Word: nabokov
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...
...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...
...Pnin,” Nabokov once wrote that “the order of the solar spectrum is not a closed circle but a spiral of tints from cadmium red and oranges through a strontian yellow and a pale paradisal green to cobalt blues and violets.” He would have been delighted by the chance findings of an Oregon State grad student this week, who in the process of experimenting with manganese oxide in a 2,000-degree furnace accidentally created a never-before-seen pigment of blue. Reportedly “shocked” at first...