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The Original of Laura
Nabokov's final novel - for the first time ever in paperback.
Dr Philip Wild, a man of brilliance, wit, fortune and tremendous bulk, is used to suffering humiliations at the hands of his wife, the younger, slender, and rudely promiscuous Flora. But in a novel, a "maddening masterpeice" documenting her infidelities, written by one of her lovers and given to the doctor, she appears as My Laura. Dishonoured and disgraced, Wild instead finds pleasure in life by indulging in self-annihilation, beginning with the removal of his toes.
The late Vladimir Nabokov requested that this unfinished work be destroyed, but his son, Dmitri, did not oblige. The result is a remarkable, provocative look at Nabokov's creative genius.
Dr Philip Wild, a man of brilliance, wit, fortune and tremendous bulk, is used to suffering humiliations at the hands of his wife, the younger, slender, and rudely promiscuous Flora. But in a novel, a "maddening masterpeice" documenting her infidelities, written by one of her lovers and given to the doctor, she appears as My Laura. Dishonoured and disgraced, Wild instead finds pleasure in life by indulging in self-annihilation, beginning with the removal of his toes.
The late Vladimir Nabokov requested that this unfinished work be destroyed, but his son, Dmitri, did not oblige. The result is a remarkable, provocative look at Nabokov's creative genius.
304 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
70 people are currently reading
2511 people want to read
About the author
Vladimir Nabokov
898 books15.1k followersVladimir Nabokov (Russian: Владимир Набоков) was a writer defined by a life of forced movement and extraordinary linguistic transformation. Born into a wealthy, liberal aristocratic family in St. Petersburg, Russia, he grew up trilingual, speaking Russian, English, and French in a household that nurtured his intellectual curiosities, including a lifelong passion for butterflies. This seemingly idyllic, privileged existence was abruptly shattered by the Bolshevik Revolution, which forced the family into permanent exile in 1919. This early, profound experience of displacement and the loss of a homeland became a central, enduring theme in his subsequent work, fueling his exploration of memory, nostalgia, and the irretrievable past.
The first phase of his literary life began in Europe, primarily in Berlin, where he established himself as a leading voice among the Russian émigré community under the pseudonym "Vladimir Sirin". During this prolific period, he penned nine novels in his native tongue, showcasing a precocious talent for intricate plotting and character study. Works like The Defense explored obsession through the extended metaphor of chess, while Invitation to a Beheading served as a potent, surreal critique of totalitarian absurdity. In 1925, he married Véra Slonim, an intellectual force in her own right, who would become his indispensable partner, editor, translator, and lifelong anchor.
The escalating shadow of Nazism necessitated another, urgent relocation in 1940, this time to the United States. It was here that Nabokov undertook an extraordinary linguistic metamorphosis, making the challenging yet resolute shift from Russian to English as his primary language of expression. He became a U.S. citizen in 1945, solidifying his new life in North America. To support his family, he took on academic positions, first founding the Russian department at Wellesley College, and later serving as a highly regarded professor of Russian and European literature at Cornell University from 1948 to 1959.
During this academic tenure, he also dedicated significant time to his other great passion: lepidoptery. He worked as an unpaid curator of butterflies at Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology. His scientific work was far from amateurish; he developed novel taxonomic methods and a groundbreaking, highly debated theory on the migration patterns and phylogeny of the Polyommatus blue butterflies, a hypothesis that modern DNA analysis confirmed decades later.
Nabokov achieved widespread international fame and financial independence with the publication of Lolita in 1955, a novel that was initially met with controversy and censorship battles due to its provocative subject matter concerning a middle-aged literature professor and his obsession with a twelve-year-old girl. The novel's critical and commercial success finally allowed him to leave teaching and academia behind. In 1959, he and Véra moved permanently to the quiet luxury of the Montreux Palace Hotel in Switzerland, where he focused solely on writing, translating his earlier Russian works into meticulous English, and studying local butterflies.
His later English novels, such as Pale Fire (1962), a complex, postmodern narrative structured around a 999-line poem and its delusional commentator, cemented his reputation as a master stylist and a technical genius. His literary style is characterized by intricate wordplay, a profound use of allusion, structural complexity, and an insistence on the artist's total, almost tyrannical, control over their created world. Nabokov often expressed disdain for what he termed "topical trash" and the simplistic interpretations of Freudian psychoanalysis, preferring instead to focus on the power of individual consciousness, the mechanics of memory, and the intricate, often deceptive, interplay between art and perceived "reality". His unique body of work, straddling multiple cultures and languages, continues to
The first phase of his literary life began in Europe, primarily in Berlin, where he established himself as a leading voice among the Russian émigré community under the pseudonym "Vladimir Sirin". During this prolific period, he penned nine novels in his native tongue, showcasing a precocious talent for intricate plotting and character study. Works like The Defense explored obsession through the extended metaphor of chess, while Invitation to a Beheading served as a potent, surreal critique of totalitarian absurdity. In 1925, he married Véra Slonim, an intellectual force in her own right, who would become his indispensable partner, editor, translator, and lifelong anchor.
The escalating shadow of Nazism necessitated another, urgent relocation in 1940, this time to the United States. It was here that Nabokov undertook an extraordinary linguistic metamorphosis, making the challenging yet resolute shift from Russian to English as his primary language of expression. He became a U.S. citizen in 1945, solidifying his new life in North America. To support his family, he took on academic positions, first founding the Russian department at Wellesley College, and later serving as a highly regarded professor of Russian and European literature at Cornell University from 1948 to 1959.
During this academic tenure, he also dedicated significant time to his other great passion: lepidoptery. He worked as an unpaid curator of butterflies at Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology. His scientific work was far from amateurish; he developed novel taxonomic methods and a groundbreaking, highly debated theory on the migration patterns and phylogeny of the Polyommatus blue butterflies, a hypothesis that modern DNA analysis confirmed decades later.
Nabokov achieved widespread international fame and financial independence with the publication of Lolita in 1955, a novel that was initially met with controversy and censorship battles due to its provocative subject matter concerning a middle-aged literature professor and his obsession with a twelve-year-old girl. The novel's critical and commercial success finally allowed him to leave teaching and academia behind. In 1959, he and Véra moved permanently to the quiet luxury of the Montreux Palace Hotel in Switzerland, where he focused solely on writing, translating his earlier Russian works into meticulous English, and studying local butterflies.
His later English novels, such as Pale Fire (1962), a complex, postmodern narrative structured around a 999-line poem and its delusional commentator, cemented his reputation as a master stylist and a technical genius. His literary style is characterized by intricate wordplay, a profound use of allusion, structural complexity, and an insistence on the artist's total, almost tyrannical, control over their created world. Nabokov often expressed disdain for what he termed "topical trash" and the simplistic interpretations of Freudian psychoanalysis, preferring instead to focus on the power of individual consciousness, the mechanics of memory, and the intricate, often deceptive, interplay between art and perceived "reality". His unique body of work, straddling multiple cultures and languages, continues to
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September 18, 2017
“What can be sadder than a discouraged artist dying not from his own commonplace maladies, but from the cancer of oblivion?”
― Vladimir Nabokov, The Original of Laura
efface
expunge
erase
delete
rub out
wipe out
obliterate
(dying is fun)
Publishing unfinished novels, art in progress, the aborted (by the author's death/suicide) final work must be a challenge. I think of Kafka's The Trial, DFW's The Pale King, Fitzgerald's The Love of the Last Tycoon, hell ... the last 50 years of Salinger. These books are funky teases. They leave you wondering where they might have ended if the final meal had not been interrupted. I hear J. Alfred bleating for all dead authors: "That is not it at all, That is not what I meant, at all."
OoL (as published) is a fascinating piece of book design. Nabokov's original note cards are inserted into heavy weight pages (about 120lb card stock). Thus, a heavy HB book actually only contains about 100 cards/pages. Nabokov's son has done his best to order and organize these cards into some form of coherence and narrative structure. It kinda works. Any other unfinished Nabokov novel wouldn't fit this format or technique, but this is a novel about an artist erasing himself in some form of trance-like state.
Starting always at his feet.
Erasing himself again and again. Sweet suicide and anxious resurrection.
The ultimate dissolution, delicious self-irradication. Let's start with those toes, Sir.
Anyway, OoL (as written) fits. The end has been erased by Nabokov's own death. As you read (quickly because there are only 100+ note cards, written on one side) the book loses focus, themes return, run together, and disappear. There isn't enough here. Your mind plays tricks. You create narratives that fill in the gaps. You are left with fragments and then -- too soon -- Nabokov has disappeared. The book is done. Feel free to pop out the cards (another Book Design trick) and rearrange and read them at your leisure. Or just let this last Nabokov fade, and slide sweetly back into black.
Thinking away on[e]self
a mel[t]ing sensation
an envahissement of delicious dissolution (what a miracu-
lous appropriate noun!)
― Vladimir Nabokov, The Original of Laura
efface
expunge
erase
delete
rub out
wipe out
obliterate
(dying is fun)
Publishing unfinished novels, art in progress, the aborted (by the author's death/suicide) final work must be a challenge. I think of Kafka's The Trial, DFW's The Pale King, Fitzgerald's The Love of the Last Tycoon, hell ... the last 50 years of Salinger. These books are funky teases. They leave you wondering where they might have ended if the final meal had not been interrupted. I hear J. Alfred bleating for all dead authors: "That is not it at all, That is not what I meant, at all."
OoL (as published) is a fascinating piece of book design. Nabokov's original note cards are inserted into heavy weight pages (about 120lb card stock). Thus, a heavy HB book actually only contains about 100 cards/pages. Nabokov's son has done his best to order and organize these cards into some form of coherence and narrative structure. It kinda works. Any other unfinished Nabokov novel wouldn't fit this format or technique, but this is a novel about an artist erasing himself in some form of trance-like state.
