The Original of Laura

The Original of Laura

First edition cover (faded text intentional)
Author	Vladimir Nabokov
Cover artist	Chip Kidd
Language	English
Publisher	Penguin Modern Classics (UK); Knopf (US)
Publication date	November 17, 2009 (announced)

The Original of Laura is the incomplete novel by Vladimir Nabokov, which he was writing at the time of his death in 1977. It was finally published, after 30 years of private debate, on November 17, 2009. Nabokov had requested that the work be destroyed upon his death, but his family hesitated to carry out his wish to destroy an incomplete but perhaps important literary work. Over the next years its contents were viewed only by Nabokov's son, wife, and a few scholars.

In April 2008, Nabokov's son Dmitri Nabokov announced plans to publish the work, in what BBC2 late night news programme Newsnight later said was "likely to be the literary event of 2009." Upon publication, however, critical response was strongly negative, with commenters lambasting the quality of the writing and admonishing Nabokov's executor for publishing the work in this state.

Based on discussions with unidentified scholars, The Times summarizes the plot as follows:

Philip Wild, an enormously corpulent scholar, is married to a slender, flighty and wildly promiscuous woman called Flora. Flora initially appealed to Wild because of another woman that he’d been in love with, Aurora Lee. Death and what lies beyond it, a theme which fascinated Nabokov from a very young age, are central. The book opens at a party and there follow four continuous scenes, after which the novel becomes more fragmented. It is not clear how old Wild is, but he is preoccupied with his own death and sets about obliterating himself from the toes upwards through meditation, a sort of deliberate self-inflicted self-erasure.

According to his diaries, Nabokov first noted his work on the project on December 1, 1974, under the title Dying Is Fun. By the summer of 1976, he noted that the story was completed in his mind, but by then his health was failing rapidly.

When Nabokov died on July 2, 1977, he was still working on the novel, since retitled The Opposite of Laura and finally The Original of Laura. The incomplete manuscript consists of Nabokov's own handwriting across 138 index cards, the equivalent of about 30 manuscript pages. The use of index cards was normal for Nabokov, the basis of many of his works, such as Lolita and Pale Fire.