The Enchanter - (Vintage International) by Vladimir Nabokov (Paperback)

About the Book

In paperback for the first time, The Enchanter is the precursor to Vladimir Nabokov's most famous novel, Lolita. At once hilarious and chilling, it is the story of a middle-aged man's fatal obsession with certain pubescent girls. "A heady combination of passion, humor, and beauty . . . suspenseful, funny, and shocking".--The New York Times Book Review.

Book Synopsis

The precursor to Nabokov's classic novel, Lolita. - A middle-aged man weds an unattractive widow in order to indulge his obsession with her daughter. - "A gem to be appreciated by any admirer of the most graceful and provocative literary craftsman." --Chicago Tribune

The unnamed protagonist of the story is, outwardly, a respectable and comfortable man; inside, he churns at the pubescent femininity of certain girls. Rare girls - one in a thousand - whose coltish grace and subconscious flirtatiousness betray, to his obsessed mind, a very special bud on the moist verge of its bloom.

Sitting on a park bench one day, he is tantalized by the fleeting form of just such a girl roller-skating on a gravel path. His desire to be near this beauty burns in him and drives him to begin a courtship of the child's pitiful mother - a course that can end only in the disintegration of his life.

Over the years, the idea of The Enchanter grew; it changed; it developed "claws and wings." By 1953 it was ready to furnish the basic theme of Lolita.

"The Enchanter is entertaining independent of its Lolita connection. It is arch, delicious and beautifully written." --Publishers Weekly

Review Quotes

"Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically." -- John Updike

"Masterly ... brilliant." --V. S. Pritchett, The New York Review of Books

"A gem to be appreciated by any admirer of the most graceful and provocative literary craftsman." --Chicago Tribune

"One of the best books of the year ... [The Enchanter] displays the supple clarity of a master." --The Boston Globe

"Enchanting ... sleekly wrought." --Newsweek

About the Author

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 23, 1899, in St. Petersburg, Russia. The Nabokovs were known for their high culture and commitment to public service, and the elder Nabokov was an outspoken opponent of antisemitism and one of the leaders of the opposition party, the Kadets. In 1919, following the Bolshevik revolution, he took his family into exile. Four years later he was shot and killed at a political rally in Berlin while trying to shield the speaker from right-wing assassins.

The Nabokov household was trilingual, and as a child Nabokov was already reading Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, alongside the popular entertainments of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Jules Verne. As a young man, he studied Slavic and romance languages at Trinity College, Cambridge, taking his honors degree in 1922. For the next eighteen years he lived in Berlin and Paris, writing prolifically in Russian under the pseudonym Sirin and supporting himself through translations, lessons in English and tennis, and by composing the first crossword puzzles in Russian. In 1925 he married Vera Slonim, with whom he had one child, a son, Dmitri.

Having already fled Russia and Germany, Nabokov became a refugee once more in 1940, when he was forced to leave France for the United States. There he taught at Wellesley, Harvard, and Cornell. He also gave up writing in Russian and began composing fiction in English. In his afterword to Lolita he claimed: "My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses--the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions--which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way." [p. 317] Yet Nabokov's American period saw the creation of what are arguably his greatest works, Bend Sinister (1947), Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), and Pale Fire (1962), as well as the translation of his earlier Russian novels into English. He also undertook English translations of works by Lermontov and Pushkin and wrote several books of criticism. Vladimir Nabokov died in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1977.