Starting always at his feet.
Erasing himself again and again. Sweet suicide and anxious resurrection.
The ultimate dissolution, delicious self-irradication. Let's start with those toes, Sir.
Anyway, OoL (as written) fits. The end has been erased by Nabokov's own death. As you read (quickly because there are only 100+ note cards, written on one side) the book loses focus, themes return, run together, and disappear. There isn't enough here. Your mind plays tricks. You create narratives that fill in the gaps. You are left with fragments and then -- too soon -- Nabokov has disappeared. The book is done. Feel free to pop out the cards (another Book Design trick) and rearrange and read them at your leisure. Or just let this last Nabokov fade, and slide sweetly back into black.
Thinking away on[e]self
a mel[t]ing sensation
an envahissement of delicious dissolution (what a miracu-
lous appropriate noun!)
March 8, 2024
A draft is a draft in spite of having been produced by the great writer. The 'Original of Laura' was supposed to be, according to Dmitri, Vladimir Nabokov's son, 'a brilliant, original, and potentially totally radical book, in the literary sense very different from the rest of his oeuvre.' But this manuscript is fragments, pieces, unfinished words, sentences and paragraphs, isolated words and notes of ideas. A very rough draft which was not intended to be seen by anybody.
And, yet, Nabokov's voice and his unsurpassable style are recognisable in this chaos. Death, dying, or 'the art of self-slaughter' is the main theme of the novel. 'Dying is fun', death is sweet and welcome. One can meditate and experiment with dying like with synonyms : 'efface, expunge, erase, delete, rub out, wipe out, obliterate' But how far can you go?
'She was an extravagantly slender girl. Her ribs showed. The conspicuous knobs of her hipbones framed a hollowed abdomen, so flat as to belie the notion of "belly." Her exquisite bone structure immediately slipped into a novel - became in fact the secret structure of that novel, besides supporting a number of poems.'
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
'It’s tempting, emptiness.'
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
'I do not believe that the spinal cord is the only or even main conductor of the extravagant messages that reach my brain. I have to find out more about that—about the strange impression I have of there being some underpath, so to speak, along which the commands of my will power are passed to and fro along the shadow of nerves, rather [than] along the nerves proper. (from Wild's note)'
And, yet, Nabokov's voice and his unsurpassable style are recognisable in this chaos. Death, dying, or 'the art of self-slaughter' is the main theme of the novel. 'Dying is fun', death is sweet and welcome. One can meditate and experiment with dying like with synonyms : 'efface, expunge, erase, delete, rub out, wipe out, obliterate' But how far can you go?
'She was an extravagantly slender girl. Her ribs showed. The conspicuous knobs of her hipbones framed a hollowed abdomen, so flat as to belie the notion of "belly." Her exquisite bone structure immediately slipped into a novel - became in fact the secret structure of that novel, besides supporting a number of poems.'
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
'It’s tempting, emptiness.'
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
'I do not believe that the spinal cord is the only or even main conductor of the extravagant messages that reach my brain. I have to find out more about that—about the strange impression I have of there being some underpath, so to speak, along which the commands of my will power are passed to and fro along the shadow of nerves, rather [than] along the nerves proper. (from Wild's note)'
May 7, 2015
As an entry in the crowded and lucrative subgenre of first drafts scribbled on index cards by legendary authors, buried for three decades and published for $$$ by their cranky sons before they croak, this book is up there in spirit with Raymond Carver’s 171 Plots Scribbled Drunkenly on Napkins, Truman Capote’s Ideas On Whom to Exploit For My Next Bestseller, and Kingsley Amis’s Letters of Apology to Every Woman I Wronged (Vols. 1-170). The scribbled incoherences in this sequence of transcribed index cards tease us with the potential of a lost final Nabokov masterpiece, and cry out for some brave lunatic to write a version based on the material here (and reap the subsequent law suit from the violent defender of pater’s work, Dmitri). If you paid for this, you effectively placed your money in a shredder (—still a more worthwhile purchase than a £18.99 pizza).
Read
August 21, 2019On preciousness
Reviews of this book were repetitively concerned with two things: whether Dmiti Nabokov should have published it, against his father’s wishes (I can’t see the interest of this question), and what effect it will have on Nabokov’s reputation (it will do “severe damage,” according to Jonathan Bate in “The Telegraph,” November 15, 2009; the book is “better suited to a college ethics class,” according to Alexander Theroux, “Wall Street Journal,” November 20, 2009). Almost every review (thirty are listed on complete-review.com) also praised some of Nabokov’s sentences and panned others (I can’t see what’s learned by that).
Reviewers also agreed there isn’t much in the fragments—that too much had been made of them. Philip Henscher (Spectator, November 25, 2009), called the book “a sphinx without a secret,” and Michiko Kakutani said more or less the same in the NYT. But the book does have secrets. As Kakutani points out, this is the author of Pale Fire and other “postmodern” novels, and so we could have expected something similarly clever here.
Puzzles
The closest any review I’ve found comes to this is David Gates (“Nabokov’s Last Puzzle,” NYTBR, November 11, 2009). He points out the open-endedness of the fragments:
“How did Nabokov plan to connect these two strands of his story — the mistress-destroying lover and the self-annihilating scientist? We’ll never know. Wild’s arcane technique of self-erasure must be connected somehow or other with the novelist’s annihilating his mistress “in the act of portraying her”; the association of depiction with destruction is common to both. But the writer can’t have destroyed her in the literal act of writing, since at one point we see the still-living Flora beginning to read a paperback copy of the novel in which Laura dies. “Let me show you your wonderful death,” says a friend who’s already finished the book. “You’ll scream with laughter. It’s the craziest death in the world.” So does the novel “destroy” Flora in some figurative sense? Perhaps reading it goads her cuckolded husband (who calls it a “maddening masterpiece”) into using his mental eraser on her? We assume that the original of Laura has to die some “crazy” death or other, as her fictive double does, but their creator beat them both to the finish line.
“And here’s a puzzle for hard-core Nabokov obsessives. From a freestanding paragraph headed “End of penult chapter,” we infer that after Wild dies of a heart attack, the novelist-lover gets hold of his “testament” — they seem to have the same typist — and arranges for its publication, though we don’t know how, where or why. Are we to suspect that the lover has invented Wild’s mystic manuscript? And even Wild himself? (Readers of “Pale Fire” still argue over whether Shade invented Kinbote or vice versa.) Yet the lover has already made Wild a character in the “Laura” novel, under the transparent name of “Philidor Sauvage.” Would even a trickster like Nabokov invent a character who invents a character and then invents a pseudonym for him? Nabokovians are welcome to take it from here, as long as I don’t have to go with them. And while they’re at it, who’s the oddly named Ivan Vaughan, who seems to know Flora and who appears in one uncompleted chapter to tell us that “the novel My ‘Laura’ ” was “torn apart by a book reviewer in a leading newspaper”?”
This kind of puzzle — which I am not interested in solving — bears on the hope, also noted by most reviewers, that the book might give us a glimpse into Nabokov’s writing method. It does, but not in a way I have seen any reviewer mention: it shows that at least in this case, he wrote around or between the cruxes of the plot. They would have been clear to him; the flesh between those bones would have been what took line-by-line inventing. It is possible there may be novelists for whom this is helpful.
Preciousness
I read this because the book is an example of preciousness, which is something that happens when the visual appearance of pages--an writer's typescripts, experiments in typography and design, letters reproduced in color--begin to be more interesting than the content of the writing. There's an edition of small drawings by Walter Benjamin that is precious in this sense: Benjamin didn't draw much, and the book lavishes high-resolution color photography on the small fragments. Another is the recent edition of Emily Dickinson's poems on envelopes, reproduced natural size and in color, and provided with keys on the opposing pages. Robert Walser's microscripts have also been reproduced this way, natural size, in color on coated stock.
In this case it's 3 x 5 cards, and they are reproduced in color, front and back, even when the backs have nothing but an X on them. The result could be called "fetishized," but I do not think that word illiminates much. "Precious" is better: it implies the cards are valuable, like old postage stamps or diminutive works of art, and it suggests there is a relation between the visual qualities of the cards, Nabokov's handwriting, and the interest of his words and ideas... but there isn't. Preciousness, here, is the spurious imposition of visual significance on literary meaning.
(Preciousness is a problem in a number of novels and poems that have images in them, so I am studying it as part of my "writing with images" project. More on this on writingwithimages.com/2-texts-as-images.)
PS: an astonishing image
And last thing: the central visual image in these fragments is the mental exercise of drawing yourself in your imagination on the inner surfaces of your closed eyelids, and then erasing yourself: an imagined—and then real—act of deliberate self-destruction. That is am amazing idea for a novel, even today, even after Deleuze’s “BwO,” Ballard, and all the rest. It's an amazing idea, more memorable in itself than most books I've read this year.
Reviews of this book were repetitively concerned with two things: whether Dmiti Nabokov should have published it, against his father’s wishes (I can’t see the interest of this question), and what effect it will have on Nabokov’s reputation (it will do “severe damage,” according to Jonathan Bate in “The Telegraph,” November 15, 2009; the book is “better suited to a college ethics class,” according to Alexander Theroux, “Wall Street Journal,” November 20, 2009). Almost every review (thirty are listed on complete-review.com) also praised some of Nabokov’s sentences and panned others (I can’t see what’s learned by that).
Reviewers also agreed there isn’t much in the fragments—that too much had been made of them. Philip Henscher (Spectator, November 25, 2009), called the book “a sphinx without a secret,” and Michiko Kakutani said more or less the same in the NYT. But the book does have secrets. As Kakutani points out, this is the author of Pale Fire and other “postmodern” novels, and so we could have expected something similarly clever here.
