The Original of Laura
Encyclopedia
The Original of Laura is the incomplete
final novel
by Vladimir Nabokov
, which he was writing at the time of his death in 1977. It was finally published, after 30 years of private debate, on November 17, 2009. Nabokov had requested that the work be destroyed upon his death, but his family hesitated to carry out his wish to destroy an incomplete but perhaps important literary work. Over the next years its contents were viewed only by Nabokov's son, wife, and a few scholars.
In April 2008, Nabokov's son Dmitri Nabokov
announced plans to publish the work, in what BBC2 late night news programme Newsnight
later said was "likely to be the literary event of 2009
." Upon publication, however, critical response was strongly negative, with commenters lambasting the quality of the writing and admonishing Nabokov's executor for publishing the work in this state.
summarizes the plot as follows:
When Nabokov died on July 2, 1977, he was still working on the novel, since retitled The Opposite of Laura and finally The Original of Laura. The incomplete manuscript consists of Nabokov's own handwriting across 138 index cards, 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
.
, and their son, Dmitri
, became his literary executor
s, but ultimately ignored his will, and did not destroy the manuscript. Dmitri noted that Vera 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 has remained since his death. In 1991 Vera 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." Dmitri noted "his father, ... or his 'father’s shade,' would not 'have opposed the release of ‘Laura’ once ‘Laura’ had survived the hum of time this long.'"
Scholars and enthusiasts disagreed over whether the manuscript should be made public; as the (London) Times
posed the question: "the demands of the literary world versus the posthumous rights of an author over his art." The younger Nabokov remarked cryptically that one other person possessed a key to the manuscript, but did not say who that person was. Like Nabokov, many observers were on the fence about the disposition of the manuscript. The author Edmund White
compared the author's last request to Virgil
's request to destroy the Aeneid
(ignored by Augustus Caesar) or Franz Kafka
's request to destroy his papers (ignored by Max Brod
). Nabokov weighed in on Nikolai Gogol
's decision to burn the sequels to Dead Souls
.
The journalist Ron Rosenbaum
, who corresponded with Dmitri Nabokov, said that the son had been inclined toward destroying the manuscript, swayed by criticism of his father, such as allegations of plagiarism that arose from the discovery of a 1916 German short story, "Lolita" with some similarities to Nabokov's work, or critics who had interpreted Nabokov's work as suggesting that Nabokov was sexually abused.
In April 2008 Dmitri Nabokov told many publications, including Nabokov Online Journal and Der Spiegel
, that he intended to publish the manuscript after all. 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 and also Playboy, to which Nabokov was a contributor."
BBC
Newsnight
predicted that the novel's publication was "likely to be the literary event of 2009."
. 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."
The German weekly Die Zeit
in its 14 August 2008 issue reproduced some of Nabokov's original index cards which had been obtained by journalist Malte Herwig
. In the accompanying article, Herwig concluded that "Laura", although fragmentary, was "vintage Nabokov".
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.
According to Delage-Toriel, the meaning of "the Original" is unclear:
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.
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.
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." Theroux concluded, "The last card of The Original of Laura is a poignant list of synonyms for 'efface'—expunge, erase, delete, rub out, wipe out, obliterate ... it is a pity that his instructions were ignored and the novel survived in such a form. English professors may assign The Original of Laura to their students someday, but it is really better suited to a college ethics class." He was not the only reviewer to suggest that the fragments should not have been published or should not be read.
However, a reviewer in New York Magazine was glad to have the book; he enjoyed reading it and enjoyed the opportunity to see Nabokov's work "rough". 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.
Unfinished work
An unfinished work is creative work that has not been finished. Its creator may have chosen never to finish it or may have been prevented from doing so by circumstances outside of their control such as death. Such pieces are often the subject of speculation as to what the finished piece would have...
final novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
by Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a multilingual Russian novelist and short story writer. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist...
, which he was writing at the time of his death in 1977. It was finally published, after 30 years of private debate, on November 17, 2009. Nabokov had requested that the work be destroyed upon his death, but his family hesitated to carry out his wish to destroy an incomplete but perhaps important literary work. Over the next years its contents were viewed only by Nabokov's son, wife, and a few scholars.
