Word: novelness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
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...
Such a generalization, however, would be misleading. Though “The Road”—adapted from the Pulitzer-Prize winning novel by Cormac McCarthy—fits comfortably into a dark and atmospheric genre of post-disaster film that has recently included such uninspired schlock as “I Am Legend,” it is also quite unlike the films that have preceded it, including Mortensen and Hillcoat’s previous efforts. Eschewing narrative conventions, at least to the extent that big-budget Oscar bait can afford...
...this seems trivial, there’s no doubt that we should be grateful for the unpredicted survival of Nabokov’s incomplete final novel “The Original of Laura,” finally published a few weeks ago. Despite Nabokov’s request that it be posthumously burnt, his family suddenly concluded a tortured 30-year debate this fall by deciding to grant the public access to the fragments. Reviewers rightly note that the book falls far short of being a “Pale Fire” or “Lolita?...