humbug. Pia Pera’s novel then is a response to this very conjecture.
One further interesting parallel between Pia Pera and Vladimir Nabokov is that she was a translator of Russian literature. Her Onegin is supposed to be rendered in a strikingly beautiful Italian; and another of Nabokov’s major works is his translation into English of Pushkin poem. She worked on this in parallel to her Lolita Diary, struggling with the two very different styles of writing.
As for Lo’s diary itself. The most interesting thing for me, when reading the Humbert-Lolita pair as seen by the latter, was that it is not a vengeful and predictive and stereotypical feminist view. Pera’s Lo comes across as a very provocative adolescent who faces her life and the world of adults in a highly rebellious and refractory manner. Her sassy voice is often offensive and insolent. She comes across as a clever schemer for whom the reader will feel a mix of pity (what has happened to her soul?) and rejection. For me the one drawback was that Lo’s character and circumstances are so developed so intensely and along may be too many pages that at times so much impertinence became somewhat tedious. -
Fuck the haters and fuck the snobs. This was a more than valid take on Nabokov's Lolita from Lo's perspective. It is by turns gaudy, hilarious, embarrassing, pungent, wicked, inelegant, rambling, shambling and surprisingly thoughtful.
I put myself at a distinct disadvantage reviewing it now, though -- at least for the sake of making comparisons -- as I haven't read Nabokov's Lolita in many years and have just started reading Emily Prager's Roger Fishbite, the Lolita-from-Lolita's-perspective novel most often compared to Pera's attempt.
Pera committed a number of apparently unpardonable sins by writing this, the most oft-cited being that it lacks the stylistic, writerly skill exhibited by Nabokov, a criticism that makes me wonder what otherwise supposedly intelligent literary critics -- who should know better and exhibit a sense of perspective and humor -- were smoking. I suppose that every dinner they eat is catered by Sardi's as well.
Another sin Pera commits is that she depicts Lo as a willing, self-aware seductress with a sexual identity; and not as the simplistic idealized, infantilized baby that too many do-gooders delude themselves into thinking that 12-to-14-year-old humans are.
A further sin is that the much-vaunted, charming and certainly unreliable Humbert is made into far less than Nabokov's poetic tragic figure. Pera's and Lo's take on him is as a pathetic, pusillanimous boor; a grotesque aesthete sporting dentures and moles sprouting grey hairs. The only reason Lo seduces him is to gain revenge against the mother she so detests. It's this tense, alienating bond between Lo and her mother, and not necessarily the relationship between Humbert and Lo that marks Pera's primary interpersonal dynamic.
Once her initial seduction aims are achieved, though, the tables are turned and Lo becomes a virtual sex slave to the paranoid Humbert. Lo's desperate longings to escape this situation, as the two make their infamous year-long cross-country trip, make for sometimes heartrending reading.
This book when paired with Nabokov's original Lolita put me to mind of John Fowles' The Collector, the story of the abduction of a beautiful college student told from the perspective of both the abductor and the abductee. The first half of the book is the story as told entirely from the mentally unbalanced perspective of the obsessive butterfly collector who is making his first foray into kidnapping and imprisoning his vision of the ideal girl. Needless to say, his take on things is fairly unreliable. The second half of that book tells the story from the perspective of the captive, a far more reliable narrator, and yet one as oddly unsympathetic from the reader's perspective as the abductor's.
Pera turns Lolita on its head by making both characters unsympathetic, especially Humbert. During the course of the book, Lo evolves from a cruel girl lacking empathy (animal abuse runs in the family) to someone who seems to be gaining tolerance and perspective, while Humbert seems to devolve in the throes of his persnickety ways.
Lo's Diary is breathless trash, and should be enjoyed as such. The sex is not explicit (perhaps this fact also frustrated the critics). In fact, the book's most transgressive element is perhaps the depth of mother hatred that Lo exhibits. Her rantings and lashings and vicious fantasies directed at her pathetic mother are often wince-inducing and hilarious; and probably also contribute to the ire of readers and critics stuck on the notion of undying mother love.
You gotta love a book that devastates the Nabokov/Lolita sacred cow and drives the pompous literati apeshit, making Humbert half impotent and Lo the most calculating vixen.
The critics who say this doesn't read like a valid young teen's diary miss the point I think. Even if the voice and its sophistication of thought seem frequently above the level of what we'd expect from a 12- to- 14- year-old, the book's reconstruction of the sensibility of an angry adolescent is convincing.
