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The Original of Laura

by Vladimir Nabokov, Dmitri Nabokov (Preface)

3.32 of 5 stars 3.32 · rating details · 648 ratings · 124 reviews

When Vladimir Nabokov died in 1977, he left instructions for his heirs to burn the 138 handwritten index cards that made up the rough draft of his final and unfinished novel, The Original of Laura. But Nabokov’s wife, Vera, could not bear to destroy her husband’s last work, and when she died, the fate of the manuscript fell to her son. Dmitri Nabokov, now seventy-five—the...more

Hardcover, 304 pages

Published November 17th 2009 by Knopf (first published 2009)

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Dec 05, 2009 Misha rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2009, literary-fiction, loved-it

Almost done, so a review will come soon, but I felt compelled to say that I am in love — not with the book itself, but with the experience of reading it. I feel like I've been sitting at Nabokov's feet while he whispered a story into my ear, by which I mean there's a particular sense of intimacy that comes from reading facsimiles of his hand-written notes, from seeing words scribbled out, stricken, even misspelled. We'll never know what the novel could have become (although I'm seeing flashes of...more Almost done, so a review will come soon, but I felt compelled to say that I am in love — not with the book itself, but with the experience of reading it. I feel like I've been sitting at Nabokov's feet while he whispered a story into my ear, by which I mean there's a particular sense of intimacy that comes from reading facsimiles of his hand-written notes, from seeing words scribbled out, stricken, even misspelled. We'll never know what the novel could have become (although I'm seeing flashes of brilliance in these fragments), but I feel closer to this decades-dead man for having read this. I feel closer to humanity for having read this. And I definitely feel closer to my own fragile, flawed creativity, which is something I've really needed as I've been attempting (and failing at) National Novel Writing Month this November. I am in love with the act of writing again because of this book, and feeling inspired to once again pick up a project I started and stopped because I was too afraid of my own inadequacies, too afraid that I could not do justice to this thing that digs so deeply into my own heart and soul. I have a file on my laptop brimming with false starts, all abandoned because they did not rise to my own too-exacting demands for perfection. I understand why Nabokov wanted these fragments burned, never wanted the world to see anything less than perfection, but there is beauty and glory in the imperfection and it is a good thing that The Original of Laura has seen the light of day, not because it can stand on its own merits, but for what it shows us of the man behind the curtain and what it shows us of ourselves, we happy few, we band of writers.

***

I've been spending some time thinking about this being "a novel in fragments" and wondering whether it is, in fact, a novel. Are these fragments a road map for a complete story, albeit an unfinished one? I think they are. I think the entire story was laid out in Nabokov's head. I think he knew what the novel would be if he could outrace death and finish it. Alas, we know how that race turned out. There are impressions of it contained in the fragments, particularly those from Wild's point of view. I suppose Wild is a stand-in for Nabokov, whom I imagine felt himself faltering in the last years of his life and wished he could rewrite his own destiny in much the same way Wild contemplates deleting and redrawing portions of his anatomy.

Speaking of the deletion scenes, the language and ideas of those seemed evocative of Ballard, at least to this reader's rather surface-level perception. I wonder if Nabokov had read any of Ballard's work in those years preceding his death.

Anyway, I'm not sure I can say much that's intelligent about The Original of Laura except that I loved reading it. Even as a set of loosely connected fragments, even as something that only hinted at the greatness that could have been, it was a beautiful and alive. Consider me firmly on Team Nabokov after this.(less)

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Feb 05, 2010 JSou rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, i-own-you

Reading this made me wish more than anything that Nabokov could've been able to complete this last novel. Just from all of his notes you could tell it would have been fantastic. You know how Nabokov's writing feels? It was like that from the very first line.

