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Dmitri Nabokov, the only son of Vladimir Nabokov ...
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http://www.postandcourier.com/news/2010/jan/24/nabokov-lives-on-in-laura
Nabokov lives on in 'Laura'
Reviewer Catherine Holmes, an English instructor at the College of Charleston
Sunday, January 24, 2010
THE ORIGINAL OF LAURA (DYING IS FUN): A Novel in Fragments. By Vladimir Nabokov. Edited by Dmitri Nabokov. Knopf. 278 pages. $35.
Dmitri Nabokov, the only son of Vladimir Nabokov, wonders if he should be reviled or thanked for his decision to publish his father's incomplete last work, "The Original of Laura." Well, thanked, with caveats.
Is "Laura" unprecedented in structure and style, as Dmitri also says in his introduction? No, it's not really possible to pinpoint the structure of a work so fractional. "The Original of Laura" is not a novel yet.
Nabokov died, leaving these tantalizing notes on 138 index cards. Dmitri's volume invites us into what Faulkner called the author's "lumber room." The boards are lying about; we can only guess what Nabokov might have made with them.
Would he approve of the present volume? That question stirred a prepublication hullabaloo that lasted a couple of years. Nabokov expressly forbade publication of "Laura" and instructed his wife, Vera, to incinerate it. Instead, she let the manuscript live, as did Dmitri, who kept it "in the stillness of a strongbox and the meanders of my mind." There it stayed until recent debates drew it out of hiding.
The book itself is gorgeously designed. Dmitri and the editors made a wise choice to spotlight the novel's unfinished status. Each thick page features a reproduction of one handwritten index card, followed by the printed text of that card. The cards are perforated, so readers can extract them from the book and shuffle them as the author might have done.
"The Original of Laura" extends Nabokov's fascination with doubling and mirrors, with embedding stories within stories, and especially with death and survival. Laura, who gives her name to the title, is actually Flora, a rail-thin 24-year-old Philistine with an appetite for men and a distaste for her fat husband.
A second strand of the notes moves to one of Flora's lovers, who writes a novel about her fictional double, Laura. A final strand centers on the story of Flora's husband, the "mad neuroscientist" Paul Wild, who hates his body and is attempting to erase it from existence.
How poignant to imagine Vladimir Nabokov writing these sentences from his deathbed in a Lausanne hospital: "I hit upon the art of thinking away my body, my being, mind itself. To think away thought -- luxurious suicide, delicious dissolution!"
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