Perhaps what some staunch Lolita defenders are also objecting to is that by telling the story from the other side, Pera has had to fill out some of the absurd conceits glossed over in Nabokov's original, the Hotel California-ish aspect of Clare Quility/Gerry Sue Filthy's surreal mansion, for instance. I never did like the Clare Quilty tangents in the original novel and by exploring them Pera possibly ends up showing why they don't really work in the original. In this version, Lo states up front that Humbert's version of the story of his rival for Lo's attention is overstated, which makes sense, given how unreliable a narrator Humbert was.
I have to admit, this book was a bit sluggish to start; Humbert doesn't enter the story until page 73. From there it picks up. If you can hang with this book -- messy and sometimes tedious though it may be -- and look at it with an open mind, you might appreciate its accomplishment. -
It’s a no from me.
check out my review here:
https://youtu.be/TEPIg5ApzLo -
the cool cover with the vellum overlay was the best thing about this book.
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Reads as though it were written in acid - who exactly is Pera giving voice to? Lolita? - the Lolita that cried all night every night? One of Humbert Humbert’s most telling slips. Surely not her. No this Lo is something out of the American Psycho generation.
Although Pera tells us this is a feminist version all I can say is Hmm -don’t think you’re doing the feminist’s any favors with this one. In fact you’re only further perpetrating the belief that girl-teens who are sexually active are complete sluts. Sorry to burst any bubbles but when young girls start to have sexual feelings - the feelings are complex it’s not just about mindless desire and only the ones with daddy complexes or some other neurosis or in a grown man’s dreams - chase after grown men - most girls want boys within their own age bracket. Anyone over 20 to Lo would’ve been, in the real world, a dinosaur. And yet Pera paints Lo as relentlessly out to nab Humbert as he is to nab her.
But that’s not the only flaw in this odd side-quel. Pera seems to have decided to write this without really analyzing any of Nabokov’s symbolic reasoning. The town of Ramsdale ( which sounds rapey ) is renamed Goatscreek?! The prose often stumbles and makes no sense - she likens the rain following her and Humbert like a ‘peeing puppy’ say what? This is only worth a peek if you want to read some colorful trash. It’s purple prose at it’s purplest.
And no matter what you feel about the original Lolita everyone can agree that Pera’s Lo is a repugnant heroine. Nabokov at least managed the impossible - to manipulate our sympathy in favor of the pedophile but Pera writes this as though having read Lolita buys into Humbert’s perception of her as an unredeemable brat, and creates a totally vile, and unsympathetic heroine. Like huh? What’s the point. Lolita is a sociopath way before Humbert gets his clutches on her and nothing really phases her. Though she waxes hate towards Humbert the reader thinks who cares, you hated just about everyone else before Humbert came, he seems like a small bump in a very rough road. -
Questo Diario, il punto di vista di Lolita, perde la forza che c’è nel romanzo dì Nabokov. Gli ultimi dieci capitoli mi hanno convinta ad assegnare tre stelle al posto di quattro.
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I would like to say something. This author is fucking disgusting(excuse my language). They intentionally paint Dolores as some sadistic and horny slut. They took Humbert's word way too far. Need I remind you that Humbert freaking kidnaped a 12 year old, attempted to drug her, molested her 3 times in a morning, told Dolores that her mother is dead after she told Humbert that he ought of been ashamed of him for molesting her, threatened her that if she ever told the police anything, she'd end up in foster care; took advantage of her while she's greiving to rape her, isolate her from society, made her have sex with him for money than secretly took her money, forbid her from having male friends, and injuring her in an argument.
If you think that anyone in their right mind would look at that and think, "Yep, she totally wanted sex lol", then not even the word bigot and have no empathy nor an understanding of this kind of abuse it does on a person if you willing believe that someone, and a fucking 12 year old at that, wanted that kind of thing.
The reality of this is that Dolores was traumatized. She's broken mentally. She's suffering internally. She didn't deserve any of this. She was just a kid. That's the harsh reality of victims of sexual abuse. Even if she were sexually explicit at an young age(chances are that she weren't), Humbert never had the right to do that to a child. This book disgust me because it's repeating the same message that almost everyone would give. "She knew what she was doing." "She wanted it." "She led him on." "It's her fault after all."
Rape is rape and trauma is trauma. -
No, no pienso leerlo otra vez y no me sorprende que esta tía no haya escrito nada más.
*Edito para añadir un par de cosas.
Casi no recuerdo esta novela, pero he leído algunas críticas, y me reafirmo en mi decisión de no revisarla, no creo que valga la pena. Por lo visto hay quién piensa que es una "respuesta feminista"; no creo, cuando se incide en la deliberación de la conducta supuestamente seductora de Lolita, que debería ser toda invención y atribución de Humbert Humbert a una niña de doce años cualquiera. Una vez más, es pretender que Lolita es una historia de amor entre iguales, cuando es la elaboradísima justificación de un abuso por parte de un pederasta.