This book looks huge, but each page is just one handwritten index card, with his notes typed out at the bottom. It only took me about an hour to read through it, but I could tell the story would've been amazing. I can see how paying $35 full-...more

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Jun 13, 2011 rachel beachy rated it 3 of 5 stars

Normally, I LOVE Nabokov. His work is genius. He is both subtle and powerful. While reading "The Original of Laura" by Vladmir Nabokov I found myself getting angry. And not just any sort of anger - its the kind of rage tha simmers just below the surface for no descernable amount of time and picks at you, annoys you. This sort of anger leads to resentments and can cause one (me) to become so enraged that they cry when trying to explain the feeling verbally. Of coure this is where my gender betray...more Normally, I LOVE Nabokov. His work is genius. He is both subtle and powerful. While reading "The Original of Laura" by Vladmir Nabokov I found myself getting angry. And not just any sort of anger - its the kind of rage tha simmers just below the surface for no descernable amount of time and picks at you, annoys you. This sort of anger leads to resentments and can cause one (me) to become so enraged that they cry when trying to explain the feeling verbally. Of coure this is where my gender betrays me as no one takes a crying woman seriously.
However, this anger stems not from the work itself - at least not directly; but more from the backstory. Which can be summed up quickly: Dimitri Nabokov, son of Vladmir Nabokov; published this book posthumously despite Vladmir's wishes for it to never see the light of day were he to perish before its completion. Simple enough, right?
While I can sympathize with the grieving wife who could not bring herself to destroy her beloved husband's work, I cannot support his son doing the exact opposite of his wishes 30 years after the death of both parents. One theory I have been tossing around has to do with monetary value and some selfishness on Dimitri's side. Have fun spending that money...
If the novel had been mostly complete and simply uneditted this would not bother me nearly as much, but the truth is that the novel was far from complete. I had trouble finding anything that truly resembled a novel or the brillance that I had previously experienced in his other works. Where is this russian genius and the masterpiece I was anticipating? What I found seemed to mostly consist of an outline, references, and what appear to be some ramblings of a dying man as he floats in and out of lucidity. While that was interesting and thought-provoking, I cringed thinking about how Vladimir might feel knowing this is open to the public.
We can see the makings of a story; something resembling the beginnings of "Lolita" as the main character seems to harbor some of the same feelings of disgust towards the male form with a slightly unheathly fascination with the young, female counterpart. But this dark base for a novel quickly disintegrates and becomes what a bulk of this book truly was.
Part of me finds most of what was published here to be quite personal and reveals a side of Vladmir only his family was privy to see. This is I found to be particularly disturbing. While our society is not above publishing journals or other texts of that nature - I find this offensive.
I feel like Nabokov might be turning over in his grave.

Also, Dimitri provides a sort of preface to the story. It would be magnanimous of me to say it can be easily skipped over as it is quite crude and self-serving. He is not his father and never will be. Perhaps he should do something of value on his own instead of exploiting his dad.
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Dec 29, 2012 Adam Floridia rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: nabokov, 5-star-books, to-assign-in-creative-writing-class

My published article: http://www.cpcc.edu/taltp/archives/sp...

Willed to be incinerated, salvaged by his wife, finally published by his aged son, this last work by Nabokov makes quite a story simply by existing. Dmitri wonders whether he “should be damned or thanked” for defying his father’s will, and the answer is, unequivocally, thanked.

Always evident is the simple way Nabokov has fun with the language: “The potentate had been potent till the absurd age of eighty”; “A few photographers moved am...more My published article: http://www.cpcc.edu/taltp/archives/sp...

Willed to be incinerated, salvaged by his wife, finally published by his aged son, this last work by Nabokov makes quite a story simply by existing. Dmitri wonders whether he “should be damned or thanked” for defying his father’s will, and the answer is, unequivocally, thanked.

Always evident is the simple way Nabokov has fun with the language: “The potentate had been potent till the absurd age of eighty”; “A few photographers moved among the crowd as indifferent to it as specters doing their spectral job” (101).

This “novel in fragments” is as the final testament to the true genius of one of the greatest literary minds of the 20th century. Incredibly erudite, Nabokov reveled in weaving complex puzzles into his novels, defying literary conventions, and pushing the limits of the language. In those regards, The Originals of Laura is as complete as any of his works.

