Lolita (review)

Reviews 243 Lolita. Read by Jeremy Irons. Random House Audio Publishing . 8 Cassettes/11.5 hours. $39.95. Review by Zoran Kuzmanovich. While remembering his and Lolita's picking up the mail at the Wace Post Office, Humbert Humbert also remembers the faces pictured on "Wanted" posters and suddenly breaks into his narrative with instructions to the future filmmakers who would film his confessions: "If you want to make a movie out of my book, have one of these faces gently melt into my own, while I look" (222). Although Humbert doesn't tell the reader whether it's Handsome Bryan Bryanski or the dangerous Sullen Sullivan whose face is to merge with his, Humbert's indulgence in this moment of Baudelairan correspondence,1 when the future gazes familiarly at the present, is one of the nerve points carrying Lolita's pulses to the reader. Without such nerve points, Lolita may just as well be merely another book about child abuse and as such beyond saving by any advice Humbert may give the filmmaker. It is unfortunate that Humbert did not leave any instructions to those who would render his memoirs as an audio book, for the makers of the Random House AudioBooks version of Lolita would have surely profited from them. Without such instructions, the choice of Jeremy Irons as the reader of Lolita is both a stroke of genius and a blunder. Cashing in on the delayed release in the United States of Adrian Lyne's filmed version of Lolita, in its promotional materials Random House pitches this almost twelve-hour long reading as "die first glimpse a U.S. audience will have of Irons's portrayal of Humbert ." While it may indeed prove instructive to see how the Schiff/Lyne version of Lolita may have influenced Irons's inter1 . "Man passes through forests of symbols/Which gaze back at him with a knowing stare" ["L'homme y passe à travers des forets de symboles/Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers"]. 244 Nabokov Studies pretation of Humbert, the audio book is a discrete performance and ought to be judged as one. As the voice of Humbert's tortured apostrophe to Lolita, Irons is indeed up to rendering Humbert's growing ruin and doing justice to the rich pliability of Nabokov's textured language . Irons never lets the listener forget how nanow for Humbert is the passageway from tenor into the magic of possibility, how sudden the return, how swiftly his gloating can turn into self-loatiiing. More importantly, through Irons's performance of both Humbert's sickening cruelty and his disarming knowingness that is almost impervious to irony, listeners famUiar with Nabokov's writing can discern the busy bustle of Nabokov's garnering of those objects that wül shine preternaturally in the more rueful eyes of the future. Even before Irons has to mime Humbert's perverted passion as having been all spent, Irons manages to infuse his voice with the same kind of eerie prophetic authority Nabokov confened upon Humbert. From cigarette ads to sanitary napkins, each detail Humbert describes stares back, waiting for its wistful cue to combine with all the other seemingly offhand details and give voice to those events which will have been Humbert and Lolita's lives. And that waiting for the proper cue forms the nerve network of the novel, a waiting that seems to call for a voice like Irons's to fül it with the right kind of expectation, to make of nothing a something . Unlike the eyes, our ears require physical activity to function. There is no auditory equivalent of the persistence of vision: when the sound waves cease arriving, equilibrium is lost. And so it is with Irons's voice. When it ceases, its ceasing has a more terminal finality, a more resonant ephemerality for Humbert than does, say, die closing of the book. And for Humbert 's portion of this book, the portion that busies itself with the observing and recording the impermanent, with the extinguishing of childhoods and choices, and the death of dreams, and then just with death, for all that disappearing, the human ear, more than the eye, is a far better...