Por otro lado, si se trata de leer la historia de una chica muy joven que esté realmente a cargo de su sexualidad, mejor leerse "El Amante" de Marguerite Duras, creo que ese es el exacto opuesto de Lolita, y no este libro. -
I HATED THIS BOOK SO MUCH!!! (that I couldn't stop reading it). But seriously, do not do this to yourself. The worst thing is that my memories of this horrible, trashy book have mingled in my mind with the real Lolita book, which used to be one of my favorite books. I almost never straight throw a book in the garbage, but that's where this book wound up.
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Il punto di vista di Lolita, che parli lei questa volta. Cosa emerge da questo suo diario? Solitudine e forza. Lolita è una ragazzina sveglia e precoce, provocante e attratta dagli uomini maturi, soprattutto ha un rapporto orribile con una madre orribile, la classica madre in competizione con una figlia che sta crescendo e potrebbe rubarle le attenzioni maschili, una donna che incarna la classica cultura America riassumibile in "villetta con giardino, elettrodomestici e marito". Lolita ha un sogno, vuole fare l'attrice. Vuole emanciparsi dalla madre e dalle disattenzioni degli adulti. Gli unici adulti che si interessano a lei sono gli uomini e lei cerca di usare questa debolezza per evadere, affrancarsi dalla madre, realizzare il suo sogno. Si ritroverà senza madre, alla mercé di un uomo che lei credeva di poter controllare, sfruttata sessualmente e prigioniera. Eppure non siamo di fronte ad una ragazzina che fa la vittima. Ci troviamo di fonte ad una dodicenne e poi tredicenne e poi quattordicenne che afferma di non essere mai stata vittima del patrigno, ma di aver fatto male i conti, perché una minorenne orfana non ha voce, la legge consente al marito vedovo di sua madre di occuparsi di lei. Lolita resiste, il suo atto rivoluzionario è non sprofondare, la sua ribellione vera è stare ad aspettare il momento giusto per trovare la forza di scappare. La sua vita è stata danneggiata, lei è sola. Ma il romanzo di Pia Pera, molto crudo e doloroso, ci racconta di una Lo che riesce a liberarsi dal giogo di Humbert, che sa che il tempo lavorerà per lei con l'annebbiamento dei ricordi, che dimenticherà e andrà avanti perché è riuscita finalmente a scappare e a trovare il posto dove poter ricominciare.
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2.5 Lo's Diary is Lolita (Delores Haze's) side of the events that Humbert Humbert told in Lolita. Once again, John Ray is presented with a manuscript this time from the hands of the famed nymphet herself.
She tells Mr. Ray that some of the details of Lolita were just over-romanticized lies thought up by Humbert, but then she sort of recants and decides that maybe Humbert was so deluded he really thought those things happened. So, we learn the "true" story of what happened starting with Lolita's diary a few months before Humbert Humbert entered the picture.
I really, really disliked Humbert Humbert while reading Lolita, and I don't think I was supposed to like him. This book was quite a jewel since Lolita's assessment of Humbert coincides with they way I felt he really was in Lolita, a bumbling fool.
This wasn't written in the same style as Nabokov's Lolita. This is quite a bit more down-to-earth. You don't have to go through pages and pages of description about one minute detail. Lo just tells it like it is. Sometimes, Lolita seems a little too mature for her age, and sometimes she seems a little childish, just as she's presented in Lolita, though. I thought it was an amusing read. -
It starts with a foreword, which like Lolita is "written" by John Ray. He relates how Lo came to him with the diary and when she gave it to him, she said it was "definitely less literary" than Lolita. Beware the book that can't get through the foreword without apologizing.
Then there's the renaming. Ramsdale. A lovely name, denotes force. In Pera's world it becomes the not at all poetic Goatscreek. Pardon? Miss D. Haze becomes Miss D. Maze. Clare Quilty suffers the worst as he is transformed into--wait for it--Gerry Sue Filthy. It's like Lolita via Alfred E. Neuman.
The characterization is ridiculous and sad. Pera wants to believe that little Lo is smart enough to use words like lugubrious in regular conversation but too dumb to figure out that Professor Guibert is using the most basic manipulation to hamstring her. I've heard tell that LD is supposed to be a feminist response [to Lolita] and I hope that was a mistaken claim. The Lo of this book is a racist who in one unfortunately memorable scene tortures her pet hamster. Let's not even get into what she does to Humbert with a fountain pen. -
I went in after two other Lolita rewritings so I was ready for anything. I was especially ready to hear Lo's voice.
But that's a hard no for me. For several reasons.