Superficially, it is about a neurologist’s experimentation with psychological self-deletion and the unfinished “manuscript in longhand” he leaves behind after being claimed by “a fatal heart attack” (187). Even though the eponymous character is in the book, “everything about her is bound to remain blurry, even her name which seems to have been made to expressly have another one modeled upon it by a fantastically lucky artists” (85). Nabokov capriciously shifts among “Flora,” “Laura,” and “FLaura.” The reader never gets a true sense of her, as if “only by identifying her with an unwritten, half-written, rewritten difficult book could one hope to render at last what” (21). All of these quotations made me wonder if this book might not be exactly what Nabokov intended it to be. Was that sentence meant to be left unfinished? Was this novel meant to be left unfinished? Is this the final frontier for an author who had pioneered so many other literary innovations and flouted form and structure in order to create something of even greater depth? Is this his ultimate attempt to create new meaning from destruction by effacing, expunging, deleting, rubbing out, wiping out, obliterating (the only words on the last page of the book!) everything we have come to assume a book should be?

The book itself allows readers to enjoy “the divine light in destroying” (181) by including perforated index cards that can be removed and rearranged in any order the reader sees fit. This not only allows him to derive his own meaning from the book, but literally to reshape the novel itself! Unlike any other book, this allows the reader the chance to truly engage in “an act of destruction which develops paradoxically an element of creativeness in the totally new application of totally free will” (213)!!

This will stand as one of Nabokov’s most “maddening masterpiece[s:]” (221), one of his greatest puzzles, and a book that demolishes literary boundaries and gives new meaning to deconstruction, reader response, and other literary approaches.

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midnightfaerie Well my goal for last year was to read all of Shakespeare, Dickens, and Austen. That was before I realized how much Dickens had actually written. So t...more
updated Dec 30, 2012 05:12pm

Adam Floridia midnightfaerie wrote: "Well my goal for last year was to read all of Shakespeare, Dickens, and Austen. That was before I realized how much Dickens had...more
Dec 30, 2012 05:35pm

Dec 28, 2009 Matt rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: anyone with book-lust or Nabokov-lust

This review will be as fragmented as the novel in question. If you are looking for a coherent, well-reasoned review check out Misha's.

1. My in-law's annual Christmas gift exchange morphed into a facebook group this year. Usually I jot down "gift card" and three store names on the tiny piece of paper and toss it into the hat, but the more leisurely www format enticed me into listing a few book titles. Evidently my sister-in-law (who is not an avid reader) carried a hard copy of the list into the...more

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Mar 24, 2010 J. rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: nabokov

Let's first say what this book is: a series of fragments on index cards, ordered and selected by Nabokov's son Dmitri after the death of father Vladimir. And how it's been manufactured : a book that ought to hold five or six hundred pages, judging by it's dimensions, holds about 200 single-sided images of the index cards, as directly pencilled by Nabokov, on heavy-stock paper with actual perforations. So that the reader can indulge his own postmodernistic need to recontextualize the assemblage b...more

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Dec 12, 2009 R. rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2009

$35 seems a bit steep for 100+ index cards worth of text.

Card One

You couldn't get more original than Laura. Laura. Yes, she was an original, all right. One of a kind. Did they break her mold or what, pal? Or...or did it self-destruct? Still, Laura. The one and the only. Such a plain name for a unique cutie. But perhaps my acuity is not without its problems. I ruin everything: a stupid story to be tapped out on my tomb's stone. I ruined even Laura. And an original ruin is rare. Just ask the arch...more

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Jun 14, 2013 Nonky rated it 2 of 5 stars

I enjoyed the perceived intimacy of reading the index cards, and the threads of story are fascinating, but The Original of Laura doesn't feel like a novel. Laura and Flora are Nabokov's cruel goddesses, tormenting and inspiring his male characters with their bodies and little else. Philip Wild is eagerly embracing a lengthy psychic suicide attempt Nabokov wrote like existential compulsive masturbation. Everything mentioned is theoretically purposeful, but we don't get to see how the scenes writt...more I enjoyed the perceived intimacy of reading the index cards, and the threads of story are fascinating, but The Original of Laura doesn't feel like a novel. Laura and Flora are Nabokov's cruel goddesses, tormenting and inspiring his male characters with their bodies and little else. Philip Wild is eagerly embracing a lengthy psychic suicide attempt Nabokov wrote like existential compulsive masturbation. Everything mentioned is theoretically purposeful, but we don't get to see how the scenes written are joined in a final draft.

I'm probably not going to tear out the cards and shuffle them. It would be like trying to play hearts with 17 playing cards. The design of the book is beautiful and stark, allowing room for all the content to become a showpiece. It's a gimmick done well, and a unique reading experience. The initial price - and poor reviews - didn't move me to spend full price, but I respect the thought needed to present unfinished material in a finished form without mucking it up.

