The Original of Laura

While it's hardly a masterpiece, Vladimir Nabokov's unfinished workprovides a glimpse into his painful final days. By Vladimir Nabokov, edited by Dmitri Nabokov Penguin, 8pp, $55 DON'T be misled by the size of this sumptuous book. You'll needless than three hours to read it from cover to cover, and even then you'll be reading most of it twice. Advertisement: Story continues below In the two years before his deathin 1977, Vladimir Nabokov was working on a new novel, sketchingbits and pieces, including a few short sections marked as chapters,on ruled index cards, writing (mostly in pencil) on one side of thecard only. He had been in poor health, his son Dmitri writes in hisintroduction, ever since an undignified fall in 1975 while chasingbutterflies at the Swiss alpine resort of Davos. He pressed onnevertheless, working on his cards, arranging and shuffling them,deleting some phrases, adding others. In 1977 his health took a turn for the worse. While undergoing a banal operation, hecontracted an infection that left him debilitated. He persisted with his cards, however, even during his last days in hospital,where he died after a nurse with a cold (who had also left a wind owopen) gave him a bronchial infection. Little was said of the exact causes of his malady, Dmitri Nabokov writes.The death of the great man was veiled in embarrassedsilence. Some years later, when he wanted to pinthings down for biographical purposes, he wasdenied all access to his father's medical files. During the last weeks of Nabokov's life, according to his son, the writer gave specific instructions that the cards must Rosetta Stone English be destroyed if he were to die beforecompleting at least a first draft. Those instructions were ignored.The cards stayed in their box. Now, long after the deaths of both his parents, Dmitri Nabokov has decided to publish those fragments of The Original of Laura, an embryonicmasterpiece. The original of Laura 821Laura is a character in a novel is a woman called Flora,the granddaughter of a Russian painter of bad genre paintings and the daughter of a ballet dancer. In the fragments Nabokov marked as the second and third chapters (occupying 25 index cards), we learn about Flora's early life, including her near-seduction when she wasan adolescent by a wine merchant with bad breath called Hubert H.Hubert. In Chapters 4 and 5 (nine cards), Flora meets Dr Philip Wild,a brilliant neurologist . . . of independent means who had everything save an attractive exterior. Floramarries him for his wealth and promptly sets out on a succession of torrid affairs as we learn from an enigmatic first chapter( cards) and from other snippets among Nabokov's jottings. One of Flora's lovers writes anovel about their affair, turning her into Laura and Philip Wildinto Philidor Sauvage get it? There's not much in formation about that novel, Laura, among Nabokov's cards except for asequence of three marked Final in which Flora learnson the railway station of a Swiss town called Sex 821that she has been given a wonderful death, a death that will make her scream with laughter. Nabokov may have had Dying Is Fun in mind as an alternative title for The Original of Laura. Understandably, Dmitri Nabokovbelieves that the fragments he and his mother failed to destroy would have turned into a masterpiece had his father lived longenough to complete the work. On the evidence of what has survived that is doubtful. The bulk of this material seems little different from Nabokov's last published works: Last Things, Look at the Harlequins! and even the longer and much more intricate Ada. The baroque turns of phrase, the puns and the languagegames are still there, but like the final works 821The Original of Laura lacks the verve and extravagance of Nabokov's three masterpieces: Pnin, Lolita and Pale Fire. For all that, one set of cardscontains extraordinary and extraordinarily disturbing material.

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