Puzzles
The closest any review I’ve found comes to this is David Gates (“Nabokov’s Last Puzzle,” NYTBR, November 11, 2009). He points out the open-endedness of the fragments:
“How did Nabokov plan to connect these two strands of his story — the mistress-destroying lover and the self-annihilating scientist? We’ll never know. Wild’s arcane technique of self-erasure must be connected somehow or other with the novelist’s annihilating his mistress “in the act of portraying her”; the association of depiction with destruction is common to both. But the writer can’t have destroyed her in the literal act of writing, since at one point we see the still-living Flora beginning to read a paperback copy of the novel in which Laura dies. “Let me show you your wonderful death,” says a friend who’s already finished the book. “You’ll scream with laughter. It’s the craziest death in the world.” So does the novel “destroy” Flora in some figurative sense? Perhaps reading it goads her cuckolded husband (who calls it a “maddening masterpiece”) into using his mental eraser on her? We assume that the original of Laura has to die some “crazy” death or other, as her fictive double does, but their creator beat them both to the finish line.
“And here’s a puzzle for hard-core Nabokov obsessives. From a freestanding paragraph headed “End of penult chapter,” we infer that after Wild dies of a heart attack, the novelist-lover gets hold of his “testament” — they seem to have the same typist — and arranges for its publication, though we don’t know how, where or why. Are we to suspect that the lover has invented Wild’s mystic manuscript? And even Wild himself? (Readers of “Pale Fire” still argue over whether Shade invented Kinbote or vice versa.) Yet the lover has already made Wild a character in the “Laura” novel, under the transparent name of “Philidor Sauvage.” Would even a trickster like Nabokov invent a character who invents a character and then invents a pseudonym for him? Nabokovians are welcome to take it from here, as long as I don’t have to go with them. And while they’re at it, who’s the oddly named Ivan Vaughan, who seems to know Flora and who appears in one uncompleted chapter to tell us that “the novel My ‘Laura’ ” was “torn apart by a book reviewer in a leading newspaper”?”
This kind of puzzle — which I am not interested in solving — bears on the hope, also noted by most reviewers, that the book might give us a glimpse into Nabokov’s writing method. It does, but not in a way I have seen any reviewer mention: it shows that at least in this case, he wrote around or between the cruxes of the plot. They would have been clear to him; the flesh between those bones would have been what took line-by-line inventing. It is possible there may be novelists for whom this is helpful.
Preciousness
I read this because the book is an example of preciousness, which is something that happens when the visual appearance of pages--an writer's typescripts, experiments in typography and design, letters reproduced in color--begin to be more interesting than the content of the writing. There's an edition of small drawings by Walter Benjamin that is precious in this sense: Benjamin didn't draw much, and the book lavishes high-resolution color photography on the small fragments. Another is the recent edition of Emily Dickinson's poems on envelopes, reproduced natural size and in color, and provided with keys on the opposing pages. Robert Walser's microscripts have also been reproduced this way, natural size, in color on coated stock.
In this case it's 3 x 5 cards, and they are reproduced in color, front and back, even when the backs have nothing but an X on them. The result could be called "fetishized," but I do not think that word illiminates much. "Precious" is better: it implies the cards are valuable, like old postage stamps or diminutive works of art, and it suggests there is a relation between the visual qualities of the cards, Nabokov's handwriting, and the interest of his words and ideas... but there isn't. Preciousness, here, is the spurious imposition of visual significance on literary meaning.
(Preciousness is a problem in a number of novels and poems that have images in them, so I am studying it as part of my "writing with images" project. More on this on writingwithimages.com/2-texts-as-images.)
PS: an astonishing image
And last thing: the central visual image in these fragments is the mental exercise of drawing yourself in your imagination on the inner surfaces of your closed eyelids, and then erasing yourself: an imagined—and then real—act of deliberate self-destruction. That is am amazing idea for a novel, even today, even after Deleuze’s “BwO,” Ballard, and all the rest. It's an amazing idea, more memorable in itself than most books I've read this year.
not-to-read
August 11, 2015Short version: I feel dirty inside for even having glanced at this book. Or you can read the longer version below...
________________________________________
Ooh, it's been a good week so far! On Tuesday, I read a wonderful kiss-and-tell exposé in The Star about Katie Price's steamy love triangle. The picture of her boyfriend Alex Reid dressed in women's underwear was particularly good. Then, on Wednesday, I watched the TV mini-series on the Queen, and was able to gloat over her pain as the tabloid press served up all the juicy details about Charles, Diana and Camilla.
And earlier today, while visiting Heffers, I picked up a copy of The Original of Laura. I was just starting to read Vladimir Nabokov's notes for his unfinished novel, which he'd expressly said should be destroyed and never shown to the world... what a treat! He had this stupid habit of burning all his drafts, like John Shade in Pale Fire - evidently, death had caught him by surprise, and he hadn't managed to get rid of this lot.
Then... damn! I'd only got a few pages into it when a friend SMSed me with a rumor about a secret webcam that had somehow been introduced into Jodie Foster's bathroom. He said it was incredible what you could see, but it was only a matter of time before she found out about it, so I'd better hustle. I rushed home and made the most of my opportunity.
I'm sure I'll get to the Nabokov tomorrow. Un embarras de riches, as the Master might have put it.
December 28, 2009
This review will be as fragmented as the novel in question. If you are looking for a coherent, well-reasoned review check out Misha's.
1. My in-law's annual Christmas gift exchange morphed into a facebook group this year. Usually I jot down "gift card" and three store names on the tiny piece of paper and toss it into the hat, but the more leisurely www format enticed me into listing a few book titles. Evidently my sister-in-law (who is not an avid reader) carried a hard copy of the list into the local B&N and told the clerk "I need a couple of these." This led to me receiving this book and "Man Walks Into A Room" by Nicole Krauss. Because of this I now love my in-laws and facebook just a little bit more...
2. For anyone who may be unaware, this is not a complete Nabokov book, but merely the fragments of a work in progress at the time of his death. His family had orders to burn it, but anyone who is intrigued by literary trivia knows that that was as likely to happen as an aging rock band retiring for good after their first farewell tour.
3. Oh the booklust! This book is high in the running for being the most beautiful book that I own. Right now it's a dead heat between this one and McSweeney's #20. The tastefully black dust cover lifts to reveal a cover that is a reproduction of the first and last index card as ordered within the book. The pages are of a thick paper stock (more on that in a minute) and the book smells really good.
4. Dmitri says that this is only a few index cards short of a complete first draft. I find this statement a bit dubious, as there is not a lot of text here (about thirty typeset pages, according to one website).
5. At least three story threads can be discerned from what we are given:
A. Flora - A promiscuous young woman who leaves a trail of broken boys in her wake. Her main goal seems to have been to marry rich and carry on a life of leisure.
B. Laura - A book that appears to have been written about Flora by a former lover (Eric Rawitch???). At one point Nabokov seems to conflate the two threads by the use of the name FLaura.
C. Phillip Wild - An aging, morbidly obese neurologist. He is the husband of Flora and plays the role of sugar daddy. As his health fails, he begins the process of suicide via psychic self-immolation.
6. As Misha mentioned in her review, Phillip's process of mentally deleting himself has an uncanny resemblance to some of the work of J.G. Ballard. His disgust with his own body also reminded me of the few things that I have sampled from Samuel Beckett. It would be interesting to know if Nabokov had read or held an opinion of either writer.
7. The preface was penned by Dmitri Nabokov, the only son of Vladimir and the man who made the final decision to unleash this upon the literary world. He seems to be a fine writer in his own right, but I was confused as to whether the last paragraph of the preface was an attempt at wry humor or if Dmitri suffers from arrogance.
8. Something I only recently learned: Nabokov did all of his writing on index cards and he would often shuffle the cards around into different orders during the creative process. Hence the heavy paper stock mentioned above. Each page is a reproduction of an index card (in Nabokov's own handwriting (Squeee!!!)) with the text of the card printed below with very few corrections from the written text. This leads to questions such as whether Nabokov really misspelled stomach as "stomack" throughout the book or if this was going to evolve into some of his beloved word trickery at a later point.
9. The index cards are perforated, thus allowing a reader to punch out all of the cards and rearrange them as Nabokov might have done. I so want to do this, even though it brings me into great conflict with my usual anally-retentive overprotectiveness of books.
10. I'm old, married, and ensconced in the corporate world at the moment, hence the only drugs that I partake of currently are the FDA approved ones. However, it is interesting to note that all of the pages contain the exact same layout. If one punched out all of the cards there would be a substantial cubby hole in the book that could be used to hide one's stash. I would love to see the sales of this book skyrocket because of this fact as hippie kids tried to shelve it between that Abbie Hoffman reader and On the Road while trying to maintain straight faces and were at the same time suckered into reading Nabokov. The disdain of both father and son Nabokov at such a notion is kind of funny too.
11. The cards are reproduced faithfully on both front and back. Some of the backs are smudged and some have a big, penciled X. I would love to know if the X meant that the passage needed more editing or instead that it was good to go. I'm assuming the latter.
12. Googling this title seems to indicate that Dmitri has taken quite a verbal beating for releasing this book of fragments. Yes, releasing it (especially in that strategically pre-Christmas shopping time of early November) probably constitutes a money grab at some level. There is one way to definitively determine whether or not this was complete enough to have warranted a release: Put out the index cards for Lolita (if they still exist) in the exact same format and let readers compare how they stack up to the final draft. I would certainly buy it...or at the very least put it on my Christmas list...
13. I thoroughly enjoyed this and believe that anyone who is a Nabokov fanboy/girl will enjoy it likewise. It is definitely fragmented, but there are still little flashes of the man's literary genius throughout. Another great thing is that a reader can guzzle this down in a little over an hour. I'm not even sure if the same can be said for most of his short stories.
