All the fuss about the publication of Vladimir Nabokov’s last “novel” was pointless. The book is just a collection of notes that’s been cleverly marketed, says Nathaniel Rich.
Let’s come clean—$35 is at stake, after all. Vladimir Nabokov’s posthumously published
The Original of Laura (Dying Is Fun), despite its considerable width (nearly 2 inches) and heft (2 pounds, 11 ounces), its publisher’s description (“a novel in fragments”), and its advance praise (“a fascinating novel” says biographer Brian Boyd), is not a novel. Not remotely. It is not to be confused with Truman Capote’s
Answered Prayers, Ralph Ellison’s
Juneteenth, or Italo Svevo’s
Further Confessions of Zeno—unfinished novels that contain long, continuous sections of writing, from which it is possible to apprehend the larger work’s subject matter, scope, and ambition, however imperfect the execution. To describe
The Original of Laura as a novel would be like mistaking a construction site for a cathedral. Yes, the blueprints might call for flying buttresses and oriel windows, but for now it is only a mess of wheelbarrows, uncut limestone, and piles of sand.
Click Image Below to View Our Gallery
These pages are the embryonic jottings made in preparation for a novel—long before it’s certain there’s even a novel to be written. There are notes to self (“What kind of folklore preceded poetry in Rus?; speak a little of Lom. and Derzh…”); marooned sentence fragments, some of them striking (“The orange awnings of southern summers” and a reference to death’s “tempting emptiness”); and incomplete scenes haunted by faintly drawn characters. Many of the scenes deal with the grim obsessions of old age: sexual futility, corporeal decrepitude, and death. There is also wordplay (“He brought from the favorite florist of fashionable girls a banal bevy of bird-of-paradise flowers”), misspellings (what the Note on Text charitably refers to as “nonstandard” spellings”), and unveiled references to Nabokov’s own earlier stories and novels, Lolita especially. This may indicate some self-referential design; the allusions also might have been private jokes that Nabokov never intended to publish. Who knows?
“I have decided that my father, with a wry and fond smile, might well have contradicted himself upon seeing me in my present situation and said... Say or do what you like, but why not make some money on the damn thing?”
I’ve read summaries of the plot in other publications, but I couldn’t for the life of me offer my own. At one point in the three-year public debate that preceded
Laura’s publication, different Nabokov scholars, who had been granted access to the secret manuscript, offered different plot summaries. One talked about a character named Philip Wild, an enormously corpulent scholar, who marries a much younger, wildly promiscuous woman called Flora. In the other version, Flora is the heroine and the model for “Laura,” a character in a novel written by her lover; Laura and Flora then engage in some sort of meta-fictional battle. Nabokovians wanted to know—which plot summary was correct? As it turns out, both describe sections that do appear in
The Original of Laura. But that doesn’t mean any of it makes sense.
What is evident, however, is that the furious controversy over the manuscript’s publication was waged on false grounds. The question was whether Dmitri Nabokov
, Vladimir’s heir and literary executive, should publish
Laura and defy his father’s wish to burn the manuscript upon his death. Ron Rosenbaum, John Banville, Tom Stoppard, and newspaper book reporters the world over joined the debate. Dmitri raised the stakes by declaring
Laura “the most concentrated distillation” of his father’s creativity. Now that
Laura has been revealed to be little more than a collection of notes, the debate seems silly, meretricious.
The Original of Laura. By Vladimir Nabokov. 304 pages. Knopf. $35.
It would be unfair to fault Dmitri, who is now 75 and reportedly quite ill, for choosing to publish. Despite its flaws,
Laura is not embarrassing to his father because it doesn’t come close to resembling a finished work. In Dmitri’s introduction to the book, he takes a darkly mystical tone when justifying his decision:
Laura is described as existing in a “penumbra,” a “disturbing specter” shrouded in “gloom”; he says he doesn’t think “my father or my father’s shade would have opposed the release of
Laura once
Laura had survived the hum of time this long” and describes being finally overcome by “an otherforce I could not resist.” Otherforce, indeed: Besides a contract with Knopf, there was an excerpt in Playboy (“we’ve never paid this much for a book excerpt, ever,” acknowledged the magazine’s literary editor), and the day before the book’s publication, Dmitri announced he would auction off the very note cards on which
Laura is composed (Christie’s estimates a take of $400,000-$600,000). Given these developments, a different comment by Dmitri comes to mind: “I have decided that my father, with a wry and fond smile, might well have contradicted himself upon seeing me in my present situation and said... Say or do what you like, but why not make some money on the damn thing?”
