The Original of Laura - Vladimir Nabokov

Everyone has now woken up to the fact that Nabokov has been writing stories and novels about older men and younger women (and even younger girls) for quite some time. It's no good taking his word for it that the inspiration for Lolita came from a 'painting' by a chimpanzee in the Jardin des plantes, when he had written an entire novella (The Enchanter 1939) on exactly the same theme. We now have his posthumous (and presumably last) work, which has been released even though he made an express wish that it should not be published if it were to be unfinished at the time of his death. And it certainly isn't finished. Even to call it 'a novel in fragments' is stretching definitions somewhat. It consists of the drafts of three discernable and coherent chapters, plus lots of notes for other vaguely related materials which Nabokov was working on at the time of his death in 1977... Read more >>

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