Nabokov and the Movies

From The New Yorker:

The axiom that great novels make bad movie adaptations has not been entirely true for Vladimir Nabokov, whose books depend to a surprising degree on plot-heavy narratives (not to say cravenly pulpy story lines) that lend themselves well to the screen. Take “Lolita,” with its tale of the Humbert Humbert, who marries the mother of the twelve-year-old girl he covets and plots his new wife’s murder, only to see her die accidentally under the wheels of a car minutes after she discovers his secret diary of pedophilic lust, whereupon he embarks on a cross-country road trip with his orphaned stepdaughter, all of it culminating in an extended murder scene when Humbert tracks a shadowy pursuer who stole the girl away from him. Stanley Kubrick’s masterful 1962 movie version, starring James Mason as Humbert, compressed all of this into two hours, and also captured the novel’s tone of suave irony—which makes “Lolita” as much a satiric indictment of mid-twentieth-century American mores as it is a study of a pervert...