I’m holding in my hands the first edition of Nabokov’s Original of Laura, the author’s unfinished novel that, according to his last wishes, was to be destroyed and never published. Nabokov’s wife, Vera, could not bring herself to destroy the work, and following years of public indecision, Nabokov’s son and literary executor, Dmitri, found a publisher in Knopf. That the work should have been destroyed raises a number of questions. Should Dmitri have followed his father’s instructions out of a sense of filial duty and respect? Did Nabokov wish the manuscript destroyed because it was unfinished, or because it was, in his mind, inferior to his other work? Or was it some other reason, one which we’ll never know?
As readers and critics, is it important to have access to this work? Will it cast light on Nabokov’s oeuvre; will it reveal something new about his writing and his writing process? Or does it just appeal to our sense of completeness, or to our desire to have as much as we can of a writer’s work? Is this selfishness more important than the writer’s final wishes?
Max Brod thought so, when he published Kafka’s work after his friend’s death and against his explicit wishes. Dmitri Nabokov thinks so – or perhaps it was, though he’d never admit it, money, fame, and power that drove his decision to publish. Many posthumous novels litter the shelves at bookstores; not all are good, not all are critically important, and not all enhanced our understanding of that writer’s career. But literary executors, agents, editors, and readers all salivate at the prospect of the unfinished masterpiece interrupted by death, the final words of a literary hero.
Dmitri Nabokov could have published The Original of Laura years ago; desire for money and fame are not the reasons this book is appearing now. In his introduction, he marginalizes those who can’t believe “that a doomed artist might decide to destroy a work of his, whatever the reason, rather than allow it to outlive him.” I agree; Nabokov had his reasons, however inscrutable. He worked on the manuscript right until his death, obviously caring for it and hoping to complete it. He once tried to burn a draft of Lolita – clearly, Nabokov was an artist who wasn’t satisfied with less than his best.
In 2666, Roberto Bolano describes how the fictional and reclusive author Archimboldi enjoys a popularity that owes greatly to his reclusiveness. It is, indeed, unknown as to whether the author is even still alive. Bolano writes that authors often win attention after their death, particularly in
All these thoughts are immaterial. I’m holding in my hands the first edition of Nabokov’s Original of Laura, the unfinished novel that wasn’t destroyed. Now the question is: what to do with it?
Knopf skirted some of the controversy (admittedly, a narrow controversy confined to literary and publishing circles) by producing a spectacularly beautiful book. The Original of Laura is Nabokov’s own title, appearing on the first of the many numbered note cards that constitute the text. These note cards are replicated in the published book – the pages are cardstock, with each note card perforated at the top of the page and a text transcription below it. The reader, if they wanted to, could punch out each card and hold in their hand a copy of the novel exactly as Nabokov left it.
The note cards themselves reproduce the author’s handwriting, his edits, his scratch-outs and erasures, his questions and quotes, notes and insertions, all the things that make a draft a draft. He leaves words out, adds them, misspells them, makes lists. Sometimes Nabokov writes precisely and purposefully, and his pencil is dark and flows across the thin blue lines. Sometimes, his handwriting seems hurried and sloppy, or seeking direction as it floats across the cards. He writes in both sure cursive and steady print. For a serious Nabokov fan or scholar, this is intense stuff.
I am not a serious Nabokov fan. I respect the hell out of him, for his talents and skill, for his imagination and daring, for his intelligence and craftsmanship. But he’s not one of my favorite writers, perhaps because, despite all his powers as a writer, I find his reputation outweighs the joy I look for when reading a novel.
I’ve read Pale Fire, which describes the slow writing of a 999-line poem on sequential note cards. I didn’t finish Lolita, but that says more about my ambition as an 18 or 19 reader not quite ready to tackle Nabokov’s prose. When I say I look for joy in a novel, I only mean pleasure – is what I’m reading something that I enjoy reading, something that I find pleasurable? My readings of Nabokov have been both stimulating and intellectually challenging, but I didn’t race home from work to read the next chapter; I didn’t bring it with me to work read on my breaks; I didn’t talk endlessly about the books to my friends. Great books? Yes. Emotionally gripping? No.