1. My in-law's annual Christmas gift exchange morphed into a facebook group this year. Usually I jot down "gift card" and three store names on the tiny piece of paper and toss it into the hat, but the more leisurely www format enticed me into listing a few book titles. Evidently my sister-in-law (who is not an avid reader) carried a hard copy of the list into the local B&N and told the clerk "I need a couple of these." This led to me receiving this book and "Man Walks Into A Room" by Nicole Krauss. Because of this I now love my in-laws and facebook just a little bit more...
2. For anyone who may be unaware, this is not a complete Nabokov book, but merely the fragments of a work in progress at the time of his death. His family had orders to burn it, but anyone who is intrigued by literary trivia knows that that was as likely to happen as an aging rock band retiring for good after their first farewell tour.
3. Oh the booklust! This book is high in the running for being the most beautiful book that I own. Right now it's a dead heat between this one and McSweeney's #20. The tastefully black dust cover lifts to reveal a cover that is a reproduction of the first and last index card as ordered within the book. The pages are of a thick paper stock (more on that in a minute) and the book smells really good.
4. Dmitri says that this is only a few index cards short of a complete first draft. I find this statement a bit dubious, as there is not a lot of text here (about thirty typeset pages, according to one website).
5. At least three story threads can be discerned from what we are given:
A. Flora - A promiscuous young woman who leaves a trail of broken boys in her wake. Her main goal seems to have been to marry rich and carry on a life of leisure.
B. Laura - A book that appears to have been written about Flora by a former lover (Eric Rawitch???). At one point Nabokov seems to conflate the two threads by the use of the name FLaura.
C. Phillip Wild - An aging, morbidly obese neurologist. He is the husband of Flora and plays the role of sugar daddy. As his health fails, he begins the process of suicide via psychic self-immolation.
6. As Misha mentioned in her review, Phillip's process of mentally deleting himself has an uncanny resemblance to some of the work of J.G. Ballard. His disgust with his own body also reminded me of the few things that I have sampled from Samuel Beckett. It would be interesting to know if Nabokov had read or held an opinion of either writer.
7. The preface was penned by Dmitri Nabokov, the only son of Vladimir and the man who made the final decision to unleash this upon the literary world. He seems to be a fine writer in his own right, but I was confused as to whether the last paragraph of the preface was an attempt at wry humor or if Dmitri suffers from arrogance.
8. Something I only recently learned: Nabokov did all of his writing on index cards and he would often shuffle the cards around into different orders during the creative process. Hence the heavy paper stock mentioned above. Each page is a reproduction of an index card (in Nabokov's own handwriting (Squeee!!!)) with the text of the card printed below with very few corrections from the written text. This leads to questions such as whether Nabokov really misspelled stomach as "stomack" throughout the book or if this was going to evolve into some of his beloved word trickery at a later point.
9. The index cards are perforated, thus allowing a reader to punch out all of the cards and rearrange them as Nabokov might have done. I so want to do this, even though it brings me into great conflict with my usual anally-retentive overprotectiveness of books.
10. I'm old, married, and ensconced in the corporate world at the moment, hence the only drugs that I partake of currently are the FDA approved ones. However, it is interesting to note that all of the pages contain the exact same layout. If one punched out all of the cards there would be a substantial cubby hole in the book that could be used to hide one's stash. I would love to see the sales of this book skyrocket because of this fact as hippie kids tried to shelve it between that Abbie Hoffman reader and On the Road while trying to maintain straight faces and were at the same time suckered into reading Nabokov. The disdain of both father and son Nabokov at such a notion is kind of funny too.
11. The cards are reproduced faithfully on both front and back. Some of the backs are smudged and some have a big, penciled X. I would love to know if the X meant that the passage needed more editing or instead that it was good to go. I'm assuming the latter.
12. Googling this title seems to indicate that Dmitri has taken quite a verbal beating for releasing this book of fragments. Yes, releasing it (especially in that strategically pre-Christmas shopping time of early November) probably constitutes a money grab at some level. There is one way to definitively determine whether or not this was complete enough to have warranted a release: Put out the index cards for Lolita (if they still exist) in the exact same format and let readers compare how they stack up to the final draft. I would certainly buy it...or at the very least put it on my Christmas list...
13. I thoroughly enjoyed this and believe that anyone who is a Nabokov fanboy/girl will enjoy it likewise. It is definitely fragmented, but there are still little flashes of the man's literary genius throughout. Another great thing is that a reader can guzzle this down in a little over an hour. I'm not even sure if the same can be said for most of his short stories.
February 3, 2022
Her exquisite bone structure immediately slipped into a novel - became in fact the secret structure of that novel, besides supporting a number of poems.
I bought this for a good cause, shopped local. I read it after I finally relaxed into sleep. Jon, were you asleep when you read it? No, but not exactly primed either. Awoke with an anxious eye to the falling crystals outside. Would there be a sufficient sum to turn off the lights? I hope not. There are few rich scenes from this posthumous curiosity but otherwise this endeavor --and what a fetching book as object this is-- is a lesson in either greed (likely) or literary posterity (not so much) but it does invite contemplation of what could have been. The tribe of Dolores Haze is further explored. I did chuckle at the Maestro's puns. The stream on self-deletion was itself rather fascinating though the links to the erotic a wonky detour.
I bought this for a good cause, shopped local. I read it after I finally relaxed into sleep. Jon, were you asleep when you read it? No, but not exactly primed either. Awoke with an anxious eye to the falling crystals outside. Would there be a sufficient sum to turn off the lights? I hope not. There are few rich scenes from this posthumous curiosity but otherwise this endeavor --and what a fetching book as object this is-- is a lesson in either greed (likely) or literary posterity (not so much) but it does invite contemplation of what could have been. The tribe of Dolores Haze is further explored. I did chuckle at the Maestro's puns. The stream on self-deletion was itself rather fascinating though the links to the erotic a wonky detour.
September 6, 2016
Terminei esta leitura com a sensação de que li algo proibido. Mais detalhes em breve.
August 5, 2018
O Original de Laura é a última obra e inacabada de Vladimir Nabokov, escrito no final da sua vida, entre os vários internamentos hospitalares. Nabokov e sua esposa Vera eram entomólogos. Em Davos, numa das saídas para caçar borboletas, Nabokov escorregara e caíra, magoado, acenava com a rede na mão, mas diversos turistas que por ali passavam julgavam que o escritor estava a brincar, riam-se e continuavam o seu percurso. Com muito esforço Nabokov conseguira chegar ao hotel, já de noite e a coxear, foi hospitalizado para fazer uma pequena cirurgia, mas, durante o internamento foi contagiado com um bacilo hospitalar, que lhe terá sido transmitido pela enfermeira que o tratava, pois ela tossia sem parar e encontrava-se visivelmente doente. Não conseguiu recuperar dessa infeção e o seu estado de saúde foi-se deteriorando dia após dia, tratamento após tratamento.
O Original de Laura é composto por 138 fichas onde Nabokov regista os seus pensamentos, a angústia, o sofrimento físico e psicológico do ser humano. A decadência do corpo e do espirito.
Apagar, erradicar, suprimir, anular, delir, limpar, obliterar (p. 142)
Neste livro, temos acesso ao processo de escrita de Nabokov, as fichas, escritas pelo seu punho, mostra-nos o processo da sua criação literária: as emendas, o riscar e substituir as palavras, sublinhar, rasurar e reescrever as ideias, o aperfeiçoamento da escrita.
Nabokov deixou ordens expressas para que o manuscrito fosse destruído após a sua morte, não queria expor a obra inacabada. Vera sua esposa, não teve coragem e guardou-o durante anos.
Vera Dimitri, teve um importante papel na vida de Nabokov, para além de esposa e secretária, lia as suas obras, dava sugestões e deve-se a ela o sucesso de Lolita. Após o livro Lolita ter sido rejeitado por vários editores Vladimir ordenou a sua destruição. Vera desobedeceu, mais tarde, consentiu que um agente propusesse à Olympia Press de Girodias. Foi a opinião de Graham Greene que catapultou Lolita para o espaço literário, como uma grande obra e Nabokov o reconhecimento de génio. Talvez por este motivo que Vera tenha decidido guardar as fichas de trabalho do seu falecido marido.
Dimitri Nabokov, (nasceu um 1934), filho de Vladimir e seu principal tradutor.
Após a morte de sua mãe (Vera Nabokov), Dimitri recebera dezenas de cartas, umas a solicitar a publicação da obra inacabada, outras a referir que se deveria de respeitar a vontade do escritor e como tal as fichas deveriam de ser eliminadas. Após anos de indecisão Dimitri resolve organizar as fichas, traduzi-las e publica-las.
A História
Laura está a escrever um novo romance, que versa sobre a vida de Flora, casada com um reputado Neurologista. Flora, de 24 anos, cansada da vida que leva com o marido, já velho e doente, resolve viajar pelo mundo e regressa de vez em quando para saber notícias do marido, e garantir assim os seus “empréstimos” financeiros. É uma história de amor, sofrimento e traições. Nabokov expõe a nu a parte menos humana do ser humano.
Laura, a escritora fictícia, não teve tempo de terminar a história, cabe a cada leitor o favor de encontrar um final feliz para Flora e Philip Wild.
Nabokov faleceu em 1977, não teve tempo para terminar “O Original de Laura”.
https://booksmf.blogspot.com/
O Original de Laura é composto por 138 fichas onde Nabokov regista os seus pensamentos, a angústia, o sofrimento físico e psicológico do ser humano. A decadência do corpo e do espirito.
Apagar, erradicar, suprimir, anular, delir, limpar, obliterar (p. 142)
Neste livro, temos acesso ao processo de escrita de Nabokov, as fichas, escritas pelo seu punho, mostra-nos o processo da sua criação literária: as emendas, o riscar e substituir as palavras, sublinhar, rasurar e reescrever as ideias, o aperfeiçoamento da escrita.
