I recently read Nabokov’s last unfinished novel The Original of Laura (Dying is Fun). Honestly, it is far from being a novel, but it is as far to ignore it!
The writer was in poor health while working on it. As usual, he sketched chapters and random pieces using the index cards which permitted him to arrange, complete or delete the patterns of his novel.
Before his death, Nabokov gave instructions to destroy the cards but, fortunately for us, his wife and his son, after 30 years of private debate, decided to publish it. In a very smart way. The book contains facsimiles of the notecards which can be removed and shuffled.
But I don’t know why you would do this.
Brian Boyd, the expert on Nabokov’s heritage, gives excellent advise to read, read and reread the novel. (It takes only a few hours.) He first was against publishing but then through an accurate reading discovered the magic of an unborn masterpiece.
Why read it carefully? Nabokov plays with readers, misleading them while introducing Mr. Hubert H. Hubert who immediately evokes Humbert Humbert. But here is the trick, he has nothing to do with Lolita; Mr. H. tenderly loves his little Flora because she reminds him of his dead daughter.
Grown Flora made of her husband’s (Mr. Wild’s) life an “anthology of humiliation”, and
as you know of coursethe word “anthology” derives from the Greek for “collecting flowers”; again Nabokov’s fine play on words.The writer analyses death and self-elimination. And even art can’t save his heros. But you’ll read it for yourself.
xx
-
New favorite thing.
-
“Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth. Every great writer is a great deceiver, but so is that arch-cheat Nature. Nature always deceives. From the simple deception of propagation to the prodigiously sophisticated illusion of protective colors in butterflies or birds, there is in Nature a marvelous system of spells and wiles. The writer of fiction only follows Nature’s lead.” —Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature -
-
"I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness-in a landscape selected at random-is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern-to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal."Vladimir Nabokov - from Speak, Memory (via slothnorentropy)
-
Nabokov explains the significance of the Museo Nacional del Prado’s recently revealed copy of the Mona Lisa:
Readers of my Speak, Memory (begun in the Nineteen-Forties) cannot fail to notice certain similarities between my recollections and Ganin’s. His Mary is a twin sister of my Tamara, the ancestral avenues are there, the Oredezh flows through both books, and the actual photograph of the Rozhestveno house as it is today—beautifully reproduced on the cover of the Penguin edition (Speak, Memory, 1969)—could well be a picture of the pillared porch in the “Voskresensk” of the novel. I had not consulted Mashenka when writing Chapter Twelve of the autobiography a quarter of a century later; and now that I have, I am fascinated by the fact that despite the superimposed inventions (such as the fight with the village rowdy or the tryst in the anonymous town among the glowworms) a headier extract of personal reality is contained in the romantization than in the autobiographer’s scrupulously faithful account. At first I wondered how that could be, how the thrill and the perfume could have survived the exigency of the plot and the ostentation of fictional characters (two of them even appear, very awkwardly, in Mary’s letters), especially as I could not believe that a stylish imitation should be able to vie with plain truth. But the explanation is really quite simple: in terms of years, Ganin was three times closer to his past than I was to mine in Speak, Memory.
The reproduction is more accurate than reality. The map expands, grows, unfurls over the kingdom, covering eventually the kingdom itself; when it frays and disintegrates, what undulates beneath its surface? The student’s brushstroke-accurate mimicry has survived unscathed, while the true and the original has been buried by time in smoke and dust, chopped from its frame, truncated, stolen, cleaned, restored almost to the point of becoming unrecognizable. Leonardo would think the painting on the left was his, not the one on the right. The memory of the copy, generated nearer in time to the original, surpasses the memory of the truth, diminished by time.
-
-
![zemblacascadia:
Vladimir Nabokov’s personal copy of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, hand-annotated for his literature lecture classes. Swoon!
For me the most heartbreaking editorial insight provided by Nabokov is delivered not as a function of one literary giant commenting on the work of another master, but curiously it instead arrives courtesy of Nabokov’s knowledge of the insect world due to his experience as a lepidopterist:
[Gregor] was a domed beetle, a scarab beetle with wing-sheaths, and neither Gregor nor his maker realized that when the room was being made by the maid, and the window was open, he could have flown out and escaped.
Let that sink in for a second: Gregor Samsa could have just flown away.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_me1scgHbYa1rr0wado1_500.jpg "zemblacascadia:
Vladimir Nabokov’s personal copy of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, hand-annotated for his literature lecture classes. Swoon!
For me the most heartbreaking editorial insight provided by Nabokov is delivered not as a function of one literary giant commenting on the work of another master, but curiously it instead arrives courtesy of Nabokov’s knowledge of the insect world due to his experience as a lepidopterist:
[Gregor] was a domed beetle, a scarab beetle with wing-sheaths, and neither Gregor nor his maker realized that when the room was being made by the maid, and the window was open, he could have flown out and escaped.
Let that sink in for a second: Gregor Samsa could have just flown away.")
Vladimir Nabokov’s personal copy of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, hand-annotated for his literature lecture classes. Swoon!
For me the most heartbreaking editorial insight provided by Nabokov is delivered not as a function of one literary giant commenting on the work of another master, but curiously it instead arrives courtesy of Nabokov’s knowledge of the insect world due to his experience as a lepidopterist:
[Gregor] was a domed beetle, a scarab beetle with wing-sheaths, and neither Gregor nor his maker realized that when the room was being made by the maid, and the window was open, he could have flown out and escaped.
Let that sink in for a second: Gregor Samsa could have just flown away.
-
"As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration [for Lolita] was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes, who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage."Vladimir Nabokov (via je-joue-loup-garou)
-
“The closer he looks at the child, the less he sees … The more he looks at it, there’s nothing there. He fears that the more you look at him the less you see. There isn’t anything there.”
—John Hughes
I never saw how this mirrors Nabokov’s “La Veneziana.”
-
"He can write, but he’s got nothing to say."
Isaac Babel on Vladimir Nabokov (via anapparatusofhappiness)
I’ve definitely had this thought before. I think there’s a difference, a subtlety. Maybe it’s too subtle to matter, but I think Nabokov had things to say. It was just very nuanced and…well, subtle. The question is why. Was it because he cared more about how he said things (and that’s a thing too, by the way)? Was it because he was too scared to say things more blatantly (scared is not exactly the right word)? Or was it because he felt saying things that way was beneath him or those of us who look for things at a more obvious level just aren’t getting it? There’s also the thought that what he wanted to say just isn’t culturally obvious to Americans.
I feel like I’m missing something, but I do think there’s more to this than meets the initial thought…