In April 2008, Nabokov's son Dmitri Nabokov
Dmitri Nabokov
Dmitri Vladimirovich Nabokov is an American opera singer and translator. He is the only child of writer Vladimir Nabokov and his wife Vera Nabokov, and is currently executor of his father's literary estate.-Background:...
announced plans to publish the work, in what BBC2 late night news programme Newsnight
Newsnight
Newsnight is a BBC Television current affairs programme noted for its in-depth analysis and often robust cross-examination of senior politicians. Jeremy Paxman has been its main presenter for over two decades....
later said was "likely to be the literary event of 2009
2009 in literature
The year 2009 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*8 October - Romanian-born German novelist Herta Müller wins the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature....
." Upon publication, however, critical response was strongly negative, with commenters lambasting the quality of the writing and admonishing Nabokov's executor for publishing the work in this state.
Plot
Based on discussions with unidentified scholars, The TimesThe Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
summarizes the plot as follows:
Philip Wild, an enormously corpulent scholar, is married to a slender, flighty and wildly promiscuous woman called Flora. Flora initially appealed to Wild because of another woman that he’d been in love with, Aurora Lee. Death and what lies beyond it, a theme which fascinated Nabokov from a very young age, are central. The book opens at a party and there follow four continuous scenes, after which the novel becomes more fragmented. It is not clear how old Wild is, but he is preoccupied with his own death and sets about obliterating himself from the toes upwards through meditation, a sort of deliberate self-inflicted self-erasure.
Background
According to his diaries, Nabokov first noted his work on the project on December 1, 1974, under the title Dying Is Fun. By the summer of 1976, he noted that the story was completed in his mind, but by then his health was failing rapidly.When Nabokov died on July 2, 1977, he was still working on the novel, since retitled The Opposite of Laura and finally The Original of Laura. The incomplete manuscript consists of Nabokov's own handwriting across 138 index cards, 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
Lolita
Lolita is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, first written in English and published in 1955 in Paris and 1958 in New York, and later translated by the author into Russian...
and Pale Fire
Pale Fire
Pale Fire is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov. The novel is presented as a 999-line poem titled "Pale Fire", written by the fictional John Shade, with a foreword and lengthy commentary by a neighbor and academic colleague of the poet. Together these elements form a narrative in which both authors are...
.
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, VeraVera Nabokov
Véra Nabokova was the wife, muse, editor, and translator of Vladimir Nabokov.-Early life and immigration:...
, and their son, Dmitri
Dmitri Nabokov
Dmitri Vladimirovich Nabokov is an American opera singer and translator. He is the only child of writer Vladimir Nabokov and his wife Vera Nabokov, and is currently executor of his father's literary estate.-Background:...
, became his literary executor
Literary executor
A literary executor is a person with decision-making power in respect of a literary estate. According to Wills, Administration and Taxation: a practical guide "A will may appoint different executors to deal with different parts of the estate...
s, but ultimately ignored his will, and did not destroy the manuscript. Dmitri noted that Vera Nabokov "failed to carry out this task, her procrastination due, 'to age, weakness and immeasurable love.'" They placed it in a Swiss bank vault
Bank vault
A bank vault is a secure space where money, valuables, records, and documents can be stored. It is intended to protect their contents from theft, unauthorized use, fire, natural disasters, and other threats, just like a safe...
, where it has remained since his death. In 1991 Vera 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." Dmitri noted "his father, ... or his 'father’s shade,' would not 'have opposed the release of ‘Laura’ once ‘Laura’ had survived the hum of time this long.'"
Scholars and enthusiasts disagreed over whether the manuscript should be made public; as the (London) Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
posed the question: "the demands of the literary world versus the posthumous rights of an author over his art." The younger Nabokov remarked cryptically that one other person possessed a key to the manuscript, but did not say who that person was. Like Nabokov, many observers were on the fence about the disposition of the manuscript. The author Edmund White
Edmund White
Edmund Valentine White III is an American author and literary critic. He is a member of the faculty of Princeton University's Program in Creative Writing.- Life and work :...
compared the author's last request to Virgil
Virgil
Publius Vergilius Maro, usually called Virgil or Vergil in English , was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He is known for three major works of Latin literature, the Eclogues , the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid...
's request to destroy the Aeneid
Aeneid
The Aeneid is a Latin epic poem, written by Virgil between 29 and 19 BC, that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who travelled to Italy, where he became the ancestor of the Romans. It is composed of roughly 10,000 lines in dactylic hexameter...
(ignored by Augustus Caesar) or Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language author of short stories and novels. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century...
