Carolyn Kunin: David Lodge is
surprisingly kind to Laura in The Literary Review...*
JM: Wasn't it instead strikingly kind to
Dmitri, kind of a "politelly correct" item?
Lodge simply recognized that Nabokov is very Nabokovian, as it was to
be expected - but he immediately went on to discuss Dmitri's editorial
projects and certain accidental serendipities not planned by VN:
"The work has been lavishly and reverently designed
and produced...the subtitle...was presumably not Nabokov's...The last recto page
of the book reproduces...a fitting tailpiece to the book, but it was not of
course Nabokov who placed it there... The
way the manuscript has been ingeniously edited and reproduced overcomes to a
large extent the disappointment and frustration ... it achieves an interesting
aesthetic effect unintended by the author...the
physical marks on the index cards...the tantalising space he left to be filled
in later...an effect akin to a caesura in poetry...and... Nabokov's notes to
himself.
Lodge summarized it very aptly in the end:
"Is it, as the blurb claims, Nabokov's
'final great book'? No. Does it contain brilliant, funny, astonishing
sentences only Nabokov could have written? Yes. Should it have been preserved
and published? Definitely."
One of the most interesting reviews in my
opinion is one that remains unstranslated, namely, "O escritor e suas
ferramentas*" by Almir de Freitas (Bravo,dez.2009).
Summing hastily up: Freitas
stresses the fairy-tale importance of the circumstances which encase
the note-cards (themselves, "a heap of scraps") because, for him, in these
events lie the true, real to life's deceits that constitute the
"nabokovian story" which involves death, ghosts,
money: ("Mas a história do manuscrito - que envolve morte,
dinheiro e até fantasmas - é tipicamente nabokoviana").
Freitas skilfully
inserts informations which were not often mentioned in the
abundant reviews flooding our list. He departs from one interview
where Nabokov introduced Laura, he adds
information from Boyd's biography and a description of his initial
reactions and a later change of heart, he includes a summary
of conclusions arrived by other reviewers. Next he links these items,
extending them from "The Opposite of Laura" to Jeff Edmund's 1998
Desommelier invention.
Freitas becomes a story-teller in his own
right when dealing Dmitri's legendary dimension, his feats and
accidents, like a spectacular fall from a climb over at the Teton
mountains, a near-death experience with a light seen in the end of a dark
tunnel, his "Lolito" nickname, the Hamletian indecision
confronting a fatherly ghost. Even the emergence of agent Wylie is
woven into the fable that turns Nabokov, the writer, into one of his
own creations inserted in another novel inside a novel that matches
Laura's.
*"Ferramentas" is the word
for "tools" - Nabokov's being a pencil with a sharp point at one end and an
erasor at the other - both equally significant...(he acknowledges
B.Boyd's use of this meaning
for "tool")