Nabokov deixou ordens expressas para que o manuscrito fosse destruído após a sua morte, não queria expor a obra inacabada. Vera sua esposa, não teve coragem e guardou-o durante anos.
Vera Dimitri, teve um importante papel na vida de Nabokov, para além de esposa e secretária, lia as suas obras, dava sugestões e deve-se a ela o sucesso de Lolita. Após o livro Lolita ter sido rejeitado por vários editores Vladimir ordenou a sua destruição. Vera desobedeceu, mais tarde, consentiu que um agente propusesse à Olympia Press de Girodias. Foi a opinião de Graham Greene que catapultou Lolita para o espaço literário, como uma grande obra e Nabokov o reconhecimento de génio. Talvez por este motivo que Vera tenha decidido guardar as fichas de trabalho do seu falecido marido.
Dimitri Nabokov, (nasceu um 1934), filho de Vladimir e seu principal tradutor.
Após a morte de sua mãe (Vera Nabokov), Dimitri recebera dezenas de cartas, umas a solicitar a publicação da obra inacabada, outras a referir que se deveria de respeitar a vontade do escritor e como tal as fichas deveriam de ser eliminadas. Após anos de indecisão Dimitri resolve organizar as fichas, traduzi-las e publica-las.
A História
Laura está a escrever um novo romance, que versa sobre a vida de Flora, casada com um reputado Neurologista. Flora, de 24 anos, cansada da vida que leva com o marido, já velho e doente, resolve viajar pelo mundo e regressa de vez em quando para saber notícias do marido, e garantir assim os seus “empréstimos” financeiros. É uma história de amor, sofrimento e traições. Nabokov expõe a nu a parte menos humana do ser humano.
Laura, a escritora fictícia, não teve tempo de terminar a história, cabe a cada leitor o favor de encontrar um final feliz para Flora e Philip Wild.
Nabokov faleceu em 1977, não teve tempo para terminar “O Original de Laura”.
https://booksmf.blogspot.com/
December 9, 2020
Vladimir Nabokov deixou instruções expressas para que após a sua morte fossem destruídas as fichas do romance que estava a escrever. No entanto, ao extremoso filho faltou a coragem de não publicar o último livro do pai. Obviamente que a intenção seria homenagear o autor; o valor dos direitos, superior a um milhão de dólares, foi, certamente, um efeito secundário dessa homenagem.
O Original de Laura não me parece um romance, mas apenas um esboço que, ao ser publicado, desvirtua a obra do Grande Vladimir Nabokov.
O Original de Laura não me parece um romance, mas apenas um esboço que, ao ser publicado, desvirtua a obra do Grande Vladimir Nabokov.
September 16, 2020
Ο Nabokov είναι από τους συγγραφείς των οποίων τη γραφή θεωρώ άκρως γοητευτική. Σε αυτό το βιβλίο το οποίο είναι ουσιαστικά ένα προσχέδιο αυτού που είχε στο μυαλό του να γράψει, βλέπουμε σκόρπιες τις σκέψεις του με ημιτελείς παραγράφους και πολλά κενά.
Ταυτόχρονα, ο γιος του δημοσιοποιώντας αυτές τις σημειώσεις (παρακούοντας την επιθυμία του ίδιου του Nabokov να καταστραφούν μετά τον θάνατό του), μας δίνει την ευκαιρία να μάθουμε κάποια πράγματα για τη συγγραφική μέθοδο.
Πιστεύω ότι αν είχε λίγο περισσότερο χρόνο και το ολοκλήρωνε, θα είχαμε σήμερα στα χέρια μας ένα πολύ ενδιαφέρον ανάγνωσμα.
Ταυτόχρονα, ο γιος του δημοσιοποιώντας αυτές τις σημειώσεις (παρακούοντας την επιθυμία του ίδιου του Nabokov να καταστραφούν μετά τον θάνατό του), μας δίνει την ευκαιρία να μάθουμε κάποια πράγματα για τη συγγραφική μέθοδο.
Πιστεύω ότι αν είχε λίγο περισσότερο χρόνο και το ολοκλήρωνε, θα είχαμε σήμερα στα χέρια μας ένα πολύ ενδιαφέρον ανάγνωσμα.
December 29, 2012
My published article: http://www.cpcc.edu/taltp/archives/sp...
Willed to be incinerated, salvaged by his wife, finally published by his aged son, this last work by Nabokov makes quite a story simply by existing. Dmitri wonders whether he “should be damned or thanked” for defying his father’s will, and the answer is, unequivocally, thanked.
Always evident is the simple way Nabokov has fun with the language: “The potentate had been potent till the absurd age of eighty”; “A few photographers moved among the crowd as indifferent to it as specters doing their spectral job” (101).
This “novel in fragments” is as the final testament to the true genius of one of the greatest literary minds of the 20th century. Incredibly erudite, Nabokov reveled in weaving complex puzzles into his novels, defying literary conventions, and pushing the limits of the language. In those regards, The Originals of Laura is as complete as any of his works.
Superficially, it is about a neurologist’s experimentation with psychological self-deletion and the unfinished “manuscript in longhand” he leaves behind after being claimed by “a fatal heart attack” (187). Even though the eponymous character is in the book, “everything about her is bound to remain blurry, even her name which seems to have been made to expressly have another one modeled upon it by a fantastically lucky artists” (85). Nabokov capriciously shifts among “Flora,” “Laura,” and “FLaura.” The reader never gets a true sense of her, as if “only by identifying her with an unwritten, half-written, rewritten difficult book could one hope to render at last what” (21). All of these quotations made me wonder if this book might not be exactly what Nabokov intended it to be. Was that sentence meant to be left unfinished? Was this novel meant to be left unfinished? Is this the final frontier for an author who had pioneered so many other literary innovations and flouted form and structure in order to create something of even greater depth? Is this his ultimate attempt to create new meaning from destruction by effacing, expunging, deleting, rubbing out, wiping out, obliterating (the only words on the last page of the book!) everything we have come to assume a book should be?
The book itself allows readers to enjoy “the divine light in destroying” (181) by including perforated index cards that can be removed and rearranged in any order the reader sees fit. This not only allows him to derive his own meaning from the book, but literally to reshape the novel itself! Unlike any other book, this allows the reader the chance to truly engage in “an act of destruction which develops paradoxically an element of creativeness in the totally new application of totally free will” (213)!!
This will stand as one of Nabokov’s most “maddening masterpiece[s:]” (221), one of his greatest puzzles, and a book that demolishes literary boundaries and gives new meaning to deconstruction, reader response, and other literary approaches.
Willed to be incinerated, salvaged by his wife, finally published by his aged son, this last work by Nabokov makes quite a story simply by existing. Dmitri wonders whether he “should be damned or thanked” for defying his father’s will, and the answer is, unequivocally, thanked.
Always evident is the simple way Nabokov has fun with the language: “The potentate had been potent till the absurd age of eighty”; “A few photographers moved among the crowd as indifferent to it as specters doing their spectral job” (101).
This “novel in fragments” is as the final testament to the true genius of one of the greatest literary minds of the 20th century. Incredibly erudite, Nabokov reveled in weaving complex puzzles into his novels, defying literary conventions, and pushing the limits of the language. In those regards, The Originals of Laura is as complete as any of his works.
Superficially, it is about a neurologist’s experimentation with psychological self-deletion and the unfinished “manuscript in longhand” he leaves behind after being claimed by “a fatal heart attack” (187). Even though the eponymous character is in the book, “everything about her is bound to remain blurry, even her name which seems to have been made to expressly have another one modeled upon it by a fantastically lucky artists” (85). Nabokov capriciously shifts among “Flora,” “Laura,” and “FLaura.” The reader never gets a true sense of her, as if “only by identifying her with an unwritten, half-written, rewritten difficult book could one hope to render at last what” (21). All of these quotations made me wonder if this book might not be exactly what Nabokov intended it to be. Was that sentence meant to be left unfinished? Was this novel meant to be left unfinished? Is this the final frontier for an author who had pioneered so many other literary innovations and flouted form and structure in order to create something of even greater depth? Is this his ultimate attempt to create new meaning from destruction by effacing, expunging, deleting, rubbing out, wiping out, obliterating (the only words on the last page of the book!) everything we have come to assume a book should be?
The book itself allows readers to enjoy “the divine light in destroying” (181) by including perforated index cards that can be removed and rearranged in any order the reader sees fit. This not only allows him to derive his own meaning from the book, but literally to reshape the novel itself! Unlike any other book, this allows the reader the chance to truly engage in “an act of destruction which develops paradoxically an element of creativeness in the totally new application of totally free will” (213)!!
This will stand as one of Nabokov’s most “maddening masterpiece[s:]” (221), one of his greatest puzzles, and a book that demolishes literary boundaries and gives new meaning to deconstruction, reader response, and other literary approaches.
May 31, 2017
(Lightning review)
Cash-grab by VVN's son which, hey shit, is pretty nifty in that the pages are perforated so you can remove the index cards and assemble the story however you want. Says a lot about how little was on the vine that I'm supposed to play Choose-Your-Own-Adventure with Nabokov. Methinks the Master would not approve. Bombshell: people do things for money OR completionism comes with a price.
Lightning Review rating: white-assed white bread
Cash-grab by VVN's son which, hey shit, is pretty nifty in that the pages are perforated so you can remove the index cards and assemble the story however you want. Says a lot about how little was on the vine that I'm supposed to play Choose-Your-Own-Adventure with Nabokov. Methinks the Master would not approve. Bombshell: people do things for money OR completionism comes with a price.
Lightning Review rating: white-assed white bread
August 6, 2023
should be enough to convince anyone that nabokov was indeed, a master of prose. even the dismembered shards of a story present here are so beautiful in their conception that you can't help but be swept into their strange, intoxicating rhythm. he had an extraordinary command of language, and some of the sentences here are perhaps the most beautiful of his career. each of the disparate story strands presents the reader with fascinating situations, characters who have a unique humanity to them... along with the sequel to the karamazov brothers, the completed version of this haunting work will remain (to me) a white whale of literature.