's request to destroy his papers (ignored by Max Brod
Max Brod
Max Brod was a German-speaking Czech Jewish, later Israeli, author, composer, and journalist. Although he was a prolific writer in his own right, he is most famous as the friend and biographer of Franz Kafka...
). Nabokov weighed in on Nikolai Gogol
Nikolai Gogol
Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was a Ukrainian-born Russian dramatist and novelist.Considered by his contemporaries one of the preeminent figures of the natural school of Russian literary realism, later critics have found in Gogol's work a fundamentally romantic sensibility, with strains of Surrealism...
's decision to burn the sequels to Dead Souls
Dead Souls
Dead Souls is a novel by Nikolai Gogol, first published in 1842, and widely regarded as an exemplar of 19th-century Russian literature. Gogol himself saw it as an "epic poem in prose", and within the book as a "novel in verse". Despite supposedly completing the trilogy's second part, Gogol...
.
The journalist Ron Rosenbaum
Ron Rosenbaum
-Life and career:Rosenbaum was born into a Jewish family in New York City, New York and grew up in Bay Shore, New York. He graduated from Yale University in 1968 and won a Carnegie Fellowship to attend Yale's graduate program in English Literature, though he dropped out after taking one course...
, who corresponded with Dmitri Nabokov, said that the son had been inclined toward destroying the manuscript, swayed by criticism of his father, such as allegations of plagiarism that arose from the discovery of a 1916 German short story, "Lolita" with some similarities to Nabokov's work, or critics who had interpreted Nabokov's work as suggesting that Nabokov was sexually abused.
In April 2008 Dmitri Nabokov told many publications, including Nabokov Online Journal and Der Spiegel
Der Spiegel
Der Spiegel is a German weekly news magazine published in Hamburg. It is one of Europe's largest publications of its kind, with a weekly circulation of more than one million.-Overview:...
, that he intended to publish the manuscript after all. 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 and also Playboy, to which Nabokov was a contributor."
BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
Newsnight
Newsnight
Newsnight is a BBC Television current affairs programme noted for its in-depth analysis and often robust cross-examination of senior politicians. Jeremy Paxman has been its main presenter for over two decades....
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 UniversityCornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...
. The scholars Brian Boyd
Brian Boyd
Brian Boyd is known primarily as an expert on the life and works of author Vladimir Nabokov and on literature and evolution...
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."
The German weekly Die Zeit
Die Zeit
Die Zeit is a German nationwide weekly newspaper that is highly respected for its quality journalism.With a circulation of 488,036 and an estimated readership of slightly above 2 million, it is the most widely read German weekly newspaper...
in its 14 August 2008 issue reproduced some of Nabokov's original index cards which had been obtained by journalist Malte Herwig
Malte Herwig
Malte Herwig is a German-born author, journalist, and literary critic. His articles have appeared widely in U.S., British and German publications, including The New York Times, The Observer, Vanity Fair, Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung...
. In the accompanying article, Herwig concluded that "Laura", although fragmentary, was "vintage Nabokov".
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
High Renaissance
The expression High Renaissance, in art history, is a periodizing convention used to denote the apogee of the visual arts in the Italian Renaissance...
portraits of women by Titian
Titian
Tiziano Vecelli or Tiziano Vecellio Tiziano Vecelli or Tiziano Vecellio Tiziano Vecelli or Tiziano Vecellio (c. 1488/1490 – 27 August 1576 better known as Titian was an Italian painter, the most important member of the 16th-century Venetian school. He was born in Pieve di Cadore, near...
and Giorgione
Giorgione
Giorgione was a Venetian painter of the High Renaissance in Venice, whose career was cut off by his death at a little over thirty. Giorgione is known for the elusive poetic quality of his work, though only about six surviving paintings are acknowledged for certain to be his work...
, both evoking the Italian sonneteer Petrarch
Petrarch
Francesco Petrarca , known in English as Petrarch, was an Italian scholar, poet and one of the earliest humanists. Petrarch is often called the "Father of Humanism"...
's unconsummated obsession with a woman named Laura.
According to Delage-Toriel, the meaning of "the Original" is unclear:
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.
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
Pennsylvania State University
The Pennsylvania State University, commonly referred to as Penn State or PSU, is a public research university with campuses and facilities throughout the state of Pennsylvania, United States. Founded in 1855, the university has a threefold mission of teaching, research, and public service...
