Name: The Enchanter
ISBN: 9780679728863

Vladimir V. Nabokov

Paints a portrait of a seemingly respectable man whose desire for a twelve-year-old girl becomes an obsession that can only end in the splintering of his life.

The Enchanter

Vladimir Nabokov

Nabokov described this novella, written in Paris in 1939 but only published twenty years later, as 'the first little throb of Lolita'. The plot is similar: a middle-aged man wedding an unattractive widow in order to indulge his paedophilic obsession with her daughter. However, The Enchanter has an utterly different atmosphere, as time, place and even names remain a mystery. Nabokov transforms his protagonist's attempts to lull his twelve-year-old step-daughter into a state of 'enchantment' into a graceful, chilling fairytale.