There are some phrases that give a little thrill of recognition, but no rollicking passages of pricking offensiveness. Even the despair, which I understand was based on Nabokov's real health problems, feels constructed. In other Nabokov novels, I always had the sense of the author's shadenfreude (regarding squirming readers sensibilities) and truth from the grittier details. These were unpleasant things, he seemed to tell us, but we should hear them because they will be relevant.

I don't think Dimitri Nabokov was wrong to release the book, but I also don't feel it lives up to the literary aspirations of his father. Just like it wasn't Vladimir's fault to die before completing it, it isn't Dimitri's fault it can't hold up to being the mythical last novel. The cover price is high for what is essentially one eighth of a novel in word count. I can see how people were disappointed.

I think the only way this would be a necessary book is if Dimitri had taken the index cards and tried to finish the novel, and included the original cards in an appendix. I'm surprised the deal to print them didn't ask Dimitri to write some biographical content to intersperse between cards, or at least a little more of the process of deciding to publish material the author wanted scrapped. Some of his own remembrances would have gone far to provide more than an hour of reading and some insight into what Laura was intended to say.(less)

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Jan 30, 2013 Chloe rated it 4 of 5 stars

Reading this fragmented novel is a sweet and sorrowful pleasure. It takes a little getting used to because of its incompleteness and general sense of disarray, but once you start to connect (and disconnect) the characters from the scattered note cards, you're presented with a building narrative that's rich in Nabokov's familiar themes. Oh, how I wish it had been completed! But, also, how glad I am that it wasn't - that readers have a chance to see the intimate details of Nabokov's way of creatin...more

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Jan 04, 2013 Jim Elkins rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: american

Reviews of this book were repetitively concerned with three things: whether Dmiti Nabokov should have published it, against his father’s wishes (I can’t see the interest of this question), and what effect it will have on Nabokov’s reputation (it will do “severe damage,” according to Jonathan Bate in “The Telegraph,” November 15, 2009; the book is “better suited to a college ethics class,” according to Alexander Theroux, “Wall Street Journal,” November 20, 2009). Almost every review (thirty are l...more Reviews of this book were repetitively concerned with three things: whether Dmiti Nabokov should have published it, against his father’s wishes (I can’t see the interest of this question), and what effect it will have on Nabokov’s reputation (it will do “severe damage,” according to Jonathan Bate in “The Telegraph,” November 15, 2009; the book is “better suited to a college ethics class,” according to Alexander Theroux, “Wall Street Journal,” November 20, 2009). Almost every review (thirty are listed on complete-review.com) also praised some of Nabokov’s sentences and panned others (I can’t see what’s learned by that).

Reviewers also agreed there isn’t much in the fragments—that too much had been made of them. Philip Henscher (Spectator, November 25, 2009), called the book “a sphinx without a secret,” and Michiko Kakutani said more or less the same in the NYT. But the book does have secrets. As Kakutani points out, this is the author of Pale Fire and other “postmodern” novels, and so we could have expected something similarly clever here. The closest any review I’ve found comes to this is David Gates (“Nabokov’s Last Puzzle,” NYTBR, November 11, 2009). He points out the open-endedness of the fragments:

