The novel Nabokov was working on when he died, The Original of Laura, is set to be released in the US on November 17th. He wasn’t finished with it; Publisher’s Weekly describes it as reading “largely like an outline, full of seeming notes-to-self, references to source material, self-critique, sentence fragments and commentary,” but it still should be worth checking out if only for the glimpse it would provide into Nabokov’s process.
He wrote his novels on index cards, and the Original of Laura exists on 138 of them; Nabokov had wanted them burned and left instructions to that effect. But his wife Véra couldn’t bring herself to do it, and neither could his son Dmitri. So the cards remained in a safe-deposit box until last spring, when Dmitri decided to publish it anyway.
At Slate, Ron Rosenbaum writes rapturously of reading the text — Random House required him to sign a 3-page nondisclosure form before allowing him to read it in their offices — and marvels that, instead of being a pile of ashes,
there it was, a hefty physical object, truly unusual in more than one respect. Knopf and presumably Dmitri have scanned the 138 index cards and presented them one to a page, in perforated detachable form. There’s a transcription by Dmitri below each card. You could detach the cards and shuffle them if you wanted to, although this form implies more randomness than the careful numbering, renumbering, and lettering V.N. has penciled in on most of the cards suggests. And if you were to remove all the cards, the hardbound book would look like a ghost town with all the windows punched in. But you have to admire the daring: The book’s form will allow readers to hold the cards in their hands the way V.N. must have, at one time or another, as he neared completion of this draft.
This reminded me of a passage from the Quarterly Conversation’s issue 16 editorial, “On the Proliferation of Posthumous Publication”:
In light of the fact that anyone working today cannot possibly believe that her unpublished work is safe, we must assume that no matter what an author says, if she didn’t burn it up to ashes she at least a little bit wanted it published. And so, in hopes of squaring readers’ and publishers’ interests with authors’ quite legitimate need to not have someone sully their work, we offer the following compromise:
1. If it’s not burned you can publish it.
2. But, you have to publish it just as it was left.That is, “The Original of Laura” should be available as a little stack of notecards secured with a handy steel ring. “The Pale King” should come packaged in numerous filing cabinets and some twine. Bolaño’s remaining manuscripts should come in spiral binders bearing the musty smell of moldy paper. And so on and so forth. Undoubtedly this arrangement will lead to production challenges that will make the large-scale manufacture of some of these posthumous manuscripts difficult, if not impossible. To which we say: oh well.
See also: Dead Men Tell No Tales?