The narration, first. The original Lolita can be a hard read but it's fragmented enough so the style isn't too heavy. This one isn't, shorter chapters would have been welcome. As well as much more concise beginning. Seriously, you don't need sixty pages to grasp the "Maze family" before the actual action kicks in. Something anyone around me heard whilst I was reading it was "Uurgh, it drags on so much!" There are some nicely paced parts but I couldn't wait to get through many.
This book is a trainwreck. And although I should have expected it, I thoughtlessly didn't, mea culpa. But here's a little spoilery pot-pourri of things that drove me insane:
Tl;dr: I'm fed up and a bit angry and feel like I've been played because of the odd impression that it was the exact goal. Still a big no. -
Una Lolita diversa, un’adolescente che si scontra con il mondo adulto.
La forma diaristica non è il mio genere preferito e sinceramente, pur amando i libri di Pia Pera, questa Lolita non mi ha entusiasmata -
Proprio come Lolita, è stupenda la prima parte, mentre la seconda gira a vuoto.
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Even if you loved Lolita, this book is still not worth it. There are certain stories that should be left as they are. The characters in Lolita were all unlikable in the first place, but to set up another book around the same unlikable characters, spend hundreds of pages making weak excuses for their behavior, only succeeds in making the reader more disgusted by them.
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This book was seriously good. I do not understand the low rating it has on here. Maybe I need to read more books with low Goodreads ratings, so I can discover more gems. I thought this was hilarious in some places, and brilliant in others. It had a few dull moments and started slow, but it's one of the most unique and creative stories I've read in a long time. I loved it.
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Awful.
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Pessimo.
Cosa l'ho letto a fare?
Brutto di per sé, dal confronto con l'originale ne esce a pezzi. -
A truly disappointing account of Lolita. As a story separate from Lolita, it's not bad at all, but because this is based off of Lolita, this story is just wrong.
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A unique experience that of course gains a lot from having read the other one first, but I dare say it would intrigue you even if you hadn't.
I'm usually not a fan of present tense prose but either Pera or her translator or both managed to give a sort of casual remarks style to the narrator voice that the present tense becomes quite swallowable.
A deeply sensuous and physical journey into the mind of a pre-teen girl that maintains a soupcon of the lyricism and verbosity of Nabokov's novel while still heavily evoking the thoughts of a child, albeit a cartoonish one. In fact, it's easy to imagine this being adapted into an animation Lizzie McGuire style.
Dolores Maze is not quite the sultry semi-adult of Humbert's imagination who deep down is just another scared little girl but on the contrary, a volatile, bitter creature experiencing the chagrin of patriarchy, curiously enough, from her own mother. It would have been tediously easy to call out Humbert as some kind of predator and deconstruct Lo's alleged seduction of him as total fantasy but admirably and even bravely, Lola is far from the virginal victim of perverse desire, but a fetishist and a connoisseur of the physical world, her problems with Humbert being not quite what you would expect, and she explores her sexuality here and there. It does get quite raunchy.
If the novel has a flaw, then it is the same one as Nabokov's novel in which the third quarter of the book feels more like an anthology of observations as the plot stops dead. Indeed, this is the point I suppose we, just like our girl, feel suffocated by our lives being on hold also ironically enough, while we are finally travelling and seeing this Great Nation. Well, hers, I'm from Britain but you know what I mean.
Very negative in its outlook but enchanting in the details it includes, this actually works not only as professional fanfiction but in being the unexpected 2nd part in the world's most challenging duology. -
I actually really liked this book when I read it about ten years ago. It’s not in the style of Lolita because it’s from a teenagers POV, but I liked the style and found some of it fairly relatable. Lo doesn’t really have a voice in the original book so this was very much up to interpretation, but I feel like she made sense.
She isn’t a perfect victim: she’s a bit of a sadist, she is precocious and she tries to seduce Humbert because of some dodgy book she read, but she’s also a naive kid who finds herself trapped in a really bad situation. It also shows Humbert as a sleepy, weak character who loses interest in her as she ages and yet won’t let her go. I’m sure there is a lot wrong with the book and I haven’t read it in a while so I’m not sure how it stands up for today’s society, but I remember enjoying the book and would recommend people read it before dismissing it. -
I hated everyone in the book, and not in a good way. It might have been better if I remembered the story of Lolita.
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This book is bad. Like it was written in a land without stars bad.
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FROM BOOK:
Due vite (Emanuele Trevi) -
Skarba 13 gadīgas meitenes atzīšanās, bet, kā jau zināms, cietējs bieži vien pierod pie šķietami nepieņemamām situācijām un uztver tās kā normālas.
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I liked the story, but it was a little too long for me. Rough language and nasty scenes that whoever may not be a fan of. Many dead ends. Overall liked the ending.
