Book review: The Original of Laura

Published on Friday 20 November 2009 18:05

THE ORIGINAL OF LAURA Vladimir Nabokov Penguin Classics, £25 MICHIKO KAKUTANI

GIVEN the shape of Vladimir Nabokov's own life, it's hardly surprising that death – and its cousin, loss – permeated his fiction like a potent but noxious perfume. Nabokov's wealthy, aristocratic family was forced to flee Russia in the wake of the Revolution and, in 1922, his father, a liberal politician, was shot at a rally in Berlin, trying to protect another man from an assassin. The Nazis would later drive Nabokov, his wife and son from Europe to America, where they moved from sublet to sublet, motel to motel. Although he gave up his beloved Russian and reinvented himself as one of the great stylists of the English language, an exile's detachment and nostalgia would always lurk beneath the surface of his playful, glittering prose, and a heightened awareness of mortality would create a powerful undertow in his novels and short stories.

In The Original Of Laura – fragments of a novel that Nabokov left unfinished at his death and that his son, Dmitri, decided, after much agonising, to publish against his father's wishes – he imagines the death of his protagonist, a writer and neurologist named Philip, as a sort of Nietzschean act of will, as an exercise in self-erasure conducted body part by body part, beginning with his toes. It is the ultimate fantasy of a writer who wants to exert complete control over the narrative of his own life. "The process of dying by auto-dissolution," Philip asserts, "afforded the greatest ecstasy known to man".

Philip's grotesque story was sketched out by Nabokov on index cards, which, according to his son, he worked on "feverishly" during the last months of his life in a hospital in Lausanne, Switzerland; he left express instructions with his wife, Vera, that Laura should be burned if it remained unfinished at the time of his death. Vera Nabokov (who had once saved Lolita from going up in smoke, when her husband became convinced that it would always remain a victim of incomprehension) failed to carry out this task, her procrastination due, her son writes, "to age, weakness and immeasurable love".

After years of procrastination himself, Dmitri decided that his father, who died in 1977, or his "father's shade," would not "have opposed the release of Laura once Laura had survived the hum of time this long". Was Dmitri right to publish The Original of Laura: (Dying Is Fun)? Do the index cards (reproduced in an ingenious punch-out format) represent, as Dmitri has said, "the most concentrated distillation" of his father's creativity? Does this fragmentary manuscript constitute the makings of "a brilliant, original and potentially radical book"? Or does the unfinished manuscript simply feel like an embarrassing coda to the master magician's oeuvre? In many respects, the release of a rudimentary version of his last novel does a disservice to a writer who cherished precision and was practised in revision. Just as The Enchanter, a precursor to Lolita written in 1939 and published after his death, reads like a crude, often flat-footed version of its famous descendant, so these fragments of Laura – so cryptic and sketchy – represent an incomplete, foetal rendering of whatever it was that Nabokov held within his imagination.

The final irony concerning The Original Of Laura, of course, is the fact that its very form – an incomplete manuscript – recalls a favourite Nabokov device: the notion of a set of "strange pages" or imperfect scribblings found, edited or annotated by another. This device – HH's memoir edited and published after his death (Lolita), say, or John Shade's poem, introduced and commented upon by a scholar named Charles Kinbote (Pale Fire) – was not only a clever, postmodernist frame deployed by Nabokov in his endlessly inventive pursuit of complication, but it was also a sort of metaphysical statement on art and the artist, a rumination upon the inscrutable mysteries of creation.

• This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday on 22 November 2009.