10 new york | january 3–16, 2022
PHOTOGRAPH: AARON RICHTER/CONTOUR
86 minutes with ...
The bee-raising, orchard-tending Brooklyn aristocrat on reading
Nabokov and making films with Maggie.by katja vujic ́
eter sarsgaard is sitting
across from me, spoiling
the ending of Lolita. It’s
early December, and we’re
at Rucola, an Italian spot in
Boerum Hill that he frequents, and the
conversation has turned to Vladimir
Nabokov, whose work I’ve somehow
never read. But that possibility doesn’t
seem to cross Sarsgaard’s mind whenhe starts to describe one of the novel’s
final scenes, in which the protagonist,
Humbert Humbert, corners Clare
Quilty, who, like Humbert, is obsessed
with 12-year-old Lolita. “He shoots him
and he shoots him. Then he goes up the
stairs, and he shoots and shoots and
shoots,” Sarsgaard says as I nod along.
“The amount of anger that Humbert
has for a guy doing the same thing thatintelligencer