Vladimir Mylnikov[ to Piers Smith]
Apart from obviouse artistic value of TOOL, personally, I love the
correlation between the content and the title, as do others. I'm not sure how
familiar you may be with Nabokov's writings, but every book of his is a big
surprise.
Fran Assa: Piers, read
it any way you please. At least you have that option [...] "it is always interesting to know what an author was working on in
the final stage of their creative journey" That's exactly my interest in
the matter. So where was our beloved VN going, mentally, with this planned
book?
JM: Not every surprise is a
good one. To have the option to read TOoL risking a disappointment is,
indeed, important, irrespectively of the outcome. Laura is a
set of manuscripted cards, envelopped by our loving
interpretations, while the novel VN had in his mind will not
ever be retrieved.
Chip Kidd's American cover is significant: the
clear-cut letters of the title gradually dissolve into black, to
present graphically that which Sebastian had already
concluded:"only one half of the notion of death can
be said really to exist: this side of the question,". His opinion is
distinct from Shade's ( 209- 214): "What moment in
the gradual decay/Does resurrection choose? What year? What day?/Who has the
stopwatch? Who rewinds the tape?/Are some less lucky, or do all escape?/ A
syllogism: other men die; but I/Am not another; therefore I’ll not
die."
Who authored SK and Shade has, at
last, escaped from space-time's cage but Sebastian and Shade are still
with us. If there's a tape and
someone to rewind its clockwork mechanism- or if there's "another side"
this is something that we, as readers, also shall not learn from
TOoL. From this side, though, unlike
every other novel and poem Nabokov has written, at every
re-reading from the unpracticed shores of my appraisal,
I see its lines recede into oblivion. Fortunately for me an expansion
of miraculous worlds inside
worlds remain.