September 23, 2019 The Nation. 35CÉSAR BERRÍOS
people whose pain they fictionalize? What
are the ethics of fiction when it comes to
drawing from true-life stories of trauma and
loss? Curiously, Weinman’s answer here is
very different from the one found in her
book. “When a novel is based on an actual
crime, it should do much more than loosely
fictionalize it. The novel must stand alone as
a work of art that justifies using the story for
its own purposes,” she concludes. I think it’s
safe to say this is precisely the standard that
Nabokov meets in Lolita. The book does
stand on its own—and has for decades.
But if we accept Weinman’s thesis that
fiction still needs to justify itself, then I
would argue that Lolita—in demonstrating
the way an elegantly crafted narrative can
mask atrocity—does exactly that. Nabokov’s
lifelong fascination with obfuscation, arti-
fice, unreliable narrators, and, yes, denials
of influence has been characterized (often
derogatorily) as art for art’s sake, a kind of
detached, apolitical aestheticism. Yet what
lesson could be more politically urgent than
understanding the potency of untruths and
subverted realities? For this reason, I have
always read Lolita—especially Humbert’s
stylized narration—as a peek into the inner
workings of self-delusion, which, regardless
of Nabokov’s intent, is a useful lens through
which to understand the darkest corners of
the human mind.
There have been a few attempts to find
the definitive source material for Lolita,
including earlier efforts to trace the con-
nections between Horner and the novel.
One such attempt that Weinman profiles in
her book is a 1963 article titled “Lolita Has
a Secret—Shhh!” by the freelance journalist
Peter Welding, which appeared in a men’s
magazine called Nugget. When a reporter
for the New York Post read it, he sent a letter
to Nabokov asking for a response. The re-
porter got one, but from Véra Nabokov, the
author’s wife. “At the time he was writing
LOLITA,” she wrote, “he studied a con-
siderable number of case histories (‘real’
stories) many of which have more affinities
with the LOLITA plot than the one men-
tioned by Mr. Welding.”
Indeed, by means of the novel, Vladimir
Nabokov was able to do what fiction lets a
writer do: fold countless stories into a single
narrative. Lolita tells stories about America
and sex beyond the confines of a single case.
Through them, we are shown a canvas of
depravity and the kind of culture that allows
it. Sally Horner’s story, told in such rich,
researched detail by Weinman, no doubt
brings us closer to a reckoning with that
culture. But so too does Lolita. QO
n July 25, 1978, Puerto Rican inde-
pendence activists Carlos Enrique
Soto-Arriví and Arnaldo Darío
Rosado-Torres took a taxi driver
hostage and ordered him to drive
to Cerro Maravilla, a mountain in cen-
tral Puerto Rico. They planned to sab-
otage a TV tower there to protest the
imprisonment of several Puerto Rican
nationalists—an idea that had been en-
couraged by Alejandro González Malavé,
whom the two men believed to be a fellow
organizer. In fact, González Malavé was an
undercover cop, and when the pair reached
Cerro Mara villa, the police were wait-ing. Soto-Arriví and Rosado-Torres were
ambushed and murdered execution-style
as they begged for mercy on their knees.
They were 18 and 24, respectively.
The Puerto Rican and US Justice de-
partments initially held that the officers
acted in self-defense, but later investiga-
tions exposed a possible conspiracy and a
cover-up by both governments. Last year,
when Puerto Rican singer Ileana Cabra
(aka iLe) began composing her second
album, Almadura, the police executions of
Soto-Arriví and Rosado-Torres were on
her mind as she began revisiting the glaring
moments of injustice that Puerto Rico has
experienced as a US-controlled territory,
all while grappling with how her home has
been brutally mismanaged and neglectedTAKING IT BACK
Ileana Cabra’s songs for a revolution
by JULYSSA LOPEZ
Julyssa Lopez writes frequently for The Nation
on music and culture.