August 18, 2022
Honestly have no idea how I could possibly rate this, but this was probably the most fun I’ve ever had reading a book. If I was only using enjoyment level as criteria I’d give it 5 stars, however, I am not sure I can recommend this book to anyone since it is absolutely bizarre and filled with unsolvable riddles.
Loads of Lolita references, common threads with Laughter in the dark as well.
Flowers, scatology, obscenity, self-mutilation, homoerotic allusions.
Made me think of Bataille in terms of the connection between death and sexuality.
Random remembrance: Boxing Helena.
Loads of Lolita references, common threads with Laughter in the dark as well.
Flowers, scatology, obscenity, self-mutilation, homoerotic allusions.
Made me think of Bataille in terms of the connection between death and sexuality.
Random remembrance: Boxing Helena.
March 24, 2010
Let's first say what this book is: a series of fragments on index cards, ordered and selected by Nabokov's son Dmitri after the death of father Vladimir. And how it's been manufactured : a book that ought to hold five or six hundred pages, judging by it's dimensions, holds about 200 single-sided images of the index cards, as directly pencilled by Nabokov, on heavy-stock paper with actual perforations. So that the reader can indulge his own postmodernistic need to recontextualize the assemblage by imposing his own order.
This is a stupid gambit; some cards hold eight or ten stabs at notes on unspecified topics, spoken or thought-of by unknown characters. In no way does any of this resemble a novel, a story, or even just a book.
But still, if you stick with it, the old writer emerges, here lingering at his own deathbed and worrying-away at the fringes of a narrative. Nothing that holds together, mostly, really only the vaguest of roadmaps to a future clarity that he would unfortunately never regain.
But he won't be entirely defeated, either, and that's what this "assemblage" gambles that readers will feel. And it's true. With the millions of words published in his lifetime Nabokov here is diminished, dwindling down a steep decline, knowing that he will never survive to birth a long-form work. Knowing that his valedictory prose will end not on symphonic scale, but in the single breath of a final syllable of something more like a haiku. And the Nabokov reader will feel that.
Something like a Parker or a Coltrane taking stabs at riffs that may or may not ever make any final solo, we find VN touching certain familiar bases, doubling back on themes he's used over the years. Some fragments contain multiple blank spots he'll come back to later on :
...self-extinction
self-immolation, -tor
As I destroyed my thorax, I also destroyed (blank) and the (blank) and the laughing people in theaters with a not longer visible stage or screen, and the (blank) and the (blank) in the cemetery of the asymmetrical heart
autosuggestion, autosugetist
autosuggestive....
Safe to say that Mr Nabokov would fairly abhor this airing of his secret notes, and he would be right. He's been done no favors by having a son reverse his stated wish to have this material destroyed.
But then again, in One Final Nabokovian Reversal, you have to get back to the physical book again, this non-book, and try imagining it, some ten or fifteen years from now. All the pre-perfed cards long removed and scattered to the winds, the book would by then contain only a neatly blocked-out empty space, a secret hiding-place, as in the golden era of detective stories. A place where there might be, who knows -- a long-ago hotel key, a hardcandy with a curious name. A dried and pinned butterfly.
And you have to think Nabokov would like that idea better.
You'll only get a quick glimpse or two of the old man in this construction, but, if you know who you're looking for, the mark is indelible:
...Every now and then she would turn up for a few moments between trains, between planes, between lovers. My morning sleep would be interupted by heartrending sounds-- a window opening, a little bustle downstairs, a trunk coming, a trunk going, distant telephone conversations that seem to be conducted in conspiratorial whispers. If shivering in my nightshirt I dared to waylay her all she said would be "you really ought to lose some weight" or "I hope you transferred that money as I indicated"-- and all doors closed again.
That's him, alright.
This is a stupid gambit; some cards hold eight or ten stabs at notes on unspecified topics, spoken or thought-of by unknown characters. In no way does any of this resemble a novel, a story, or even just a book.
But still, if you stick with it, the old writer emerges, here lingering at his own deathbed and worrying-away at the fringes of a narrative. Nothing that holds together, mostly, really only the vaguest of roadmaps to a future clarity that he would unfortunately never regain.
But he won't be entirely defeated, either, and that's what this "assemblage" gambles that readers will feel. And it's true. With the millions of words published in his lifetime Nabokov here is diminished, dwindling down a steep decline, knowing that he will never survive to birth a long-form work. Knowing that his valedictory prose will end not on symphonic scale, but in the single breath of a final syllable of something more like a haiku. And the Nabokov reader will feel that.
Something like a Parker or a Coltrane taking stabs at riffs that may or may not ever make any final solo, we find VN touching certain familiar bases, doubling back on themes he's used over the years. Some fragments contain multiple blank spots he'll come back to later on :
...self-extinction
self-immolation, -tor
As I destroyed my thorax, I also destroyed (blank) and the (blank) and the laughing people in theaters with a not longer visible stage or screen, and the (blank) and the (blank) in the cemetery of the asymmetrical heart
autosuggestion, autosugetist
autosuggestive....
Safe to say that Mr Nabokov would fairly abhor this airing of his secret notes, and he would be right. He's been done no favors by having a son reverse his stated wish to have this material destroyed.
But then again, in One Final Nabokovian Reversal, you have to get back to the physical book again, this non-book, and try imagining it, some ten or fifteen years from now. All the pre-perfed cards long removed and scattered to the winds, the book would by then contain only a neatly blocked-out empty space, a secret hiding-place, as in the golden era of detective stories. A place where there might be, who knows -- a long-ago hotel key, a hardcandy with a curious name. A dried and pinned butterfly.
And you have to think Nabokov would like that idea better.
You'll only get a quick glimpse or two of the old man in this construction, but, if you know who you're looking for, the mark is indelible:
...Every now and then she would turn up for a few moments between trains, between planes, between lovers. My morning sleep would be interupted by heartrending sounds-- a window opening, a little bustle downstairs, a trunk coming, a trunk going, distant telephone conversations that seem to be conducted in conspiratorial whispers. If shivering in my nightshirt I dared to waylay her all she said would be "you really ought to lose some weight" or "I hope you transferred that money as I indicated"-- and all doors closed again.
That's him, alright.
Read
August 8, 2017Leggere questo abbozzo di romanzo è stata un’esperienza frustrante ancorché interessante; l’emozione di sbirciare nei meccanismi del processo creativo di un grande autore, di vedere riprodotte quelle schede ormai leggendarie, la grafia ordinata e le cancellature, e le sottolineature, insomma la brutta copia di quella che prometteva essere una grande storia, merita il viaggio ma al contempo è una sorta di coitus interruptus, si gode a metà e resta la malinconia e una punta di tristezza per un’operazione che non credo Nabokov avrebbe approvato.
L’ho preso in prestito in biblioteca per curiosità e sono soddisfatta ma se l’avessi acquistato ignara mi sarei sentita presa in giro. E’ vero che se ne è parlato molto però sarebbe stato più corretto un avvertimento sui contenuti almeno in quarta di copertina: chissà quanti lo compreranno convinti di trovarsi davanti ad un romanzo compiuto e avranno in mano materiale da museo o da fanatici dell’autore.
L’ho preso in prestito in biblioteca per curiosità e sono soddisfatta ma se l’avessi acquistato ignara mi sarei sentita presa in giro. E’ vero che se ne è parlato molto però sarebbe stato più corretto un avvertimento sui contenuti almeno in quarta di copertina: chissà quanti lo compreranno convinti di trovarsi davanti ad un romanzo compiuto e avranno in mano materiale da museo o da fanatici dell’autore.
June 13, 2011
Normally, I LOVE Nabokov. His work is genius. He is both subtle and powerful. While reading "The Original of Laura" by Vladmir Nabokov I found myself getting angry. And not just any sort of anger - its the kind of rage tha simmers just below the surface for no descernable amount of time and picks at you, annoys you. This sort of anger leads to resentments and can cause one (me) to become so enraged that they cry when trying to explain the feeling verbally. Of coure this is where my gender betrays me as no one takes a crying woman seriously.
However, this anger stems not from the work itself - at least not directly; but more from the backstory. Which can be summed up quickly: Dimitri Nabokov, son of Vladmir Nabokov; published this book posthumously despite Vladmir's wishes for it to never see the light of day were he to perish before its completion. Simple enough, right?
While I can sympathize with the grieving wife who could not bring herself to destroy her beloved husband's work, I cannot support his son doing the exact opposite of his wishes 30 years after the death of both parents. One theory I have been tossing around has to do with monetary value and some selfishness on Dimitri's side. Have fun spending that money...
If the novel had been mostly complete and simply uneditted this would not bother me nearly as much, but the truth is that the novel was far from complete. I had trouble finding anything that truly resembled a novel or the brillance that I had previously experienced in his other works. Where is this russian genius and the masterpiece I was anticipating? What I found seemed to mostly consist of an outline, references, and what appear to be some ramblings of a dying man as he floats in and out of lucidity. While that was interesting and thought-provoking, I cringed thinking about how Vladimir might feel knowing this is open to the public.
We can see the makings of a story; something resembling the beginnings of "Lolita" as the main character seems to harbor some of the same feelings of disgust towards the male form with a slightly unheathly fascination with the young, female counterpart. But this dark base for a novel quickly disintegrates and becomes what a bulk of this book truly was.
Part of me finds most of what was published here to be quite personal and reveals a side of Vladmir only his family was privy to see. This is I found to be particularly disturbing. While our society is not above publishing journals or other texts of that nature - I find this offensive.
I feel like Nabokov might be turning over in his grave.
