Couturier, Maurice. Down the Line with a Smile: Shadowing Nabokov. 2022

Maurice Couturier, a distinguished specialist of Vladimir Nabokov and translator of Lolita, likes to say that he was born in the Middle Ages. In his autobiography, packed with countless poetic or erotic intertexts, he humorously tells his own story as a little boy in a strict catholic environment, as an international scholar between France and the United States, as a literary critic and specialist of censorship, as well as a novelist and translator of David Lodge, taking time on the way to analyze the colossal technological and communicational evolutions of the last eighty years and their impact on our societies. Not in his mother tongue but in English, his working language, which, he claims, lends itself more readily to the needs of his tortuous and playful imagination.