The Original of Laura is an incomplete novel by Vladimir Nabokov, which he was writing at the time of his death in 1977. It was published by Nabokov's son Dmitri Nabokov in 2009, despite the author's request that the work be destroyed upon his death.
Plot
Based on discussions with unidentified scholars, The Times summarizes the plot as follows: the equivalent of about 30 manuscript pages. The use of index cards was normal for Nabokov, the basis of many of his works, such as Lolita and Pale Fire.
Executor's dilemma
Nabokov was a perfectionist and made it clear that, upon his death, any unfinished work was to be destroyed. Nabokov's wife, Véra, and their son, Dmitri, became his literary executors, but ultimately ignored his will, and did not destroy the manuscript. Dmitri noted that Véra Nabokov "failed to carry out this task, her procrastination due, 'to age, weakness and immeasurable love.'" They placed it in a Swiss bank vault, where it remained until its eventual publication. In 1991 Véra died, leaving Dmitri Nabokov as the sole literary executor. Dmitri wavered on whether to destroy the manuscript. On the one hand, he felt bound to uphold his "filial duty" and grant his father's request, but he also said the novel "would have been a brilliant, original, and potentially totally radical book, in the literary sense very different from the rest of his oeuvre." The younger Nabokov remarked cryptically that one other person possessed a key to the manuscript, but did not say who that person was. In the Nabokov Online Journal interview with Suellen Stringer-Hye, Nabokov stated that he had never seriously considered burning the manuscript. Once Dmitri decided to publish the manuscript, "several short excerpts were published in advance in the Sunday Times Magazine, as well as Playboy, to which Nabokov was a contributor."
BBC Newsnight predicted that the novel's publication was "likely to be the literary event of 2009."
Publication of excerpts
In the late 1990s Dmitri Nabokov read a portion of the book to a group of about 20 scholars at a centenary celebration of his father at Cornell University. The scholars Brian Boyd and Lara Delage-Toriel claim to have read the manuscript. In 1999 two passages from The Original of Laura were published in The Nabokovian, a scholarly publication devoted to Nabokov. Zoran Kuzmanovich, a scholar of Nabokov, said of passages he heard at Cornell University, "It sounds as though the story is about aging but holding onto the original love of one's life."
According to a 2006 account of the book by Lara Delage-Toriel, the narrator and protagonist of Nabokov's book receives a novel titled My Laura from a painter. The narrator realizes that the novel is in fact about his own wife Flora, whom the painter had once pursued. In this novel within the novel, Laura is "destroyed" by the narrator (the "I" of the book). Delage-Toriel also notes that the names of Laura and Flora, possibly refer to well-known High Renaissance portraits of women by Titian and Giorgione, both evoking the Italian sonneteer Petrarch's unconsummated obsession with a woman named Laura.
<blockquote>Does it refer to the mistress of the “I,” the Laura of My Laura, or to the probable mistress of this novel’s author, the Flora of The Original of Laura? The manuscript’s playful juxtapositions obviously incite the reader to fuse both ‘originals’ into a single original, a gesture which Nabokov graphically performs in ‘chapter’ 5, by contriving an amusing hybrid, ‘Flaura’. On close observation of the manuscript, one notices that the name contains in fact two capital letters, ‘F’ and ‘L’, as though Nabokov had been loath to give precedence to either name and had instead opted for some typographical monster, a bicephalous cipher of sorts.</blockquote>
The Original of Laura was the subject of a 1998 literary prank which capitalized on its cachet as a mysterious "lost work" of a renowned author. Jeff Edmunds, a Pennsylvania State University employee and editor of the Nabokov website Zembla, posted an essay on his site entitled "The Original of Laura: A First Look at Nabokov's Last Novel". The essay, supposedly written by a Swiss scholar named Michel Desommelier, included concocted passages from Laura that fooled scholars and even Dmitri Nabokov. Edmunds then worked with Nabokov's Russian translator, Sergei Il'in, to publish the fake passages in Russian literary journals.
Content
thumb|Laura, painted 1506 by [[Giorgione]]
thumb|Flora, painted 1515 by [[Titian]]
John Banville called the published volume, designed by Chip Kidd, "a triumph of the book maker's art". The pages are gray and heavy. Each one comprises a reproduction of an index card above and a printed version of the card below. The photographs of the cards are perforated so the reader can take them out and rearrange them. Banville considered the perforations "dubious", and a review in the Washington Times called it "little more than gimmick" that "would surely have disgusted the author", but a review in The Cornell Daily Sun called the format "ingenious".
The book also includes an introduction by Dmitri Nabokov about the writing of the book and his decision to publish it.
Literary significance and reception
A review of the German translation in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung compared the fragment to a "labyrinthine, overgrown garden without a gazebo in its center" and "a puzzle with too many missing pieces". Alexander Theroux's review of the book in The Wall Street Journal criticized the publication as an exemplar of a writer who has lost his literary powers except for a few hints and "witty Nabokovian moments", comparing the Nabokov of Laura to Lou Gehrig in 1939. Martin Amis echoed this sentiment somewhat more directly in his review in The Guardian, "When a writer starts to come off the rails, you expect skidmarks and broken glass; with Nabokov, naturally, the eruption is on the scale of a nuclear accident." or should not be read. A reviewer in the Christian Science Monitor said the book was "filled with sly wit and memorable images" and considered the publication of it "a generous gift to readers". Writing for Literary Review, David Lodge asks, "Is it, as the blurb claims, Nabokov's 'final great book'? No. Does it contain brilliant, funny, astonishing sentences only Nabokov could have written? Yes. Should it have been preserved and published? Definitely."
Few reviewers commented on the introduction, but at least two criticized it harshly.