Bee-raising, orchard-tending Brooklyn aristocrat petersarsgaard talks reading Nabokov and making films with Maggie. katja_vujic reports
Photo: Aaron Richter/Contour/Contour by Getty Images for Pizz Peter 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.
In The Lost Daughter, the seed of the attraction between Hardy and Leda is planted during a lecture he gives on W. H. Auden. Sarsgaard’s character addresses the packed room, projecting electricity and gentle charisma. But the effect, Sarsgaard admits, can be only partially attributed to his preparation. “You have your wife adoring you and filming you a certain way,” he says. “If the person making it in the camera adores you, then the audience will adore you.
This line of literary couples is interesting to consider in the context of The Lost Daughter, which is so much about how the conditions of womanhood stamp out the possibilities of creative production, how Leda’s talents and desires are subsumed into the act of being a wife and mother. Véra Nabokov and Elsa Rush fall into a tradition of wives who functioned as their husband’s typists, readers, muses, or silent partners but who, unlike their spouses, have not become literary household names.
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