Word: flora
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...comes at you as a reprieve, a final appearance from an old friend you thought was already gone for good. It's a shambles, a heap of shards, but they're Nabokov's shards and no one else's: the "nasty compassion" the partygoers direct at a drunken Flora; the "alien creams" Flora spots in someone else's bathroom (recalling the "solemn pool of alien urine" deposited by Mr. Taxovich in another bathroom in Lolita); the playful half-rhyme of belie and belly; the perhaps overly wink-winky inclusion of a pedophile named Mr. Hubert H. Hubert; and one lost...
...third 'written' in the strictly technical sense," Dmitri says. It is not a series of consecutive chapters. Nabokov liked to attack his subjects on multiple fronts, from all directions, an approach facilitated by his use of index cards. The book begins at a party attended by a woman named Flora. Her husband is not present, and she slips away to an absentminded tryst with a lover, which Nabokov renders delicately but unsentimentally: "That first surrender of hers was a little sudden, if not downright unnerving. A pause for some light caresses, concealed embarrassment, feigned amusement, prefactory contemplation...
...meet, in due course, the deceived husband as well: "A brilliant neurologist, a renowned lecturer [and] a gentleman of independent means, Dr. Philip Wild had everything save an attractive exterior." Philip is older, eccentric and miserly, and he's less interested in Flora than in a bizarre experiment he's conducting on himself. As he feels his aging flesh deteriorating, he develops the habit of entering a trance wherein he pictures his body and then mentally erases portions of it; he begins with his toes, which instantly become numb. By this means, he imagines that he is bringing about...
...Flora's surrender to lazy, loveless sexual pleasure and Philip's intensely strange abdication of bodily life together make, or would have made, The Original of Laura a melancholy meditation on our fleshly predicament. And what else? The novel's title refers to a novel-within-a-novel called My Laura, about a character based on Flora. This in turn rhymes with Aurora, the name of an early love of Philip's whom Flora physically resembles, creating a chain of resemblances and echoes that leads us ... where...
...never know. The Original of Laura is a beautiful ruin, like the Venus de Milo, not a novel. To pretend otherwise is wishful thinking, no different from Philip's belief that he can master death. At some moments the book seems to anticipate its shattered future--Nabokov compares Flora to "an unwritten, half-written, rewritten difficult book." That's part of her appeal and, oddly, part of Laura's too. You admire what you can see, and you dream about what might have been...