JB ON VN

Whilst we prep a large-ish Marginalia post, you'll want to cozy up with John Banville on Nabokov in the latest Bookforum:

Aptly, we may begin with the title. The dust jacket has it as The Original of Laura: A novel in fragments, while the title page varies this to The Original of Laura (Dying Is Fun). However, the author himself, at the top of the first of the 138 file cards on which the novel—let us call it a novel, for now—is composed, calls the book merely The Original of Laura. The...