Also, Dimitri provides a sort of preface to the story. It would be magnanimous of me to say it can be easily skipped over as it is quite crude and self-serving. He is not his father and never will be. Perhaps he should do something of value on his own instead of exploiting his dad.
However, this anger stems not from the work itself - at least not directly; but more from the backstory. Which can be summed up quickly: Dimitri Nabokov, son of Vladmir Nabokov; published this book posthumously despite Vladmir's wishes for it to never see the light of day were he to perish before its completion. Simple enough, right?
While I can sympathize with the grieving wife who could not bring herself to destroy her beloved husband's work, I cannot support his son doing the exact opposite of his wishes 30 years after the death of both parents. One theory I have been tossing around has to do with monetary value and some selfishness on Dimitri's side. Have fun spending that money...
If the novel had been mostly complete and simply uneditted this would not bother me nearly as much, but the truth is that the novel was far from complete. I had trouble finding anything that truly resembled a novel or the brillance that I had previously experienced in his other works. Where is this russian genius and the masterpiece I was anticipating? What I found seemed to mostly consist of an outline, references, and what appear to be some ramblings of a dying man as he floats in and out of lucidity. While that was interesting and thought-provoking, I cringed thinking about how Vladimir might feel knowing this is open to the public.
We can see the makings of a story; something resembling the beginnings of "Lolita" as the main character seems to harbor some of the same feelings of disgust towards the male form with a slightly unheathly fascination with the young, female counterpart. But this dark base for a novel quickly disintegrates and becomes what a bulk of this book truly was.
Part of me finds most of what was published here to be quite personal and reveals a side of Vladmir only his family was privy to see. This is I found to be particularly disturbing. While our society is not above publishing journals or other texts of that nature - I find this offensive.
I feel like Nabokov might be turning over in his grave.
Also, Dimitri provides a sort of preface to the story. It would be magnanimous of me to say it can be easily skipped over as it is quite crude and self-serving. He is not his father and never will be. Perhaps he should do something of value on his own instead of exploiting his dad.
October 13, 2020
Προσοχή στις απομιμήσεις :p
https://pepperlines.blogspot.com/2020...
https://pepperlines.blogspot.com/2020...
November 21, 2009
This is not really a novel in fragments, as so many reviewers have said, as a few notecards that he was planning to use in a book eventually. So I felt kind of dirty reading it, as it seems kind of wrong... and because his son is basically a nobody who, many cynics speculate, may have run out of money. What better way to make a fortune?
All that cynicism aside, it is really wonderful to read this and see what it is like to be a great writer who has lived through everything tragic int he 20th century and had a crazy life and written about ridiculous, dirty, and intense things. And to know you are dying, and that you can't beat it or run away. As a testimony to an intellectual exercise, the book is amazing - but I must be honest and admit it is because I love Nabokov, and feel this is a lot about him dying as well.
It has prompted some annoying reviews, including this one from Martin Amis, which I basically hated because I think it misses the point of his books, including Ada or Ardour, which I loved:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/...
It is a long and kind of rambling review, but not without some love for the writer, and interesting to read. But still at points annoying.
Amongst the best reviews (or most in line with what I think) are the one in the NYT (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/boo...). The book is indeed beguiling to Nabokov fans (I am "involved" with him, so it is magic to me), and I feel his attempts at taking control of death are heart-breaking in their authenticity.
Or the one from the New York Magazine (http://nymag.com/arts/books/reviews/6...), which writes:
My inner Kinbote suspects, in fact, that Laura isn’t unfinished at all—that it’s actually a perfectly executed work of literary performance art, a carefully engineered posthumous spectacle that its author spent his entire career preparing us to receive. I imagine him reaching down, even now, to crank the recursion machine harder than it’s ever been cranked. Those 30 years of drama, perhaps, were part of the work itself. He may not have even wanted the manuscript destroyed: It’s possible he wanted it read at precisely this moment, under precisely these circumstances. Incompleteness is the book’s central theme, so it could only have been finished by being left unfinished. Like Philip’s body in the midst of one of his trances, Laura survives, ecstatically, with key parts missing. It could be Nabokov’s very last brilliant joke: a black hole of textuality that he conjured and then slipped into, pulling his pencil behind him.
And totally fine is the Christian Science Monitor review: http://features.csmonitor.com/books/2....
More annoying reviews:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/...
and
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001... (although good on Dmitri's introduction)
and
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/peo... - but this is mosty annoying because it groups it with a story on Brangelina. It does quote Nabokov's comments on the book, though: 'He confesses that, "in my diurnal delirium [I:] kept reading it aloud to a small dream audience in a walled garden. My audience consisted of peacocks, pigeons, my long dead parents, two cypresses, several young nurses crouching around, and a family doctor so old as to be almost invisible"'.
All that cynicism aside, it is really wonderful to read this and see what it is like to be a great writer who has lived through everything tragic int he 20th century and had a crazy life and written about ridiculous, dirty, and intense things. And to know you are dying, and that you can't beat it or run away. As a testimony to an intellectual exercise, the book is amazing - but I must be honest and admit it is because I love Nabokov, and feel this is a lot about him dying as well.
It has prompted some annoying reviews, including this one from Martin Amis, which I basically hated because I think it misses the point of his books, including Ada or Ardour, which I loved:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/...
It is a long and kind of rambling review, but not without some love for the writer, and interesting to read. But still at points annoying.
Amongst the best reviews (or most in line with what I think) are the one in the NYT (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/boo...). The book is indeed beguiling to Nabokov fans (I am "involved" with him, so it is magic to me), and I feel his attempts at taking control of death are heart-breaking in their authenticity.
Or the one from the New York Magazine (http://nymag.com/arts/books/reviews/6...), which writes:
My inner Kinbote suspects, in fact, that Laura isn’t unfinished at all—that it’s actually a perfectly executed work of literary performance art, a carefully engineered posthumous spectacle that its author spent his entire career preparing us to receive. I imagine him reaching down, even now, to crank the recursion machine harder than it’s ever been cranked. Those 30 years of drama, perhaps, were part of the work itself. He may not have even wanted the manuscript destroyed: It’s possible he wanted it read at precisely this moment, under precisely these circumstances. Incompleteness is the book’s central theme, so it could only have been finished by being left unfinished. Like Philip’s body in the midst of one of his trances, Laura survives, ecstatically, with key parts missing. It could be Nabokov’s very last brilliant joke: a black hole of textuality that he conjured and then slipped into, pulling his pencil behind him.
And totally fine is the Christian Science Monitor review: http://features.csmonitor.com/books/2....
More annoying reviews:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/...
and
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001... (although good on Dmitri's introduction)
and
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/peo... - but this is mosty annoying because it groups it with a story on Brangelina. It does quote Nabokov's comments on the book, though: 'He confesses that, "in my diurnal delirium [I:] kept reading it aloud to a small dream audience in a walled garden. My audience consisted of peacocks, pigeons, my long dead parents, two cypresses, several young nurses crouching around, and a family doctor so old as to be almost invisible"'.
February 5, 2010
Reading this made me wish more than anything that Nabokov could've been able to complete this last novel. Just from all of his notes you could tell it would have been fantastic. You know how Nabokov's writing feels? It was like that from the very first line.
This book looks huge, but each page is just one handwritten index card, with his notes typed out at the bottom. It only took me about an hour to read through it, but I could tell the story would've been amazing. I can see how paying $35 full-price for this would piss some people off, but in my opinion, it's definately worth owning (plus I didn't pay full-price). You get to see Nabokov's handwriting, his scribbles and eraser marks...how cool is that? Even the actual book cover under the dust jacket is designed as an index card with scribbles all over it. Awesome.
This would probably be best for Nabokov fans as more of a collector's book, not one to just sit and read. The one thing that puzzled me was each index card is perforated so you could punch them out and switch them around as Nabokov might have done. Really? I just can't picture any book lover desecrating a book like that. I know if anyone tried taking the cards out of mine, some serious shit would go down.
In any case, this is worth at least checking out. If you can find an unsealed copy at the bookstore, you can grab a coffee and a chair and read through the whole thing pretty quick. If you love Nabokov though, I'd recommend adding this one to your collection.
This book looks huge, but each page is just one handwritten index card, with his notes typed out at the bottom. It only took me about an hour to read through it, but I could tell the story would've been amazing. I can see how paying $35 full-price for this would piss some people off, but in my opinion, it's definately worth owning (plus I didn't pay full-price). You get to see Nabokov's handwriting, his scribbles and eraser marks...how cool is that? Even the actual book cover under the dust jacket is designed as an index card with scribbles all over it. Awesome.
This would probably be best for Nabokov fans as more of a collector's book, not one to just sit and read. The one thing that puzzled me was each index card is perforated so you could punch them out and switch them around as Nabokov might have done. Really? I just can't picture any book lover desecrating a book like that. I know if anyone tried taking the cards out of mine, some serious shit would go down.
In any case, this is worth at least checking out. If you can find an unsealed copy at the bookstore, you can grab a coffee and a chair and read through the whole thing pretty quick. If you love Nabokov though, I'd recommend adding this one to your collection.
January 1, 2010
This books consists of Nabakov's notes for his last, unfinished novel. He had instructed his wife and son to destroy the notes after his death, but they couldn't bear to do so and, after agonizing over it for years, his son finally decided to publish them. The book is wonderful as an object: lovely clear font, heavy white paper, sewn binding, perforations around the cards so that you can punch them out arrange them an different orders as Nabokov surely would have if he had lived long enough to continue work on the novel. His concept for the book was interesting. It centered around a cold woman named Flora/Laura, and mostly was told by her obese, unloved husband who comes up with the notion of slowly obliterating himself by imagining progressively erasing parts of his body (hard to explain, you just have to read it). It seemed like he was toying with the idea of a novel within a novel, too. Also interesting that early in the book he approached writing Lolita again by creating a lecherous stepfather named Hubert H. Hubert for Flora: an M-less Humbert Humbert! But then he veered away from that.
