So now we have Vladimir Nabokov’s posthumous opus, The Original of Laura, with two subtitles, “(Dying Is Fun)” and “A novel in fragments,” neither chosen by the author.[1] It is the book Nabokov was working on, some of it in the hospital, during his last time on earth. As was his habit, he wrote on 3 x 5 inch index cards, reaching 138, and corresponding to, as has been estimated, forty-five pages of print. Otherwise put, nowhere near a finished novel.

Nabokov had asked his wife, Vera, to burn the cards if he did not get to finish the novel, but, we read, “her failure to perform was rooted in procrastination—procrastination due to age, weakness, and immeasurable love.” In his introduction, Nabokov’s son, Dmitri, invokes comparisons to Coleridge and Kafka that do not hold. Even in its unfinished state, what “the person from Porlock” interrupted—“Kubla Khan” —is still a major poem. And the works that Max Brod, despite Kafka’s instructions, chose not to destroy but publish are most of Kafka’s greatest masterpieces.

I am not for burning anything a major writer leaves behind unfinished, but it strikes me that the little that is left here belongs more properly in an archive or limited university-press edition than in Knopf’s greatly heralded, largely holographic, deluxe publication. These cards are merely an interesting mess. Whereas as a novel they are as unfinished as can be, they do leave my esteem for Nabokov the man, as different but