Advance PW Review: Nabokov's 'The Original of Laura'

-- Publishers Weekly, 7/30/2009 8:01:00 AM

Vladimir Nabokov's much-discussed last, unfinished novel, The Original of Laura, is reviewed here by PW, in one of the first critical takes on the book.

The Original of Laura: (Dying Is Fun)
Vladimir Nabokov. Knopf, $35 (288p) ISBN 978-0-307-27189-1
Before Nabokov’s death in 1977, he instructed his wife to burn the unfinished first draft—handwritten on 138 index cards—of what would be his final novel. She did not, and the cards have been locked in a Swiss bank vault for the past 30 years. Now, Nabokov’s son, Dmitri, who contributes what could charitably be called a skippable preface, is releasing them to the world, though after reading the book, readers will wonder if the Lolita author is laughing or turning over in his grave.

This very unfinished work reads largely like an outline, full of seeming notes-to-self, references to source material, self-critique, sentence fragments and commentary (“The whole scene was pretty artificial in a fishy theatrical way”). It would be a mistake, in other words, for readers to come to this expecting anything resembling a novel, though the few actual scenes wedged between the notes are unmistakably Nabokovian, with cutting wordplay, piercing description and uneasy-making situations—a character named Hubert H. Hubert molesting a girl, a decaying old man’s strained attempt at perfunctory sex with his younger wife.

What form the book may have eventually taken is, of course, a mystery, but the story appears to be about a woman named Flora (spelled, once, as “FLaura”), the daughter of an artist couple—he a photographer who appears briefly before killing himself, she a ballet dancer—who, at some point, is the subject of a scandalous novel, Laura, written by a former lover. Flora’s beginnings are Lolita-like; it is she who has the encounter with Hubert and, years later, marries an older neurologist named Philip Wild to whom she is marginally faithful. The portions of the draft taken from “Wild’s notes” contain some spectacular prose: “I saw you again, Aurora Lee.... Your painted pout and cold gaze were, come to think of it, very like the official lips and eyes of Flora, my wayward wife, and your flimsy frock of black silk might have come from her recent wardrobe.”

Mostly, this amounts to a peek inside the author’s process and mindset as he neared death. Indeed, mortality, suicide, impotence, a disgust with the male human body—and an appreciation of the fit, young female body—figure prominently.

Knopf is publishing the book in an intriguing form: Nabokov’s handwritten index cards are reproduced with a transcription below of each card’s contents, generally less than a paragraph. The scanned index cards (perforated so they can be removed from the book) are what make this book an amazing document; they reveal Nabokov’s neat handwriting (a mix of cursive and print) and his own edits to the text: some lines are blacked out with scribbles, others simply crossed out. Words are inserted, typesetting notes (“no quotes”) and copyedit symbols pepper the writing, and the reverse of many cards bears a wobbly X. Depending on the reader’s eye, the final card in the book is either haunting or the great writer’s final sly wink: it’s a list of synonyms for “efface”—expunge, erase, delete, rub out, wipe out and, finally, obliterate. (Nov.)