House of Mirth

My piece on Vladimir Nabokov's The Original of Laura has been posted over at the Los Angeles Times Book Review. I found the book something of a damp fizzle. I'm glad Dmitri Nabokov didn't accede to his father's wishes and destroy the manuscript (actually a pile of index cards), since it's fascinating to see what was on Nabokov's mind during his final months: death and its opposite, sex. But to my mind, Chip Kidd's lavish design has the strange effect of diminishing The Original of Laura. You pick up the 277-page volume expecting it to contain an actual book, and what you find is a fragment: a toothpick pretending to be a tree. I began this way:

In the fall of 1976, a newspaper contacted Vladimir Nabokov in his Swiss refuge and asked him which books he had recently read. He responded with three typical titles: Dante's "Inferno" (in Charles Singleton's deliciously literal translation), a big, fat book about butterflies and his own work-in-progress, "The Original of Laura."

The latter project had preoccupied him over the summer, despite a serious illness. It was, he told his correspondent, "completed in my mind." The revisions went on while he was confined to a hospital bed, a febrile process he describes in some detail in his "Selected Letters": "I must have gone through it some fifty times and in my diurnal delirium kept reading it aloud to a small dream audience in a walled garden. My audience consisted of peacocks, pigeons, my long dead parents, two cypresses, several young nurses crouching around, and a family doctor so old as to be almost invisible."

You can read the rest here. To judge from this handy roundup in the paper's Jacket Copy blog, most critics seem to share my disappointment. Aleksander Hemon, who reviewed the book in Slate, went one step further, characterizing the very publication of the TOOL as a barrel-scraping betrayal of its author: "It is safe to say that what is published as the novel titled The Original of Laura (Dying Is Fun) is not a result Nabokov desired or would welcome.... [The book] can't escape the musty air of an estate sale: The trinkets that piled up in the attic; the damp books from the basement; the old man's stained cravat; the lonely figurines that used to be part of a cherished set; the mismatched, overworn clothing -- all are brought out in the hope that there might appear a buyer for those sad objects, someone blinded by literary nostalgia and willing to rescue the family possessions from the waste basket."

Labels: The Original of Laura, Vladimir Nabokov