“How did Nabokov plan to connect these two strands of his story — the mistress-destroying lover and the self-annihilating scientist? We’ll never know. Wild’s arcane technique of self-erasure must be connected somehow or other with the novelist’s annihilating his mistress “in the act of portraying her”; the association of depiction with destruction is common to both. But the writer can’t have destroyed her in the literal act of writing, since at one point we see the still-living Flora beginning to read a paperback copy of the novel in which Laura dies. “Let me show you your wonderful death,” says a friend who’s already finished the book. “You’ll scream with laughter. It’s the craziest death in the world.” So does the novel “destroy” Flora in some figurative sense? Perhaps reading it goads her cuckolded husband (who calls it a “maddening masterpiece”) into using his mental eraser on her? We assume that the original of Laura has to die some “crazy” death or other, as her fictive double does, but their creator beat them both to the finish line.
“And here’s a puzzle for hard-core Nabokov obsessives. From a freestanding paragraph headed “End of penult chapter,” we infer that after Wild dies of a heart attack, the novelist-lover gets hold of his “testament” — they seem to have the same typist — and arranges for its publication, though we don’t know how, where or why. Are we to suspect that the lover has invented Wild’s mystic manuscript? And even Wild himself? (Readers of “Pale Fire” still argue over whether Shade invented Kinbote or vice versa.) Yet the lover has already made Wild a character in the “Laura” novel, under the transparent name of “Philidor Sauvage.” Would even a trickster like Nabokov invent a character who invents a character and then invents a pseudonym for him? Nabokovians are welcome to take it from here, as long as I don’t have to go with them. And while they’re at it, who’s the oddly named Ivan Vaughan, who seems to know Flora and who appears in one uncompleted chapter to tell us that “the novel My ‘Laura’ ” was “torn apart by a book reviewer in a leading newspaper”?”

This kind of puzzle — which I am not interested in solving — bears on the hope, also noted by most reviewers, that the book might give us a glimpse into Nabokov’s writing method. It does, but not in a way I have seen any reviewer mention: it shows that at least in this case, he wrote around or between the cruxes of the plot. They would have been clear to him; the flesh between those bones would have been what took line-by-line inventing. It is possible there may be novelists for whom this is helpful.

And one other thing: the central surviving image of these fragments is the mental exercise of drawing yourself in your imagination on the inner surfaces of your closed eyelids, and then erasing yourself: an imagined—and then real—act of deliberate self-destruction. That is am amazing idea for a novel, even today, even after Deleuze’s “BwO,” Ballard, and all the rest. It's an amazing idea, more memorable in itself than most books I've read this year.
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May 04, 2012 Louis rated it 4 of 5 stars

If you bought this book for $35...you are an all-day sucker. There can't be more than 40 pages worth of material. The book's real appeal to me, though, is what also boosts its size and sticker-price: the text is presented in Nabokov's hand-written index cards--rub-outs, notes-to-self, ellipses and all--with a printed transcription beneath. Mostly I just read the transcription, but every so often Nabokov's notes are fascinating (besides showing us how one of the masters of the language was actual...more

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Dec 04, 2009 Manny marked it as to-read

Short version: I feel dirty inside for even having glanced at this book. Or you can read the longer version below...

________________________________________

Ooh, it's been a good week so far! On Tuesday, I read a wonderful kiss-and-tell exposé in The Star about Katie Price's steamy love triangle. The picture of her boyfriend Alex Reid dressed in women's underwear was particularly good. Then, on Wednesday, I watched the TV mini-series on the Queen, and was able to gloat over her pain as the tabloi...more

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Nov 21, 2009 Olivia rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is not really a novel in fragments, as so many reviewers have said, as a few notecards that he was planning to use in a book eventually. So I felt kind of dirty reading it, as it seems kind of wrong... and because his son is basically a nobody who, many cynics speculate, may have run out of money. What better way to make a fortune?

All that cynicism aside, it is really wonderful to read this and see what it is like to be a great writer who has lived through everything tragic int he 20th cen...more

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Feb 25, 2012 Kevin Hinman rated it 3 of 5 stars

It's not really fair to call The Original of Laura an unfinished novel, since it's barely a finished outline for a novel. Sentences stop as abruptly as ideas shift. Characters appear for a paragraph and then, perhaps, never appear again, though perhaps they do, under a different name. The Laura of the novel, Flora, takes the backseat to the much more in depth, Nabokovian proxy, Wild, and what remains of Flora's stories are brief sketches of her childhood sexual awakening.
But there's also some pr...more

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Dec 26, 2009 Farren rated it 4 of 5 stars

The narrative of this book is the commentaries of one cuckolded husband on one memoir written by his wife's lover. The book starts off as a refutation of his dismal portrayal in the memoir, and tender-ish recollections of the wife, but then the husband begins writing obsessively about the process of auto-dissolution, in which the mind convinces the body it has died--the mind ANNIHILATES the body. The book starts of fairly coherent, but enacts dismantling toward the end--ostensibly, Dmitri Naboko...more

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Dec 05, 2009 Sean rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: own

First, the rather startlingly expensive hardcover edition is incredibly nice. It contains great, big, thick satisfying pages. These removable index cards are a nice idea, though I fear I am unlikely to ever follow up and remove them out of a crippling anxiety that one will end up misplaced if I do.

