PUBLISHER: Ecco, 9/11/2018GENRE: Nonfiction/True Crime
AUTHOR SITE: link
PURCHASE: link
MY GRADE: A
FROM PUBLISHER: A gripping true-crime investigation of the 1948 abduction of Sally Horner and how it inspired Vladimir Nabokov’s classic novel, Lolita.
Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is one of the most beloved and notorious novels of all time. And yet very few of its readers know that the subject of the novel was inspired by a real-life case: the 1948 abduction of eleven-year-old Sally Horner.
Weaving together suspenseful crime narrative, cultural and social history, and literary investigation, The Real Lolita tells Sally Horner’s full story for the very first time. Drawing upon extensive investigations, legal documents, public records, and interviews with remaining relatives, Sarah Weinman uncovers how much Nabokov knew of the Sally Horner case and the efforts he took to disguise that knowledge during the process of writing and publishing Lolita.
Sally Horner’s story echoes the stories of countless girls and women who never had the chance to speak for themselves. By diving deeper in the publication history of Lolita and restoring Sally to her rightful place in the lore of the novel’s creation, The Real Lolita casts a new light on the dark inspiration for a modern classic.
MY THOUGHTS: This is a well researched account of a lesser-known child kidnapping case from New Jersey in 1948. The author shows the similarities between the novel Lolita and this case. Vladimir had been working on his novel for many years (10?), well before Sally's abduction by fifty-year-old Frank La Salle, and only finished it after Sally's case came to light. He denied her case having anything to do with his novel despite the abundance of similarities. After the novel came out, a writer for a men's magazine called Nugget, Peter Welding, wrote an article about the similarities though some of his information was incorrect.
I like that the author mentions other crimes (and criminals) that took place in the U.S. around the same time, like Howard Unrah, Dr. Melvin Nimer, ect, as I like learning of other crimes from this era.
Not a whole lot is known about Frank La Salle other than he spent fourteen months in prison for the statutory rape of five girls a few years before he kidnapped Sally. You can feel the book is lacking information the whole time you're reading it but the author did the best she could with so little information to go on. The subject matter is interesting to me and I never got bored with the story.
You can read a little about Sally's abduction here.
I received this from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
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