Book review: The Original of Laura: A Novel in Fragments

Published on Friday 20 November 2009 18:44

THE Original of Laura: A Novel in Fragments by Vladimir Nabokov Penguin Classics, 278pp, £25

A BEAUTIFUL object, superbly bound and lovingly furnished, its title fading across the cover from left to right with allusive aptness, The Original of Laura, (which Nabokov subtitled Dying is Fun – though for him the opposite was the case), is an old man's fumble, a failed attempt at sleight of hand, so often Nabokov's stock in trade.

He was wise to insist that it be destroyed should he die before it reached completion. His widow, Vera, "due to age, weakness, and immeasurable love" – so we are told by their son Dimitri in his superfluous introduction – did not comply.

Dimitri, 32 years in the wake of Nabokov's death, has decided to flout his father's wishes, and publish these fragments, which Nabokov senior, a scrupulous perfectionist, had abandoned during that final protracted illness.

The deed is done. And it is the son, firmly believing (we must take him at his word) that, as he sees it, this work "is an embryonic masterpiece whose pockets of genius were beginning to pupate", to whom the plaudits or the flak, at least in part, must be directed. His choice of simile is unfortunate. Nabokov senior, a lepidopterist, punctilious to the last, ought to have told him the meaning of pupa.

More aptly, 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".

Written carefully, in soft pencil on to numerous index cards, a format which permitted him scope to shuffle the narrative deck into permutations enlivened by chance as well as intent, it is seldom much better than Nabokov-lite. Here and there, in the faltering hand, you can trace the final protracted illness, a tell-tale ghost betraying decline.

The book has been published very handsomely, with facsimiles of each of the novel's 138 index cards reproduced on alternate pages, with perforations, should you wish to tear them out, and below each card the text is deciphered into clear print.

The spinal story of the novel is that of promiscuous Flora Lanskaya, slender, capricious, once a nymphet who lost her virginity aged 14, now unhappily married, seduced by her husband's fame and fortune.The cuckolded husband, Philip Wild, an obese "mad" neurologist, is also a would-be novelist, middle-aged, far more perplexing and therefore constantly and more vigorously intriguing than his wife.

"Fat men beat their wives, it is said, and he certainly looked fierce, when he caught her rifling through his papers," is the reader's introduction to Wild's disposition. Gradually we discover, as the text flows back and forth, and as Flora merges into Laura, that fickle, fantasised, beautiful Laura (Wild's creation) is based on his wife, on her wayward nature: taunting, dismissive and irresistible to lovers thrice her age.

Her mother's new husband, Hubert H Hubert, a slobbery gargoyle, had slavered after the 12-year-old Flora in her nymphet days (ah! echoes of Lolita), and now "her frail, docile frame when turned over by hand revealed new marvels – the mobile omoplates of a child being tubbed, the incurvation of a ballerina's spine, narrow nates …"

Nabokov cannot resist this foray into obscurity and pretentiousness: Why "omoplates" and not shoulder blades? Why "nates" instead of buttocks? Alliteration is partly the answer – Nabokov's weakness for it – slippers are "foetally folded", a messenger brings "from the favourite florist of fashionable girls a banal bevy of bird-of-paradise flowers".

The familiar roll-call of Nabokov themes is here headed by death, pursued inventively by Wild's fanciful narrator, bidding for suicide by means of self-erasure, "an act of self-destructiveness which develops paradoxically an element of creativeness". He begins by vanishing his toes, proceeding towards oblivion, towards Nirvana. But do we care?

Casting doubts at every turn, Nabokov fishes from his deck a wild card, Rawitch, a painter, and possibly true author of the novel Laura – "a bestseller", Wild informs us, "a maddening masterpiece". Thus Rawitch's Laura – unlike the Laura of Wild and Nabokov – must, one presumes, have bled and breathed and come alive to dance through the reader's imagination.

Here Flora and Laura, amongst these fragments of valediction, lie flat on the page, erotic pawns in search of a destiny. Nabokov's destiny though seems secure, despite the dent this publication may inflict.