Sandy Klein sends a link (http://www.theamericanscholar.org/nabokov-lives-on/ ) to Brian Boyd's  "Nabokov Lives On," where he explains "why his unfinished novel, Laura, deserved to be published" and discloses " what's left in the voluminous archive of his unpublished work."

 

Brian Boyd observes that "The Original of Laura could have been published badly, as if it were a new Lolita or at least a new Pnin. Instead it was better published than I could  have imagined," but he forgets that many Nabokov readers will only have access to often defective translations. There is also "Playboy's" TOoL, or its future re-editions, to consider. The luxurious first-edition, often described as an "objet d'art," shall probably become a reliquary for this novel's material (facsimile) cards, its shape and texture intimately linked to the written words it holds.  

 

For B.Boyd the reader needs to "forget the tension of Lolita or the ecstatic, 'passionate pump-joy' release of Ada; forget, above all, the romance of first love in Speak, Memory or in Mary," to be able to grasp TOoL's innovative qualities: Nabokov's feat, in TOoL, derives from his having inverted "what he values most, but, as always, in a new way. He inverts love as a path to self-transcendence ...Flora-as sterility goddess wiping the sperm off her groin....Art becomes not a way to self-transcendence here but, rather, the vengeful obliteration of others or the skulking effacement of the tattletale self."  Wild's "whole obsessive quest seems an apotheosis of self and of stasis, a self-fixated and self-enclosed attempt to circumvent the limits to the self that death imposes"...If art "can offer a kind of immortality, a different promise of transcending death..." the reader won't find it in TOoL: "not here, not in this novel," as B.Boyd concludes. But he also notes that "Nabokov has hidden under our noses the beating core of tenderness in this apparently heartlessly hard novel: Flora as potential Daisy, not as Lolita, is one of  this novel's "secret points," relating the paragraphs about the barber of Kasbeam, to equally incidental Hubert H. Hubert and his pathos.

 

For Boyd, humankind has "evolved into a storytelling species, and that the main reason we have done so is because stories improve still further the social cognition..." and that which "constitutes the distinctively Nabokovian...may be most extraordinary not so much as prose but as story...No one has taken this further than Nabokov does in his last novel."  As I see it, there's no better example for Nabokov's ingenious shifts of perspective, in TOoL, than to contrast the present storytelling project with the one that had been entertained by the younger Nabokov, in his biography of Gogol (NG:78), when he states that it is the enchanter, “more than the yarn-spinner or the teacher" who interests him, or “the remarkable phenomenon of mere forms of speech directly giving rise to live creatures” in Gogol, and Shakespeare’s “verbal poetical texture…immensely superior to the structure of his plays as plays." 

 

Perhaps Wilde's solipsism is contagious to some of his unfortunate readers, since I have no intention to "forget," not even momentarily, Lolita, Ada, Machenka and Speak, Memory and be ready to appreciate TOoL's novelties and improve my social-cognitive abilities. My old fashioned passion remains faithful to Nabokov's genius as an enchanter.     

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All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.