"To admit he pilfered from a true story would be, in Nabokov's mind, to take away from the power of his narrative," Weinman writes. Nabokov always denied that Sally's story influenced his novel, which he insisted was all art. It was first published abroad in 1955, and then in the United States in 1958 - when it became an immediate, incendiary commercial success. unforgotten child." After two attempts to burn the manuscript (intercepted by his wife Véra), Nabokov finished Lolita in 1953, three years after Sally's liberation and a year after her death, at 15, in a car accident. She smartly discusses how the novel's preoccupation with pedophilia and prepubescent girls was presaged in some of Nabokov's earlier work - including Laughter in the Dark, The Gift, and his shockingly graphic 1928 poem, "Lilith," about an older man's intercourse with an "enticing. Weinman interweaves the story of Sally's abduction and eventual rescue with Nabokov's writing of Lolita, which he had begun well before Sally's kidnapping and which had stymied him for years.
The next time Sally saw her family was 21 months later, in March 1950, shortly before her 13th birthday. Scared, Sally lied to her mother, who gave her the OK. He instructed Sally to tell her mother that he was the father of two school friends who had invited her on vacation. Months later, in June 1948, the man, whose current alias was Frank La Salle, intercepted Sally on her walk home from school and convinced her that the government insisted she go with him to Atlantic City. As she was leaving the store, a "hawk-faced man" in a fedora grabbed her arm, told her he was an FBI agent and threatened her with reform school.
Weinman is a thorough reporter who is most compelling when she tells it straight: Sally Horner, a fifth-grade honor student, stole a 5-cent notebook in her local Camden, N.J., Woolworths on a dare by a clique of girls she hoped to join. Her book makes for riveting reading, despite a disconcerting tendency to fill in blanks with conjectures (about young Sally's thoughts, for example) and to overplay cliffhangers at the end of each chapter. She does it not just for its own inherent interest but in order to build a convincing case that that crime served as an inspiration for Vladimir Nabokov's most famous novel, Lolita - a claim that he denied. Sarah Weinman, an editor and writer of true crime stories, doubles up on her literary sleuthing in The Real Lolita, investigating the 1948 kidnapping and rape of 11-year-old Sally Horner by a convicted pedophile. Your purchase helps support NPR programming.
Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Real Lolita Subtitle The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World Author Sarah Weinman
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