The Original of Laura is about a wonderfully large man called Philip Wild, married to a very promiscuous woman, and whose meditations concern the nature of death. The novel was complete in Nabokov's mind, though he died before he could translate his vision on to paper. The late Vladimir Nabokov requested that this unfinished work be destroyed, but his son, Dmitri, did not oblige, although neither did he allow the work to be published – until now.
"The Problem with Nabokov" -- Martin Amis, The Guardian, 14/11/09
John Crace's Digested Read (The Guardian)
Reviews
The New York Times
Michiko Kakutani
"In many respects, the release of a rudimentary version of his last novel does a disservice to a writer who deeply cherished precision and was practiced in the art of revision... Yet, at the same time, these bits and pieces of “Laura” will beckon and beguile Nabokov fans, who will find many of the author’s perennial themes and obsessions percolating through the story of Philip, an “enormously fat creature” with “ridiculously small feet, ” and his wildly promiscuous wife, Flora, who seems to have been the inspiration for a fictional character named Laura."
09/11/2009
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The Literary Review
David Lodge
"The way the manuscript has been ingeniously edited and reproduced ingeniously overcomes, to a large extent, the disappointment and frustration inherent in reading an unfinished and disconnected narrative... 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."
01/12/2009
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The Daily Telegraph
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
"No doubt it will be the subject of conference papers for years to come, as experts vie with each other to explain how it would have been completed if Nabokov had lived. It will become the 20th century’s answer to Edwin Drood. What nobody will want to admit is that what we have may be substantially what Nabokov wanted to give us all along: a puzzle without a solution. No writer more enjoyed leaving phoney clues and false trails and it is hard to avoid closing Laura without wondering whether it is anything more than a great big wink at posterity."
21/11/2009
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The New York Times
David Gates
"The younger Nabokov’s introduction claims that “despite its incompleteness,” “The Original of Laura” is “unprecedented in structure and style.”... The style of Nabokov’s very last work hardly seems “unprecedented”... but especially for an aging, ailing man, he was in fine form. This, rather than imputed formal innovations or supposed insights into his writing process — we’ve known for years that he wrote on index cards, and that, like other mortals, he revised and deleted and made notes to himself — makes “The Original of Laura” worth the frustration of reading it."
11/11/2009
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The Observer
William Skidelsky
"It seems likely that, had Nabokov finished it, The Original of Laura would indeed have been an important work, if not necessarily a masterpiece. Yet the problem is that he didn't finish it and, in fact, he was a long way from doing so… It seems likely that this book will have a more significant impact on the size of Dmitri Nabokov's bank balance than it ever will on the world of letters."
22/11/2009
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The Scotsman
Tom Adair
"...this novel is a flawed, truncated mosaic, its sentences glittering, sometimes opaque, here and there risible with strained alliteration. It stands before us, if not in tatters then all too often patchily clothed. And Nabokov's posthumous reputation is not well served by the dust jacket's claim that it is a "masterwork", a "great book"."
21/11/2009
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The Los Angeles Times
James Marcus
"The problem is that Wild's portion of the narrative consists largely of jotted notes... Of course, they give us some precious insight into Nabokov's compositional methods. And there are glimpses, here and there, of his own physical trials, all the more moving for being unvarnished. But their scholarly interest far outweighs their value as art. To be blunt: As a novel -- even as the sketch of a novel, with operating instructions enclosed -- "The Original of Laura" is largely an exercise in frustration."
15/11/2009
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The Sunday Telegraph
Jonathan Bate
"Techniques that are brilliant in the finished novels seem merely tired in this fragment... Dmitri Nabokov would have served Vladimir’s memory most nobly by publishing this fragment in an academic journal for the benefit of scholars. By seeking to turn it into a moneyspinner, he may have inflicted some severe damage on his father’s reputation."
02/12/2009
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The Washington Post
Michael Dirda
"Apart from a few enchanting phrases -- "the orange awnings of southern summers" -- there's just not much here... Where the action was intended to go remains elusive, and without any serious editorial apparatus it's difficult even to speculate. In consequence, this book remains only a posthumous collection of rough drafts and authorial notes, more novelty than anything else. "The Original of Laura" is for Nabokov completists only."
19/11/2009
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The Spectator
Philip Hensher
"The Original of Laura itself has, in the mind of a fevered coterie, somehow become a lost masterpiece. If no one had ever been allowed to read it, it would have stayed like that forever. Unfortunately, it turns out to be rambling, trite, and, evidently, a very early draft of some quite confused material."
25/11/2009
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The Evening Standard
David Sexton
"Anybody interested in reading late Nabokov should turn back to his wonderful novella Transparent Things of 1972. The Original of Laura contains a few fine Nabokovian phrases and it provides some new insight into Nabokov's working methods. But he has been done no favours at all by the ostentatious way this fragment has been published, against his clear wishes, by his son."
17/11/2009
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