Sixty years after the American publication of Vladimir Nabokov's literary tour de force “Lolita,” two new books take up the kidnapping of an 11-year-old New Jersey girl by a pedophile, the case on which Nabokov partially based his novel. Both Sarah Weinman's nonfiction account, “The Real Lolita,” and T. Greenwood's novel, “Rust and Stardust,” reflect changes in our understanding of pedophilia and sexual abuse as a disorder of power rather than as a side effect of uncontrollable lust; more important, in the light of the #MeToo movement, we have come to value the witness of abused little girls.
When Nabokov's sensational, now classic, novel was first published in Europe in 1955, it was banned. As a result, it was turned down by a number of publishers in the United States. Until it was finally published here, in 1958, Americans smuggled it home as once they had “Ulysses” or “Fanny Hill.” Told in the first person by the child molester Humbert Humbert, “Lolita” describes his affair with the 12-year-old “nymphet” he kidnapped and held for nearly two years. Humbert's account was written from prison, where he died while awaiting trial for the murder of a rival. Lolita, we are told, eventually married and died in childbirth — Nabokov's way of finessing the problem of imagining a future for the violated child and her abuser.
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