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
John Banville
John Banville is an Irish novelist and screenwriter.Banville's breakthrough novel The Book of Evidence was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and won the Guinness Peat Aviation award. His eighteenth novel, The Sea, won the Man Booker Prize in 2005. He was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize in 2011...
called the published volume, designed by Chip Kidd
Chip Kidd
Chip Kidd is an American author, editor, and graphic designer, best known for his book covers.- Early life :Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, Kidd grew up in the Reading suburb of Shillington, strongly influenced by American popular culture...
, "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 ZeitungFrankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , short F.A.Z., also known as the FAZ, is a national German newspaper, founded in 1949. It is published daily in Frankfurt am Main. The Sunday edition is the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung .F.A.Z...
compared the fragment to a "labyrinthine, overgrown garden without a gazebo
Gazebo
A gazebo is a pavilion structure, sometimes octagonal, that may be built, in parks, gardens, and spacious public areas. Gazebos are freestanding or attached to a garden wall, roofed, and open on all sides; they provide shade, shelter, ornamental features in a landscape, and a place to rest...
in its center" and "a puzzle with too many missing pieces". Alexander Theroux
Alexander Theroux
Alexander Theroux is an American novelist, poet, and essayist.He was born in Medford, Massachusetts. His brother is Paul Theroux. He studied at Harvard University and Yale University...
's review of the book in The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal is an American English-language international daily newspaper. It is published in New York City by Dow Jones & Company, a division of News Corporation, along with the Asian and European editions of the 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
Lou Gehrig
Henry Louis "Lou" Gehrig , nicknamed "The Iron Horse" for his durability, was an American Major League Baseball first baseman. He played his entire 17-year baseball career for the New York Yankees . Gehrig set several major league records. He holds the record for most career grand slams...
in 1939. Martin Amis
Martin Amis
Martin Louis Amis is a British novelist, the author of many novels including Money and London Fields . He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester, but will step down at the end of the 2010/11 academic year...
echoed this sentiment somewhat more directly in his review in The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
, "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." Theroux concluded, "The last card of The Original of Laura is a poignant list of synonyms for 'efface'—expunge, erase, delete, rub out, wipe out, obliterate ... it is a pity that his instructions were ignored and the novel survived in such a form. English professors may assign The Original of Laura to their students someday, but it is really better suited to a college ethics class." He was not the only reviewer to suggest that the fragments should not have been published or should not be read.
However, a reviewer in New York Magazine was glad to have the book; he enjoyed reading it and enjoyed the opportunity to see Nabokov's work "rough". 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
Literary Review
Literary Review is a British literary magazine founded in 1979 by Anne Smith, then head of the Department of English at Edinburgh University. Its offices are currently on Lexington Street in Soho, London, and it has a circulation of 44,750. Britain's principal literary monthly, the magazine was...
, David Lodge
David Lodge (author)
David John Lodge CBE, is an English author.In his novels, Lodge often satirises academia in general and the humanities in particular. He was brought up Catholic and has described himself as an "agnostic Catholic". Many of his characters are Catholic and their Catholicism is a major theme...
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.
External links
- Kirschbaum, Alexis. "The inside story of Nabokov's last work". The Guardian. 17 November 2009.
- Albina Kovalyova, "A Literary Legend Resurfaces". Russiaprofile.org. 28 July 2009. Requires registration.
- "Should Nabokov's unpublished manuscript be burned?" ABC Radio National. 24 February 2008. Discussion among Brian BoydBrian BoydBrian Boyd is known primarily as an expert on the life and works of author Vladimir Nabokov and on literature and evolution...
, Ron RosenbaumRon Rosenbaum-Life and career:Rosenbaum was born into a Jewish family in New York City, New York and grew up in Bay Shore, New York. He graduated from Yale University in 1968 and won a Carnegie Fellowship to attend Yale's graduate program in English Literature, though he dropped out after taking one course...
, Leland de la DurantayeLeland de la DurantayeLeland de la Durantaye is an American writer, and Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of English, at Harvard University.He won a 2011 Berlin Prize fellowship.-Life:...
and Ramona KovalRamona KovalRamona Koval is an Australian broadcaster, writer and journalist.Her parents were Yiddish-speaking survivors of the Holocaust who arrived in Melbourne from Poland in 1950....
. - Chloé Deroy's website http://lolita-laura.e-monsite.com/ where you can watch lectures on "Lolita" and "The Original of Laura"