The book self-advertises as a 'novel in fragments', but this tends to imply that there exists a full novel between the book's covers, an impression which is quickly proved to be quite false. There is r...more

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Nov 29, 2009 J.R. rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

As an admirer of Nabokov, I wish I could give this a higher rating. Unfortunately, it’s not a book but rather a fragment of one.

We have an obese man blissfully oblivious to being cuckolded by his wife until the fact is driven home by a novel penned by another lover and he decides to obliterate himself by meditating on the process. None of the characters is fully realized and it’s apparent Nabokov was a long way from completing the story.

Am I among those who wish it never had been published? No....more

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Jul 02, 2012 Hamish rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: lit

Nabokov has eighteen other novels, a memoir, a large collection of short stories, a book of plays and several books of lectures. Unless you have read EVERY SINGLE ONE of them, The Original of Laura is not worth your time. Every single one of those books was completed and deemed fit for publication by the author and, with no exceptions, they are all better than this. I notice there is a tendency among the reading public to immediately jump on any new book by an established author, especially if t...more Nabokov has eighteen other novels, a memoir, a large collection of short stories, a book of plays and several books of lectures. Unless you have read EVERY SINGLE ONE of them, The Original of Laura is not worth your time. Every single one of those books was completed and deemed fit for publication by the author and, with no exceptions, they are all better than this. I notice there is a tendency among the reading public to immediately jump on any new book by an established author, especially if there is an interesting story behind it. So we get a lot of people who have probably only read Lolita buying this--a collection of about fifty pages of what would have been a much larger work, without a coherent structure and only the hint of a plot--and getting very frustrated and probably feeling a little ripped off. I know this has the sheen of newness, but unless you're a legit Nabokov scholar this is probably going to be of very little interest to you. Go read Pale Fire or Speak, Memory instead. Or any of his other books for that matter. I promise they're all MUCH better.

Hell, I've read all of the aforementioned works and I still found this to be frustrating. In the introduction, Dimitri Nabokov (the author's son) defends his decision to publish a work in the most rudimentary stages of production and that the author asked to be destroyed on his death by comparing it to Kafka. I don't buy it. True, The Castle and The Trial weren't finished, but they were at least complete enough to provide a satisfying read. The Original of Laura is in too early of a stage and resembles little more than a half-completed skeleton with a few pieces of muscle hanging precariously from its bones. If this were published as bonus material at the end of an existing work (The Enchanter would be a good choice since that was also a posthumously published work), similar to the sketches at the end of Kafka's Complete Stories, you would judge it simply as an interesting curiosity piece or as a tantalizing glimpse of what could have been. But publishing it on its own forces the reader to judge it as an individual work, which is unfair to the material.

It's especially frustrating because there are some neat passages and some hints at what N was going to do. There are a few bits that imply the novel would have been full of the usual Nabokov trickery that makes his work so engaging, fun and re-readable. But as hints of something we'll never be able to see in completed form it's almost cruel. There are also some passages that are borderline incomprehensible, things I'm sure N would have cleaned up or thrown out entirely. And that's what bothers me about this project: We're seeing something N didn't want us to see. This was a man with meticulously high standards and it seems in poor taste to make public work he himself deemed to be below those standards.

I feel guilty giving this two stars. Nabokov is my favorite writer and I don't think he ever published a work that was less than good. I have no doubt that if he had been able to finish The Original of Laura it would have been a worthwhile novel, but in its present form it's nothing more than a tantalizing but frustrating glimpse into the working method of one of the all-time greats.(less)

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Nov 13, 2009 Brent Legault rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: completists, fanatics, lovers of even imperfect genius

A "Novel In Fragments" is it's subtitle but it is not a novel at all and might have been better billed as "Fragments of a Novel" or simply "Fragments." T.O.O.L. reminded me, in it's "construction," more of Fernando Pessoa than it did of Vladimir Nabokov (though there is nothing wrong with that.) It is certainly not going to satisfy anyone who reads for story's sake as the plot line is threadbare at best. But for the language, even some of the clumsier* passages (wherein it reads like someone end...more

