The Real Lolita

The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World

By: Sarah Weinman

Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell

Length: 7 hrs and 26 mins

Publisher's summary

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is one of the most beloved and notorious novels of all time. And yet, very few of its readers know that the subject of the novel was inspired by a real-life case: the 1948 abduction of 11-year-old Sally Horner.

Weaving together suspenseful crime narrative, cultural and social history, and literary investigation, The Real Lolita tells Sally Horner’s full story for the very first time. Drawing upon extensive investigations, legal documents, public records, and interviews with remaining relatives, Sarah Weinman uncovers how much Nabokov knew of the Sally Horner case and the efforts he took to disguise that knowledge during the process of writing and publishing Lolita.

Sally Horner’s story echoes the stories of countless girls and women who never had the chance to speak for themselves. By diving deeper in the publication history of Lolita and restoring Sally to her rightful place in the lore of the novel’s creation, The Real Lolita casts a new light on the dark inspiration for a modern classic.

©2018 Sarah Weinman (P)2018 HarperCollins Publishers

Critic reviews

“The Real Lolita is a tour de force of literary detective work. Not only does it shed new light on the terrifying true saga that influenced Nabokov’s masterpiece, it restores the forgotten victim to our consciousness.” (David Grann, author of Killers of the Flower Moon)

Meandering and tedious while never delivering the promised story.

10 chapters in, the author finally admits that she was never able to find out much about what happened to the girl. I wish I’d known that before buying the book. So, the result is hours and hours of talk on topics she was able to find out about. Half way in I had to call it quits.

Questionable premise

I feel the author has made too much of comparing Nabokov’s and poor Sally’s stories. Authors often draw on real life events for their books of fiction. It’s a work of fiction, after all. The evidence she uses is fairly weak. However, she’s done a great service in directing attention to the fact that the book is story of child rape. Too often, because Nabokov’s genius, people aren’t able to see past the seduction of Humbert’s audience. Sally’s sad life is reflected in Lolita, but not copied from it.

A great story, but contains “a shimmer of errors”

Contrary to what the author purports about most “Lolita” fans, I was familiar with Sally Horner’s story prior to reading this book. I enjoyed the expanded history of the events surrounding Horner’s kidnapping, and the story of how “Lolita”’s penmanship unfolded. Weinman makes a compelling case for Nabokov’s knowledge of Horner’s story, and indeed, I think it is likely he knew more about Sally than he ever let on.

However, having read “Lolita” several times, I was dismayed by several glaring errors about the novel’s text. Such obvious mistakes cannot help but make me worry whether there are other problems with the text that I didn’t catch, not knowing the history of Horner, LaSalle, Nabokov, and other real-life characters. Perhaps, the book will be revised in the future, to correct any other mishaps.

Self-important reader.

The reader is too overly dramatic in her style. It’s actually awful to listen to her read each and every sentence as if it was some pinnacle climax of the story. Also, because parts of the book are written in first person, the reading makes the author sound as if she thinks of herself and her work as being self-important. If I didn’t have to read this book for book club, I would have stopped listening in the first chapter. Tone it down— not every sentence needs to be read as though it’s a pinnacle moment in a Russian tragedy.

Odd and disappointing

This book is an odd mixture of literary criticism and true crime. The literary criticism would be better situated in an article in a literary journal, and the true crime portion is skimpy and lacking in details. The author has lots of excuses (the crime happened a long time ago, records are hard to find, witnesses are elderly or dead, etc.), but other true crime authors have managed to unearth plenty of details on crimes that occurred much farther in the past, so perhaps she just isn't that great a researcher. As far as the link to Nabokov's Lolita is concerned, it is rather tenuous (one brief mention of Sally Horner in the book, and a general resemblance to her story). But (unfortunately) Sally Horner is not the only girl to be kidnapped and molested by a pedophile, so the link is weak. And in any case, Nabokov took a sordid story of the kidnapping and molestation of a young girl and turned it into a great (though disturbing) work of literature. Which exact story (or stories) may have inspired him is hardly relevant.

difficult to follow

the story line is odd, jumps around, talks too much about random characters that sometimes make no sense. seems to be a lot of speculation about Sally's perspective, what's the point? save your credit.

Good back story information but her conclusion is wrong

Sally Horner’s story is closely similar to Lolita’s but the author here gave lots of evidence that Nabokov has been working on this theme long before Horner

A New Kind Of Truth-Telling

Sarah Weinman's glittering writing and incisive point-of-view reinvents true crime, while Cassandra Campbell's performance brings every character to life with subtly and precision.

All future works in the genre will have to contend with the contributions of these two women.

Disappointing, Not Enough Substance for a Book

I believe the author did do extensive research, but unfortunately there is too little evidence left to fully tell Sally’s story. Instead it remains a vague sketch, a sadly common reality that, while sobering still does not warrant a book-length exploration. And while I am thoroughly convinced Nabokov based Lolita on Sally’s story, the author offered almost no new information and failed to make the link relevant. I never saw the point of the book. Perhaps it was to bring Sally out of Lolita’s shadow, but with so little known about Sally that was just not possible. The content only warranted a long article at most. Like Nabokov, this author capitalized off of Sally, but with much less captivating results. In addition, the reader was not my favorite. I was not a fan of her character voices, but fortunately they were only needed infrequently. Overall, I say skip it.

So that’s truth behind the fiction.

Great research and tying of the revelations to the story. Enjoyed how Weinman links Nabokov’s plots to incidents reported in the press about Sally, the real victim from Camden, New Jersey. The citation of diary entries and earlier writings demonstrate that Nabokov tried for many years to fashion a story premised on an older man’s fascination with a little girl. I found this troubling. This changed my view that Nabokov was a stylist who wrote about a perverse subject to that he was a deviant who used style to mask his perversions. I laughed at the hypocrisy of Nabokov and his wife’s lame denials that Sally’s true story influenced the novel.

More than Sally

The book focused more on other crime than Sally Horner's kidnapping. Interesting to listen to