The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World
Sarah Weinman
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World
Sarah Weinman
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Weinman succeeds at her most important task, which is to make sure we’ll never think about Lolita or Lolita again without sparing a thought for Sally Horner.
By combing through court documents and newspaper accounts and interviewing surviving friends and family members, Weinman has evocatively reconstructed Sally’s nightmare, as well as the sexual mores of mid-20th-century America.
The sections detailing Sally’s abduction read as standard-issue, ripped-from-the-headlines Dead Girl fare.
The Real Lolita makes up for the Horner-shaped lacuna in its center by a deft and thorough depiction of the mid-century suburban context of both Horner’s abduction and Nabokov’s novel. It was an atmosphere of pervasive victim-blaming, even when the victim was a child.
Weaving together chapters that juxtapose Sally’s experiences with Nabokov’s writing of his masterpiece, Weinman exposes his ambivalence about plumbing real-life stories for his novels and the extent to which he relied on, but largely obfuscated, such stories in the crafting of his fiction. The similarities that Weinman reveals between Sally Horner and Dolores Haze are striking.
Weinman points out the many parallels between the novel and Sally’s life (so cruelly shortened after her rescue—she was just 15 when she died), while chronicling Nabokov’s own cross-country journeys, writing habits, and denial of the Horner connection. Weinman’s sensitive insights into Horner’s struggle play in stunning counterpoint to her illuminations of Nabokov’s dark obsession and literary daring, and Lolita’s explosive impact..
By the end of The Real Lolita, I could not help feeling tenderness for [Sally] Horner. Weinman has presented a compelling outline of a life—touching in its pain, resilience, and surprising banality, and animated by the author’s impressive ability to tell a good story even when the material is slim—but she hasn’t managed to fill it in. The questions of victimhood gnaw at us long after the 'real' story has been told. What is it like to suffer? What is it like to survive? How does a little girl cope with the absurdity of life, and with her own unarticulated pain? How does she wrest back control? Ironically, if we want to hear a victim’s voice, we have to return to the fictional Lolita.
Weinman sets out to correct this erasure and honor Sally Horner...It’s a noble goal, yet Sally remains the cipher at the book’s center, most alive in the photos that show a smiling child and, even more poignant, the young teenager who never had the chance to grow into a woman. Too many questions remain unanswered and maybe unanswerable.
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. Weinman is a thorough reporter who is most compelling when she tells it straight.
In this case, the subtitle promises more than the book can deliver.
She makes a convincing case, though the writer’s real achievement is in evocatively relating the story of a girl who — like her fictional counterpart — was no temptress, as the word 'Lolita' has come to mean, but the victim of a sexual predator. The author has brilliantly filled out her subject’s ghost. B+.
Sarah Weinman is a crime writer who has seriously researched the Nabokov connection. Her book provides extensive background for the Horner story.
Weinman makes it clear, however, that her book is not intended as an attack on Nabokov or his work. Weinman’s greatest gripe with Nabokov was that he refused to acknowledge that Sally’s terrible story in any way influenced a literary masterpiece, despite the obvious evidence that it did.
... [Nabokov] denied that Lolita was inspired by the case. But Sarah Weinman’s exhaustive research reveals many parallels.
This is an odd hybrid of a book. It’s half true crime story and half literary criticism and, overall, an honest attempt to unearth the origins of the iconic novel Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, now celebrating its 60th year since publication.
The book includes a few odd digressions and a fair amount of conjecture. More poignantly, Weinman argues that Nabokov and his wife, Véra—who served as her husband’s spokesperson and flatly denied the use of Sally’s story as inspiration for his novel—allowed Sally to be eclipsed by her fictional counterpart.
A tantalizing, entertaining true-life detective and literary story whose roots were hidden deep in a novel that has perplexed and challenged readers for decades..
... an admirable, if at times unsuccessful, mission. While Weinman’s refusal to read Lolita on Nabokov’s terms is refreshing, her book can also feel hostile to the very nature of literary fiction—which is always attempting to draw both from the world and beyond it—and uninterested in the political capacities of stories that aren’t true.