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Jan 27, 2013 Patrick rated it 1 of 5 stars

My rating of this book ain't a knock on Nabokov. He's one of the most brilliant writers we've ever had, and this volume, as a primary source, affirms that sentiment. But I could never get around the ethical dilemma of the publication of these cards (Nabokov's deathbed instructions were to burn the manuscript if left unfinished—instructions ignored by his widow, and quite extremely ignored by his son, Dmitri, who oversaw the publication). When this whole thing happened, I felt strongly in favor o...more

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Nov 28, 2009 Fred rated it 4 of 5 stars

" * Always, always obey your father. In this case, Dimitri did not respect his father will.

* Never, never read something from Playboy. And in this case parts of the novel were published over there.

* It is hard to say, but it is true. Aging, ailing man are seldom in fine form. But Vladimor and his son are in fine form.
* Writing on index cards or hyperlinks: constructing a text is determined by the reader.
* Typically Dutch: the Bezige Bij editions of Nabokov were not amended with the Original of L...more

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Sep 24, 2011 Jonathan Hutchins rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw this unpublished fragment as a giant glossy Penguin hardback in Waterstone's, Dorking. Now having read it I am ... what ..? Disappointed? Yes, and no. In a way it is no more and no less than what one would expect. I'm an ardent Nabokovian. Not a Perfect Nabokovian - I confess to finding 'Ada' problematic, and don't know the play, poems or problems at all. The controversial question of whether it should have been published at all becomes not an ethical questi...more I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw this unpublished fragment as a giant glossy Penguin hardback in Waterstone's, Dorking. Now having read it I am ... what ..? Disappointed? Yes, and no. In a way it is no more and no less than what one would expect. I'm an ardent Nabokovian. Not a Perfect Nabokovian - I confess to finding 'Ada' problematic, and don't know the play, poems or problems at all. The controversial question of whether it should have been published at all becomes not an ethical question - Dmitri's Dilemma - but crystallises round the impossibility of forming any opinion on it as a work of art because it simply isn't that - just a collection of fragments. A successful work of art, in VN's own definition, is one which conforms most closely in its final written form, to its author's vision or prevision. 'Laura' certainly isn't that. Exceptionally, VN in an interview once afforded a glimpse of a work in progress, at that time 'Ada', by revealing one of his famous index cards with a scene on it which came to him, a fresh fragmentary vision of a ruin at the sea's edge on a summer night, a Don Juan figure embracing a young girl, roses ... Changed and assimilated in the crucible of genius, no such scene appears in the finished novel. But such lambent shards form part of 'Laura'. Other cards - for they are reproduced, no expense spared, with perforations so they may be pressed out and rearranged to the reader's taste, as if it were a deluxe William Burroughs edition - comprise passages of continuous narrative, while others are mere author's notes and quotes. No, it doesn't add up, and there's no justification for easy journalistic extrapolation into an 'unfinished masterpiece' or similar. That said, VN being VN, among the odds and ids there are some gems which literally made me catch my breath. Mr 'Hubert H. Hubert' [how dare he!!?] awkwardly lining his shoed foot up against the pattern in the carpet, looking 'like a not too successful conjuror', and the marvellously resonant description of the en passant move in chess, 'where the ghost of a pawn can be captured on the square it has crossed'. There is the authentic frisson, the spinal twinge which is one's only valid response to great art, to slightly paraphrase the author. But this isn't great art: a few chunks of recognisable torso, a litter of bits, and a few scribbled aides-memoires. (less)

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Nov 21, 2009 Lewis Manalo rated it 4 of 5 stars

I should warn that I'm a Nabokov fan, and if you are not even moderately interested in old Vlad, The Original of Laura is not for you. Barely even a rough draft, The Original of Laura was posthumously published despite Vlad's dying wish that it be destroyed, something that caused a twitter of discussion in the literary world.

Reading Laura reminded me of reading the fragments of Sappho, where the brittle pieces make no coherent whole, but where random, alienated phrases hint at the promised poetr...more

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Oct 11, 2012 Ksenia Anske rated it 4 of 5 stars

I rather rated the experience of reading this book than the book itself. Took me one evening, and it was fantastic to be in the guts and throes of another author, and such a great master as Nabokov. The entire book can be summarized with a quote: "Every now and then she would turn up for a few moments between trains, between planes, between lovers." I would add, between pages. Laura. Who is also Flora. Who is also possibly every other female character mentioned here.