But that’s my reading of Nabokov: highly intelligent and incredibly well-written, linguistically dazzling and brilliantly layered, but not the sort of thing that made me angry, or weep, or cry, or laugh, or walk around in a daze while trying to sort out how the book made me feel. Others are free to disagree – many will disagree, especially those who’ve read far more Nabokov than I.
So what to do with The Original of Laura? It can’t be unpublished. It will be read. I could take a stand of some sort and not read it as a way of honoring Nabokov’s wishes – but that would just betray my intellectual curiosity. And to me, intellectual curiosity is everything Nabokov stood for. I said that the Knopf edition is beautiful; beneath the dust jacket, on the book itself, is a reproduction of one of Nabokov's note cards that reads "efface expunge erase delete rub out wipe out obliterate." That was the intended fate of this novel. It didn't happen. Dmitri Nabokov finally opened his father’s box of index cards, and for years after, was haunted by the story they contained. That story is ready to be told. I’m holding in my hands the first edition of Nabokov’s “Original of Laura,” the author’s unfinished novel that, according to his last wishes, was to be destroyed and never published. And I’m going to read it.
The dolphins were all around us, arcing from the glassy water and disappearing before I could get a photograph. I soon gave up and removed my rubber boots, let the wind blow across the water and watched the dolphins surface and dive all around me. I let my eyes scan over the water towards the far shores, and I relaxed into the evening as dolphins broke the surface, pink sides strange and alien and out of place, somehow, and and sharp dorsal fins describing a curve above the river that disappeared almost as soon as it was drawn on the heavy air. It was incredibly relaxing, and it took a long time before the clever reality of everything washed over me - this isn't normal activity. Twenty minutes later, the sun dropped below the horizon, the dolphins swam away, and we motored slowly into the Yanayacu.
I left Iquitos in the morning, and I was not impressed. It looks odd, thrown together, with little infrastructure and that which exists is unmaintained. In the Plaza de Armas, there's a multi-story hotel, half-finished and abandoned for decades, and the Iron House, made by Gustav Eiffel during the rubber boom years and then left to fall apart until recent reconstruction. The people see to be either unconcerned with how the city functions, or they’re too focused on the tourists to care. I was approached, aggressively, twice by the same cigarette vendor. No, I don’t want your cigarettes, so go the hell away already. I’m sure I’m not giving Iquitos a fair shake – but I’ve been warned often about pickpockets and I’ve seen enough to plant a strong impression.
From Iquitos, it was a 2½ hour journey in a cramped speedboat to the lodge. The heat and humidity were lessened by the breeze, but the sun burned down on my exposed left arm. Along the way, we picked up and dropped off several people. Little docks and communities of houses on stilts line the Amazon – a very wide river, with steep banks on one side and wide, sloped beaches on the opposite shore, and lots of river traffic – old riverboats, speedboats, canoes, motorized canoes called peque-peques for the sound the engine makes, and butterflies in the middle, a kilometer from either shore. Rafts of trees torn from the banks float slowly downstream, half-submerged navigational hazards. The water runs brown, gray, blue, green, depending on tributaries and the effects of the sun, and it’s a strange sensation to drift off to sleep to the roar of the engine, and wake to find yourself further up the Amazon, and to dip your hand into the river and scrub your arms and face with river water that has traveled a thousand miles already. 
After a few hours, we reached the Yanayacu River, narrow where it joins the Amazon and a rich, coffee-and-cream color. But the Yanayacu - Quechua for "black water" - slows and widens, with reeds and overhanging trees, and half the dark water filled with hyacinth and lily. Mercifully cleaner than the Amazon – Iquitos harbor is a depressing cesspool filled with trash and sewage, and the rusting hulls of forlorn ships – the Yanayacu is a cool, shaded, and peaceful river with high muddy banks and deep forest along its length. Half an hour later, we docked at Muyuna Lodge, set on stilts some distance back from the river and approached by a long wooden walkway with a thatched roof. We were handed cold juice and led into communal dining area, where I met Hulber, my guide for the next five days, and had a welcome cigarette in the rainforest heat.
