Word: originale
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Cooley was one of the original smoke jumpers, firefighters who parachute into remote blazes, often in deep wilderness. His first attempt was less than perfect--which was perhaps not surprising, considering that he had never been in an airplane before he took his practice runs. In July 1940, Cooley and...
Nabokov spent his last years in a grand hotel in Montreux, Switzerland--after Lolita he could afford it--working on a novel called The Original of Laura. But he died before he could finish it, leaving behind a box of 138 index cards that he instructed Vera to destroy. This...
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 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...
We 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...