In my role as Vladimir Nabokov's biographer, I was the first person other than Nabokov, his widow and his son to read The Original of Laura. After years of imploring Véra Nabokov for access to the manuscript, so that I could write accurately about the novelist's last years and his final but unfinished novel, she allowed me to read it in 1987, 10 years after her husband's death – once only, without taking notes, and under her eyes, which were trained on me like a drill.
When Véra and Dmitri later asked me what I thought they should do with the manuscript, which Nabokov had told Véra she must destroy, I said, to my own surprise, “Destroy it.” How glad I am that they ignored my advice and that their attachment to Nabokov's work overrode even their respect for his wishes.
The Original Of Laura: A Novel in Fragments, by Vladimir Nabokov, Knopf, 278 pages, $42
The Original of Laura could have been published badly, as if it were a new Lolita. Instead, it has been better published than I could have imagined.
Nabokov famously composed in pencil, on index cards, and not in sequence but working on any part of the image already firmly in place in his mind. The Original of Laura reproduces each index card, front and back, perforated so that it can be taken out and reshuffled according to a reader's sense of the ideal order. Many cards, especially the first 50 or so, form a clear sequence. Others would have undergone Nabokov's rearrangement, and readers can play Nabokov by anticipating the order he might have chosen.
(Spoiler alert: You might think that the card on page 189, “First a,” in Nabokov's private number code, should be taken out and inserted almost within the card on page 1, which bears the novel's title and Nabokov's “Ch. One.”)
The more I reread it – and Nabokov famously said that one cannot read a good novel, only reread it – the more I discover and admire
An index card, reproduced in full colour, occupies the top half of each page. Nabokov's careful hand could hardly be more legible, but the bottom half of each page also prints an edited version of the text, black print on the light grey background of the remainder of the page. Sometimes a rapid thought, a new phrase written over a smudgy erasure, or a preoccupied mind's careless spelling blurs the handwritten sense and makes the printed text particularly welcome.
Subtitled A Novel in Fragments on the stunning cover and “(Dying is Fun)” on the title page, The Original of Laura as published rightly flaunts its unfinishedness. Readers should not expect a new story to rival Lolita's intensity or a new character to match Pnin's pathos, but instead glimpses of a famously challenging writer still challenging himself and his readers in his late 70s, with death closing in.
Death also closes in on the two main characters in very different ways. Philip Wild, a lecturer in experimental psychology at the University of Ganglia, enormously fat but teetering on tiny feet, experiments with willing his own death, shutting off his body from his toes upward, but restoring himself again at will. Death takes him anyway by surprise: Wild's death, after all, will be unwilled.
An inside page from The Original of Laura: The edges of the cards are perforated, making it possible for the reader to remove them and rearrange their order.
His much younger wife, the deliciously unlikeable and dizzyingly unfaithful Flora, is the original of the heroine of a kiss-and-tell novel, My Laura, by a thoroughly elusive, thoroughly self-erasing lover. A bestseller, it also proves to be, to Philip Wild's surprise, “a maddening masterpiece.”
In what seems as if it would have been the last chapter of The Original of Laura – “Last” and “Z” in Nabokov's code – one of her friends notices Flora on a railway platform on a bench with a softcover My Laura on her lap. Flora doubts whether she will be able to read the book, but her friend insists she must read the story of her life. “And there's your wonderful death. … You'll scream with laughter. It's the craziest death in the world.” But Flora will have none of it.
