The Enchanter

Since Tony brought it up in a comment he made to an earlier post, here's one of my favorite book covers.

[ From The Literary Encyclopedia ] The principal Nabokovian antecedent to The Enchanter (and indeed to Lolita) is to be located within his novel The Gift (written 1933-38), when a minor character suggests the following synopsis for a novel (Penguin edition, 172-3):

Imagine this kind of thing: an old dog – but still in his prime, fiery, thirsting for happiness – gets to know a widow, and she has a daughter, still quite a little girl – you know what I mean – when nothing is formed yet, but already she has a way of walking that drives you out of your mind – A slip of a girl, very fair, pale, with blue under the eyes – and of course she doesn't even look at the old goat. What to do? Well, not long thinking, he ups and marries the widow. Okay. They settle down the three of them. Here you can go on indefinitely – the temptation, the eternal torment, the itch, the mad hopes. And the upshot – a miscalculation. Time flies, he gets older, she blossoms out – and not a sausage. Just walks by and scorches you with a look of contempt. Eh? D'you feel here a kind of Dostoevskian tragedy?