The Enchanter (Vintage International)

by VladimirNabokov (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  1991

  $19.17

• Used

  Hardcover
  1987

  $4.75

  As the story of a middle-aged man's fatal obsession with certain pubescent girls who are, to his mind, special buds on the verge of bloom, THE ENCHANTER is the precursor to LOLITA.

• New

  Paperback
  2009

  $10.62

  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.