The Enchanter By Vladimir Nabokov, Picador, $100 When Vladimir Nabokov felt his 'first little throb' of fascination with paedophilia in 1939, this short work was the result. As an experiment for his masterpiece, Lolita, published nearly 20 years later, The Enchanter is an explosive nugget, far from the 'dead scrap' that Nabokov thought he had long destroyed and recalled in a letter to his publisher in 1959 after stumbling upon it among his things.
But Nabokov never sent the manuscript, despite the publisher's strong interest, and the book did not find its way into print for several more years. This fine translation from the original Russian is the work of his son, Dimitri, who scrupulously sought his father's inimitable style. Nabokov himself switched to English for later works, including Lolita, after emigrating to the United States.
The reissue by Picador no doubt coincides with the fresh surge of interest in Nabokov's work, following the 1997 remake of Lolita the movie, starring Jeremy Irons and Melanie Griffith. Testament to the enduring power of this disturbing tale of a middle-aged man obsessed by a pre-pubescent girl, the movie failed to find a distributor in the US on release, falling foul of the child pornography censors. But it came briefly to the big screen in Hong Kong in December, and was shown in cinemas across Europe.
The Enchanter is no less disturbing. In fact, in this condensed form it packs a punch lacking in its successor. Familiarity with Lolita is not essential to enjoying this novella, but it does lend another dimension. As Nabokov recalls in an author's note to his best-known work, The Enchanter is the essence of Lolita in many ways. Many elements remained the same in the later work: the nymphet was really 'much the same lass' as was the basic 'marrying-her-mother idea'.
Our anti-hero is an elegant gentleman: a balding, thin-lipped loner who carries a cane.
Once smitten by his 'nymphet', he is a martyr to his obsession. His first victim is really the young girl's mother, a woman sick with bowel problems, with 'a hairless wart near a nostril of her bulbous nose'. He cannot bring himself to describe her as his wife, calling her 'that person' and his 'monstrous bride'. She is only a means to an end. On his wedding night he dreads her 'ponderous pelvis and the rancid emanations of her wilted skin'. His happiest moments on the wedding day are when the 12-year-old girl plants two chaste kisses on his cheek.