5.6 /10 1 Votes5.6
Originally published August 1999 | 2.8/5 Goodreads | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Similar Roger Fishbite, The Enchanter, The Wind Done Gone, The annotated Lolita, The Original of Laura | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Lo's Diary (Italian: Diario di Lo) is a 1995 novel (ISBN 0964374021) by Pia Pera, retelling Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita from the point of view of "Dolores Haze (Lolita)".
It depicts Dolores as a sadist and a controller of everyone around her; for instance, she enjoys killing small animals. It also says that Dolores did not die in childbirth, Humbert Humbert did not kill Quilty, and that all three are still alive. Most notably, the novel takes the interpretation of Humbert as being unattractive or repulsive: he even loses his teeth at one point.
Reception
Reception was mixed to negative, with critics agreeing that it did not live up to the source material. Entertainment weekly said it "drags down Nabokov's blackly satiric vision, set in atomic-age suburban America, to the level of a cynical 1990s teen sex comedy".
Kirkus Reviews found it "a mix of wit and tedium in near-equal parts".