If I could turn back time

I’d be in... Venice in 1962 

And catch a glimpse of Sue Lyon sunning herself on a gondola, all grown up after having caught world attention for playing Lolita in the movie adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial 1955 novel of the same title. 

Despite Lyon’s engaging portrayal and James Mason’s sterling performance as the antihero Humbert Humbert, the film adaptation, whose screenplay Nabokov himself tried to write, cannot hold a candle to Lolita, the novel crafted in Nabokov’s masterful prose styling, replete with layers upon layers of meaning in his choice of words, particularly of the proper nouns. 

Reactions were mixed, but no one can deny the film is the novel’s less interesting twin. 

Here’s a sample, the very first three sentences of Lolita in words, not in moving pictures: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth.” 

‘Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth.’

Oh, but the women of today would have scoffed at the material as cold and soulless and plain misogynistic and the more activist of them, the woke as a demon after eternal sleep, would have thrown Sue Lyon off the gondola, along with the gondolier attempting a high C from the chest with an opera piece from Lucia di Lammermoor, for betraying her own sex.

Ah, but Venice on a gondola, with the gondolier singing Puccini, is always a good idea, if only it weren’t such a tourist trap. —AA Patawaran