Vladimir Nabokov - "The Original of Laura" Index Card Reverso X's

Back in 2010 i was tasked with writing a review for then-recently published "The Original of Laura" aka unfinished novel by Vladimir Nabokov. It was a throwaway review for entertainment mag. Some context plus basic retelling of the plot. The book had a lot of buzz. Because of that it was deemed as viable for consumer review for the target audience - Zhytomyr's bohemians.

The book was terrible, mostly because it was just a jumbled mess of bits and pieces that were yet to come into any cohesion. It was raw, rough and bloody. Far from anything you can even remotely recommend or promote. You could see all of the Nabokov's style signatures but none of the grace and pace. The other problem with this book was that you can't really review it in the constraints of a 500 word piece. If you do it straight - give some context, retell the plot, recommend, not recommend, etc - it just wouldn't work because that way the book resembles a pretentious romance novel. Which it is not because it is not even there.

"The Original of Laura" was mildly controversial because of the fact that Nabokov specifically stated in his will to destroy any unfinished piece after his death. However, due to Nabokov's wife and son indecisiveness - Laura was never destroyed. You can understand why. It was the last thing Nabokov worked on - there was a considerable sentiment bundled with it. So instead it laid dormant in the locker room for decades. After Nabokov's wife Vera had died in the early 90s, Nabokov's son Dmitry started to make some movements with the manuscript. He started to show it to the scholars. Then some excerpts got published. However, the talk about publishing the whole book kinda stood still until mid 2000s. Then the announcement came and the book was out.

It was immediately thrashed and dismissed for what it is - arrogant attempt at cashing-in. My review was never published because secondary trend analysis showed that was no interest for it. Happens. What would you expect while considering a review of a posthumous Nabokov novel for a local website? Contribution to the conversation? Anyway.

For some reason i remained fascinated with this book for some time. Mostly because of the way it was presented.

The thing with "Laura" is that it is barely a book. It is more of a suggestion out of which you can conjure an idea of a book. That requires some excessive thinking. But it is an interesting concept. The format of the book was interesting too. Nabokov used to write on small format index card. The book itself was a series of transcripts of these writings. In theory, that's quite a constraint and it can help you with constructing the story compressed and dynamic. If you take one card as one distinct event - you need to go straight to the point and not dissipate on the irrelevant nuances. In reality, the cards contained some sketches of the episodes, internal monologues, dialogue drafts and the likes. Because the text was still formatted around the cards - it helped to take a distance from the text and consider what it was trying to talk about. You know this is not a real text and you only need to consume information and piece it together on your own.

The most interesting thing from the artistic standpoint was not the plot or characters or themes or writing style. The most interesting thing about the book were the reverses of the index card scans. The second part of the book contained lots of scans of the cards and there were a lot of pieces that had big X on the reverse side marking a rejection. Those X's are probably the most creative thing in the book. Looking at them you could feel the executive decision, the power of nixing, the will to nonplus. If you take this thing out of context and present in isolation - that would be quite a conceptual piece.

By the way, here's a little sampler: