James Studdard: Do these scribbled
notes offer any redemptive return to academics, or is VN's reputation
diminished? Is the novel simply a teaser to ramp up the sale price of the
note cards?" I really am confused by all this piffle.
JM: Critical
essays about "TOoL", as expected, vary from (mainly
manual) hands-off and thumbs down
signals, to ecstatic applause. Of course, there is no final authority to establish the value of a work of art
- but - this time, there is an additional excitement! Outside the academic and artistic realm, the
concrete penciled note-cards are being auctioned to reveal
the commercial value connected to " all this
piffle"...
"Nabokov's The Original of Laura (Dying Is
Fun)... would-be novel has been resurrected by a crafty agent-publisher
alliance that has orchestrated a high drama around it, complete with an unusual
half-embargo on advance reading copies;"... "a concerted effort to exploit to the hilt this possible
relation to Nabokov's own disintegration: His illness and suffering are meant to
enhance the weak text and fuel the industry-orchestrated drama...an insult to
the artistic control Nabokov exerted in all of his finished work." (A.
Hemon);
"The real stars of the
night were the notecards themselves. They were housed in a glass case in a
large, green-carpeted room off the lobby. People waited in line to get a peek at
what are likely Nabokov's final written words, before the cards are auctioned
off at Christie's next month." (Steven Kurutz);
"even if Nabokov did not expect his family to burn
the unfinished manuscript, did he really expect them to flog it to the highest
bidder? That is exactly what will happen on December 4, when Christie's will
auction the document in New York..."
(Rachel H.Donaldson).
Nevertheless, I cannot agree with Charles
Mudede:"It is not a surprise that Nabokov is the greatest novelist in
English... which not only has failed to produce a school of exceptional
novelists but also philosophers...The English is only something special when it
comes to economics. Ours is the language of doing (and writing about)
business."
Missing the "e" found in Dorian Gray's
author's ( but the transposition of life into uncorruptible art
is there - except for a dismantling of "Laura" intended
to reach its original inspiration) there is Philip Wild,
who "embarks upon a 'process of self-obliteration...presumably
...reflected on the pages of the finished novel... so the text would be
self-deleting as well..." (A.Hemon); "it
isn't a stretch to imagine a wretched Nabokov in his Lausanne hospital bed,
wishing to "efface/expunge/erase/delete/rub out/wipe out/obliterate" his
offending body parts "(H. McAlpin). However Michael
Dirda reverts this processes when he believes that "'The
Original of Laura' is for Nabokov completists...", just like Amis who doesn't "think the book's
publication dilutes the writer's reputation in any way,"
for "[Nabokov's] 'corpus is so amazingly
strong'..."