Nabokov's Last Novel, The Original of Laura

It looks lovely, but I'm not getting it any time soon. It's kind of pricey and I have so many books already.

Yeah, it was £25 here! That's a lot of money for a book that is actually not very long at all.

Still, the introduction is interesting, and I'm looking forward to sinking into the story.

From what I've read about it, there really isn't a story, that it's more like notes for a novel. It is a gorgeous looking book though, and I'd like to read his notes, but I'll wait and hope it's under the Christmas tree this year.

The publication of this is a tragedy, in the most innocuous of uses for "tragedy." He wanted it destroyed and the kid should have destroyed it, instead of publishing what amounts to like 30 manuscript pages of the roughest draft. The story sounds like it would have been interesting, but it wasn't written. Curse you, Dmitri Nabokov.

Franz Kafka wanted all of his work destroyed.

I've read it already and, yes, it is very fragmentary, but you can see the skeleton of what the novel might have looked like. The are some passages, even in this early draft, that are dripping with everything that's great about Nabokov.

When I first heard about the publication, I was against it too, but when I saw it at the store, I couldn't resist. Maybe it shouldn't have been published, maybe Dimitri just wants some money, but it kind of doesn't matter because it's out there now so you might as well enjoy it. The book has both copies of the index cards and typed out paragraphs. You can punch the cards out and carry them around, which is more than a little reminiscent of Pale fire, and there'll probably be a bunch of Kinbote's in the next twenty years that think they can annotate the thing. It all strikes me as the kind of joke that Nabokov would pull, and that it's all been planned from the beginning. That's just my image of the man, though.

I think it's worth reading, if nothing else, you get a little glimpse into his process. I'm a Nabokov super-fan, though.

Speaking of unfinished posthumous publications: some of Vonnegut's early stories are being released soon and David Foster Wallace's last book is coming ut next summer. It just goes to show, if you're a famous writer and you don't want something published after you die, you should destroy it yourself.

Shit, Tolkien's son has made his own career on this. I don't see anything wrong with it, really. The fragments you die with are going to see the light of day eventually unless you or someone else makes sure to destroy them.

I think it's pretty similar to making a biography of someone who's died. It's not something they chose to have done in their lifetime, but people want it.