Vladimir Nabokov is one of the few writers to have written his greatest novels in a language other than his mother tongue. He wrote several novels in Russian, but for the émigré community; he and his family left Russia shortly after the Russian revolution and his work was banned in his homeland. But easily his most famous novel, Lolita – perhaps the most notorious novel ever – was written in English. Less famous, but of perhaps even greater stature among cognoscenti are Pnin and Pale Fire, also written in luminous, brilliant English.
Nabokov spent his later years in Switzerland, and it was there that he died, leaving his final work unfinished. He also – like Kafka before him – left instructions that the manuscript, on 275 index cards, was to be destroyed.
Scholars and pundits have speculated from time to time on the nature of the book, and whether Nabokov’s son, Dmitri, should allow publication. As the debate raged, the index cards sat unread in a Swiss bank vault.
I guess the lesson for novelists in their last days is that if they want a job doing, they’re better off doing it themselves. Whereas Kafka’s reputation was largely formed and now rests on two of his three unfinished novels, all of which he wanted to be destroyed, Nabokov’s was already entirely secure, so the justification for publication is certainly less strong.
The cover of The Original of Laura describes it as ‘a novel in fragments’. It’s certainly fragmentary, but is it in any sense a novel? The way it’s been prepared for publication does nothing to hide its fragmentary nature; indeed it emphasises it.
As a physical object, it’s one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever come across. Each of the 275 index cards are reproduced in facsimile, with perforations around them should you wish to assemble them in a different order, as Dmitri Nabokov speculates that his father must have done. Each card is transcribed on the lower half of the page, with nonstandard spellings and punctuation preserved. Only obvious errors are corrected, and then in square brackets. (It’s good to see that even a great novelist like Nabokov frequently transposed ‘to’ and ‘too’, for example, and amusing to see that he had mastered the art of the handwritten pilcrow.) The pages don’t scan very well, since they match the text on the cards rather than any conventional text layout scheme.
This presentation is a fascinating insight into Nabokov’s creative process, and is certainly better than trying to edit the fragments into some sort of shape, because the novel is very far from being finished; it’s not even close to being a first draft. While sections of it are coherent and come close to the beauty of Nabokov’s other books, the majority of it is basically unpublishable. Many cards are perplexing, while others simply make no sense at all. Perhaps the most fascinating card is one on which Nabokov has listed a number of synonyms for ‘delete’ with ‘efface’ circled.
There are flashes of Nabokov’s brilliant wit, and many sentences of great individual beauty, but never does this even come close to approaching his published work. In other places I was – bizarrely – reminded of Samuel Beckett’s prose, particularly a passage in which the narrator describes lying in a bath having cut his toes off, which does seem to be a very Beckettian scene.
Critics have decried Dmitri’s decision to publish – while still profiting from it, of course – mainly on the grounds of quality. I don’t follow that logic. The fragments Nabokov left will be of immeasurable value to students of his work, and will no doubt yield up secrets once there’s been enough time to study them in detail. Quality doesn’t enter into it. Either it is right to ignore an author’s dying request for destruction, or it is not. One must assume that Nabokov himself was not in any doubt as to the manuscript’s quality; had he lived he would either have finished and published the book in a radically different form, or have abandoned it.
Anyway, the toothpaste is out of the tube; there seems little point in squabbling about its mintiness. What a treat it is though to see a great novelist at work, to peer over his shoulder. And how wonderful to have a hardback book that has been so beautifully produced, with sewn binding and all.
The Original of Laura is strictly of interest to Nabokov’s existing readers; if you are approaching his work for the first time, this certainly isn’t the place to start. No one should think any the less of one of the last century’s greatest writers as a result of reading it, but should rather mourn the fact that he didn’t live to finish it. We can have only the dimmest inkling of what it might have become.
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