I neglected to mention last night that as we sped westward from St. Louis over I-70, frankly not one of America’s most photogenic interstate highways, Greg and I were kept engaged by the audiobook version (complete and, ahem, unexpurgated) of Lolita, recited by Jeremy Irons in his trademarked buttery baritone. I would not have thought that Nabokov’s prose would have lent itself to this treatment, but the delivery is superb and the language enchanting. We’d actually begun to listen considerably earlier in the trip, in Virginia or North Carolina, but I had forgotten how, ah, explicit the narrative becomes early on, and by the end of disc three our avuncular ears were burning and we tacitly agreed to save the rest for this stage of the trip. Priggish of us, I know, but still...
So yesterday disc 8 (of ten) wound up at some propitious point (stopping for fuel; pulling into town...it’s a blur) with Humbert, his nymphet snatched from her sickbed by his mysterious double, setting out in search of them. It should make for a nice transit of Nevada’s austere, oddly lovely basin-and-range terrain as we set out on the final leg of our 10,000 mile trip.
Edit: We reflected before the end of our trip that Jeremy Irons’ reading was a critical element. Both of us agreed that an audiobook Lolita would not have worked with David Sedaris as Humbert.
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