Read
March 10, 2018God I feel so gross right now. When I got this book from the library I didn't realise how fragmented it would be, otherwise I would never have read it because it's so obvious that this book should never have been published in the way it exists now. To some degree I understand the decision but at the same time Nabokov didn't want his manuscripts to be published and looking through the fragments of this book that probably add up to about 60 pages in total. I guess I would feel better about it if at least parts of the novel had been finished but it's just a bunch of longer notes. I have to say it is interesting to see how Nabokov worked but ultimately it's not worth feeling guilty for the rest of the day because I read something that wasn't intended to be seen by anyone.
April 5, 2023
4 γιατί φαντάζομαι το ολοκληρωμένο αποτέλεσμα αυτών των αποσπασμάτων μιας ιστορίας άλλης μιας Λολίτας, ενός επιστήμονα που καταλήγει στην ύπνωση για να καταφέρει έστω κι έτσι την αυτό-εξαφάνισή του, κι έναν συγγραφέα που εμπλέκει στοιχεία της αυτοβιογραφίας του σαν συνεκτικό δεσμό φαινομενικά αταίριαστων στοιχείων.
March 7, 2011
I can't understand the impulse to publish this. No doubt it's immensely interesting and useful to critics, Nabokov scholars, and academics, and perhaps that's reason enough. It is beautifully presented and substantial, a facsimile edition of the 3 x 5 notecards on which Nabokov famously wrote and on which he was composing his final novel when he died. It's printed on heavy stock paper, each page perforated so that the reproduced card can be punched out if the reader desires and kept stacked and boxed just as VN himself probably kept them. Underneath each card duplicating the author's handwriting, corrections, and original composition is the printed text of the card's contents, though it's seldom needed because he wrote legibly. The problem is the substance. What we have is unmistakably Nabokov, the urbane and silky style, the clever wordplay--"Games of blindman's buff would be played in the buff," he wrote--and even the familiar theme of pedophilia with a character named Hubert J. Hubert who I thought slimier and more disturbing than Humbert. It's not the dexterous Nabokov we know; he didn't have time to do much with it. The Original of Laura amounts to a collection of notes or several series of cards dealing with a potential thread or theme. But none of it's developed, and there's not enough to any of these threads to make a sustained narrative. No doubt had he lived and continued it he would've polished it into something fine, an elegant narrative plumped with wonderful characters and situations. As it is, though, for the general reader it's merely a curio.
December 26, 2009
The narrative of this book is the commentaries of one cuckolded husband on one memoir written by his wife's lover. The book starts off as a refutation of his dismal portrayal in the memoir, and tender-ish recollections of the wife, but then the husband begins writing obsessively about the process of auto-dissolution, in which the mind convinces the body it has died--the mind ANNIHILATES the body. The book starts of fairly coherent, but enacts dismantling toward the end--ostensibly, Dmitri Nabokov assures us in the beginning, because Vladimir Nabokov simply ran out of time. But the book itself dissolves between the hands, enacting suspiciously successfully, the process of auto-dissolution that its author is obsessed with. Forget the term "novel in fragments", don't quibble about it anymore. The book is a little like an highly-plotted piece of literary performance art.
The other notable thing about this edition is its layout -- SO COOL -- heavy-stock pages, the top half are reproductions of the notecards on which Nabokov composed, perforated so a reader can punch them out and arrange/rearrange them, as Dmitri had to (and Vladimir before him!) and at the bottom, translations of the text.
As always, Nabokov's clean, light, precise language, his brilliant facility with constructions that I so envy and admire.
SIGH!
The other notable thing about this edition is its layout -- SO COOL -- heavy-stock pages, the top half are reproductions of the notecards on which Nabokov composed, perforated so a reader can punch them out and arrange/rearrange them, as Dmitri had to (and Vladimir before him!) and at the bottom, translations of the text.
As always, Nabokov's clean, light, precise language, his brilliant facility with constructions that I so envy and admire.
SIGH!
November 29, 2009
As an admirer of Nabokov, I wish I could give this a higher rating. Unfortunately, it’s not a book but rather a fragment of one.
We have an obese man blissfully oblivious to being cuckolded by his wife until the fact is driven home by a novel penned by another lover and he decides to obliterate himself by meditating on the process. None of the characters is fully realized and it’s apparent Nabokov was a long way from completing the story.
Am I among those who wish it never had been published? No. A little is better than no Nabokov. The wit is present. The playfulness with language. The quirky character names. There’s even a Hubert H. Hubert, reminding one of another character. Hopefully there’s enough to interest those who haven’t already to investigate his oeuvre. It’s inspired me to read again some favorites.
As I writer, I also found it interesting to see the hand-written cards he used to compose his manuscript. It’s obvious they are not a complete book but a sort of road map Nabokov used as he explored, changed and developed the novel already present in his mind. What a book it might have been had he lived to complete it is undoubtedly a far cry from what we are given.
We have an obese man blissfully oblivious to being cuckolded by his wife until the fact is driven home by a novel penned by another lover and he decides to obliterate himself by meditating on the process. None of the characters is fully realized and it’s apparent Nabokov was a long way from completing the story.
Am I among those who wish it never had been published? No. A little is better than no Nabokov. The wit is present. The playfulness with language. The quirky character names. There’s even a Hubert H. Hubert, reminding one of another character. Hopefully there’s enough to interest those who haven’t already to investigate his oeuvre. It’s inspired me to read again some favorites.
As I writer, I also found it interesting to see the hand-written cards he used to compose his manuscript. It’s obvious they are not a complete book but a sort of road map Nabokov used as he explored, changed and developed the novel already present in his mind. What a book it might have been had he lived to complete it is undoubtedly a far cry from what we are given.
September 26, 2016
[2.5/5]
This books was incredibly interesting as a background to Lolita and many of Nabokov past works. (H.H emerges here but as 'Hubert Hubert').
Nabokov asked for this manuscript (written in fragments on cards) to be destroyed if he died and it wasn't finished beforehand.
I felt slightly guilty for reading it, due simply to Nabokov not wanting it published, but nevertheless it was captivating to read the notes by Dimitri (his son) and gather a few 'behind the scenes' looks at Nabokov's mind.
It was my natural inclination to warm to it simply because, hey, it's Nabokov, the guy whose short stories I've been re reading for god knows how long now, but as a book/story it fell short for me (although I really shouldn't view it as such). As a little piece of 'history' behind Nabokov's works, I found it valuable, as well as the witty insights from his son, and the struggle of whether or not the publish this manuscript.
This books was incredibly interesting as a background to Lolita and many of Nabokov past works. (H.H emerges here but as 'Hubert Hubert').
Nabokov asked for this manuscript (written in fragments on cards) to be destroyed if he died and it wasn't finished beforehand.
I felt slightly guilty for reading it, due simply to Nabokov not wanting it published, but nevertheless it was captivating to read the notes by Dimitri (his son) and gather a few 'behind the scenes' looks at Nabokov's mind.
It was my natural inclination to warm to it simply because, hey, it's Nabokov, the guy whose short stories I've been re reading for god knows how long now, but as a book/story it fell short for me (although I really shouldn't view it as such). As a little piece of 'history' behind Nabokov's works, I found it valuable, as well as the witty insights from his son, and the struggle of whether or not the publish this manuscript.
March 2, 2013
This is surely a mind-blowing book. Although you may find it unnecessarily thick with a lot of blank spaces, but it is the way for you to take notes while this book is hitting certain points in your brain.
Still, it's Nabokov's style. The difference is that he is bedridden, near death. Maybe you can say this is a book that guides you to experience the near death experience. Word. There are delusions, painful toes, dissolution and melting feelings.
Also, you could read it as a museum of Nabokov's works. He himself is the collector. This book absolutely worth re-reading. There are Lolita parts, Pale fire parts, all could find their original position. He is organizing his mind with a miserable physical feeling.
This is a book about his final days, about autobio with images flashing back from his childhood, and his will power deciding to have a taste of dying, and it is FUN.
Still, it's Nabokov's style. The difference is that he is bedridden, near death. Maybe you can say this is a book that guides you to experience the near death experience. Word. There are delusions, painful toes, dissolution and melting feelings.
Also, you could read it as a museum of Nabokov's works. He himself is the collector. This book absolutely worth re-reading. There are Lolita parts, Pale fire parts, all could find their original position. He is organizing his mind with a miserable physical feeling.
This is a book about his final days, about autobio with images flashing back from his childhood, and his will power deciding to have a taste of dying, and it is FUN.
May 8, 2018
I will not take into account the beautiful edition of this book, which was gifted to me. You can take out every index card, perfect reproductions of Nabokov's (he thought it's the best kind of material to write on, allowing easy rearranging, etc.). You can rearrange them, just as he ought to.
The book itself is unfinished, it was his final project before he died. It's recognizable, of course. Only short passages are sticking together already, blended with some weird excesses about the authors' fat legs and toes he despised. The novel fragments are maddening as well, a strange erotic fever in flashes, rehashes of earlier works. This is a book for adorers of his, it reads strangely indeed, but it is lovely to have. Don't expect a novel you can 'read' read. I used it as an inspiration and motivation for my own writing - if you let it, it will show you an adventurous way of writing.
The book itself is unfinished, it was his final project before he died. It's recognizable, of course. Only short passages are sticking together already, blended with some weird excesses about the authors' fat legs and toes he despised. The novel fragments are maddening as well, a strange erotic fever in flashes, rehashes of earlier works. This is a book for adorers of his, it reads strangely indeed, but it is lovely to have. Don't expect a novel you can 'read' read. I used it as an inspiration and motivation for my own writing - if you let it, it will show you an adventurous way of writing.
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