Why was it fantastic? Because...more

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Mar 02, 2013 Zöe Zhai rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: american

This is surely a mind-blowing book. Although you may find it unnecessarily thick with a lot of blank spaces, but it is the way for you to take notes while this book is hitting certain points in your brain.

Still, it's Nabokov's style. The difference is that he is bedridden, near death. Maybe you can say this is a book that guides you to experience the near death experience. Word. There are delusions, painful toes, dissolution and melting feelings.

Also, you could read it as a museum of Nabokov's...more

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Feb 24, 2012 Yordan Eftimov rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Набоков е категоричен в завещанието си: жена му Вера да унищожи тези наброски, нахвърляни на 138 картончета. И днес, когато синът му ги извади на бял свят, мнозина се сетиха за Кафка, чиято воля бе делегирана на приятеля му Макс Брод. Брод не изгорил, а публикувал Процесът, Замъкът и Америка, но с тази разлика, че при Кафка нещата са завършени и авторът просто искал (може би) да ги доогледа. Оригиналът на Лаура обаче е по-скоро план-конспект.

Малко повече: http://sofialive.bg/izkustvo/bibliote...

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Feb 24, 2010 Jessie rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 50-book-challenge-2010

I agree with others who reviewed this book and said that it wasn't really "a novel in fragments." It was more like "fragments of a novel." I also do feel that the introduction was somewhat misleading. There is a particular line: "Nabokov did not desire to burn The Original of Laura willy-nilly, but to live on for the last few card lengths needed to finish at least a complete draft." Perhaps Dmitri Nabokov and I differ on the meaning of "a few" and "complete draft," because I don't think that wha...more

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Jun 11, 2010 Laura rated it 3 of 5 stars

This novel was supposed to be destroyed, at the request of the author, on his deathbed. He told his wife to destroy the manuscript if he died before he finished writing it. But she procrastinated, and never did the deed, passing the task onto her son, who, as you see, published the work.
The interesting part of this book was getting to read an author's draft of a novel before it was completed. On the last page, Vladimir Nabokov writes these words in list form, giving the reader some idea of what...more

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Feb 21, 2010 Kerri rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

The two stars for this go directly to Chip Kidd. At least he was able to take this hopeless thing and turn it into something beautiful, visually.

When I heard that Dmitri Nabokov would be releasing this draft (it's not even complete enough to call a draft—these are sometimes incomprehensible notes and snippets) against Nobokov's explicit wishes to his family that it be burned if died before finishing it, I was skeptical. But I wanted to give Nabokov's son the benefit of the doubt. I assume it too...more

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Dec 02, 2009 Bookmarks Magazine rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: jan-feb-2010

"A glorious mess," is how the New York Magazine critic described Nabokov's unfinished manuscript, which languished in a Swiss vault for three decades. It is a sentiment shared by the majority of reviewers, who acknowledged that while glimpses of the author's skill shine through in this rough draft, there is simply not enough material to review. Most questioned whether this book should have been published at all and were disturbed that Nabokov's specific wishes were disregarded. Overall, critics...more

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About Vladimir Nabokov

Russian: Владимир Владимирович Набоков

Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist. He also made significant contributions to lepidoptery and had an interest in chess problems.

Nabokov's Lolita (1955) is frequently cited as his most important novel, and is at any rate his most widely known one, exhibiting the love of intrica...more

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“You couldn't get more original than Laura. Laura. Yes, she was an original, all right. One of a kind. Did they break her mold or what, pal? Or...or did it self-destruct? Still, Laura. The one and the only. Such a plain name for a unique cutie. But perhaps my acuity is not without its problems. I ruin everything: a stupid story to be tapped out on my tomb's stone. I ruined even Laura. And an original ruin is rare. Just ask the archaeologist, "Egypt, again?" Just ask me, "Laura, again?" and we'll both respond: "Yes, again and again. And again.” — 3 people liked it

“What can be sadder than a discouraged artist dying not from his own commonplace maladies, but from the cancer of oblivion?” — 2 people liked it

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