Word: laura
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...readers who are devoted to Nabokov (I'm one), The Original of Laura affords its own ecstasies. It 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...
Neither did his son Dmitri. Now Dmitri Nabokov has published The Original of Laura (Knopf; 278 pages)--what there is of it--in an elegant edition, priced at $35, that reproduces each index card on a single page. "Nabokov intended to win his 100-card dash against death but, given the course of events, could not foresee the exact form in which the book would ultimately appear," Dmitri explains in a written interview with TIME. "He was sure, however, that it would appear. He had been working on the novel since 1974 and, when asked in 1976 what three favorite...
...Original of Laura is a fragment, or a collection of fragments--"the novel was probably half or one-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...
...imagines that he is bringing about his own death, piecemeal--seizing control of it and turning it into a volitional act, even an enjoyable one. "The process of dying by auto-dissolution affords the greatest ecstasy known to man," he tells us. The subtitle of The Original of Laura is Dying...
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...