L's Diary

Original title: Journal de L.

Publication Date:

August 2019

Pages:

200

Original language and publisher

French | Goutte d’Or

Territories Handled

Netherlands, North America, Scandinavia

Territories Sold

Serbia (Vulkan, in a pre-empt)
Albania (Dritan)
Czech Republic (Albatros)
(Gorodets)

Genre

Literary Fiction

L's Diary

Original title: Journal de L.

Synopsis

Sixty years after LOLITA, Vladimir Nabokov’s major novel with 50 million copies sold worldwide, the writer Christophe Tison gives Lolita, the main character of this subversive work, a chance to tell her version of the story.

Christophe Tison has created a literary gem from a modern classic. With a sharp writing, faithful to Nabokov’s work, he opens up the door onto Dolores’ lucid, deep, and sometimes futile thoughts.

Moved and fascinated by this young girl – he intimately understood her experience as he was also sexually abused, a story he relates in his successful book He Loved Me (2004 Grasset) – Tison wrote Lolita’s diary in order to give a voice to the notorious teenager.

From a literary monument, Christophe Tison created a masterpiece. With a sharp writing, faithful to Nabokov’s work, he opens up the door onto Dolores’ lucid, deep, and sometimes-futile thoughts.

We feel the complexity of her “relationship” with Hum, her need to flee reality, her escape plans, and her wanderings on the roads through America.

Strong Points: 

  • The novel is endorsed by the Nabokov Foundation, by Vladimir Nabokov’s beneficiaries, and by Maurice Couturier, university researcher and Nabokov’s specialist and author published by Gallimard.
  • Many big production companies showed a strong interest in buying the rights in order to turn L.’s Diary into a series in the US.
  • A road-movie type documentary film following Lolita’s journey is going to be made by the author and two film directors in California.

Christophe Tison is a novelist published by Gallimard and Grasset, among others. He has also written autobiographical stories such as the best-selling He Loved Me (Grasset, 2004) in which he relates the sexual abuse that he was subjected to as a child.

Excerpt from the English sample:

I perspired so much that my back is slick with sweat, I was burning up in the car. We drove all day heading west until the sun turned into a big ball of fire on the horizon.
A bloody orifice, said Hum, bloody and disgusting. Then he gave me a whole lecture on attraction-repulsion, the planets and atoms rotating around each other, he also talked about people who attract and repulse each other… you are my little blonde sun, chalky-white in the hidden crannies, he said.
It’s true that I’m quite tan, except for my breasts and buttocks.

Marketing Information

  • English sample available