I have heard a couple people remark upon this event today and felt that since I posted about Studs Terkel and David Foster Wallace upon their passing, it would be appropriate to say a few words.
Just two nights ago I was at my friend's apartment and saw his copy of The Catcher in the Rye. This friend has said that he does not like to read that much, but he did enjoy this volume. I made the proposition that we enjoyed this book so much because we both went to prep school and no other book could so perfectly encapsulate the experience. I've read it at least five times, though not in the last few years.
Of course, I have commented at length upon Franny and Zooey http://flyinghouses.blogspot.com/2009/09/franny-and-zooey-jd-salinger.html
Nine Stories is also a masterpiece, as is Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour: an Introduction. Hapworth 16, 1924 is not a masterpiece and perhaps Salinger knew best what to publish in book form. This may cast doubt upon his unpublished work. I remember a friend, some eight or nine years ago now, mention how her high school class Religion class read Franny and Zooey, and how she had become fascinated with Salinger's oeuvre, and how there was a whole slew of things in his vault that would be published after his death. Unlike Nabokov's recent The Original of Laura, reviewed here http://flyinghouses.blogspot.com/2010/01/original-of-laura-vladimir-nabokov.html, Salinger may have more work in his vault because he lived for so long and never published for so long.
It is a sad day, but not an entirely surprising one. He lived a very long time, and must have lived one of the most interesting American lives of the past century, the extraordinarily popular artist who retired from public life at the height of his talents. He has left behind a handful of classics and will be remembered as one of the finest writers this country has ever produced.
Showing posts with label The Original of Laura. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Original of Laura. Show all posts
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Monday, January 11, 2010
The Original of Laura - Vladimir Nabokov
If The Original of Laura were as great as Knopf would like everyone to believe, then I would have read about it before last September, or October, or whenever, when I read that Wall Street Journal article about "Ghost Writers" and new books by Kurt Vonnegut, Nabokov, and Ralph Ellison.
I love Nabokov; I am one of his biggest fans. But it was a mistake to read The Original of Laura before the majority of his other work. Oh, I have tackled Lolita three times, Pale Fire once, Speak, Memory once, Bend Sinister twice, Laughter in the Dark once, Despair once, Pnin once, and several of his short stories out of the sixty-five in the collection I have of his--but Ada looms as the final masterpiece that I have yet to digest--and it will be soon.
But still, even with Ada sitting on my shelf, there are so many others remaining: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Invitation to a Beheading, The Defense (which seems boring--if it is about chess...), The Eye, Look at the Harlequins!, King, Queen, Knave, Transparent Things, and I am probably forgetting one or two others. I bet all of these are far superior to Laura, and yet it is Laura which will receive far more attention than anything he has done since Lolita.
Why is Laura such a hot topic? Well, it's the myth surrounding it, but let me clear something up, probably the only time I feel like I am being a good samaritan since my review of the Times New Viking album back when this blog started--this is more of an arts and crafts/board game "Let's Play Author!" than a real novel. When I checked it out from the library, I was like, whoa, that's thick. Some 270 pages, not a slight novel in the least--but there is all that talk about index cards, and how there are only 120 or so, and that comprises all of the text....
Okay, so the edition is beautiful, credit where credit is due. It goes for $35.00 and I would be shocked if they print this in paperback. It's the index cards that represent the majority of the publishing costs--they are lovingly re-created, and anyone interested in Nabokov's handwriting will love it.
But it was one of the most bizarre reading experiences of my life--every two pages would not contain even a whole paragraph. As if this weren't annoying enough, almost half the time, the next index card poses no resemblance to the previous one, which means the story has almost zero continuity.
Well, here is the myth that surrounds this volume and accounts for its popularity--Nabokov revivalism. Probably around the 30th anniversary of his death, his son Dmitri must have decided that it would be a good time to put a different sort of book into the marketplace. Basically, Vladimir was working on this at the time of his death, and he told his wife to burn the index cards if he never completed it. Well, she didn't, and years later, Dmitri decided it should be published, despite intimations from the man himself that the work was not up to code.
Dmitri's introduction to the volume is probably the best thing about it, because you get about five or six pages of memories of Vladimir, as he neared death, and it is quite alluring, for example, to read about how he once collapsed while hunting for butterflies, and his cries for help were laughed at by passerby. But Dmitri compares himself to Max Brod, publishing Metamorphosis and The Trial after Kafka's death, though Kafka instructed him to burn them. The Original of Laura is not Metamorphosis. No. Fucking. Way.
What is Laura about? Well, it seems to me to be a highly self-conscious (which makes it seem interesting for Nabokov lovers, but really it's not so much) meditation on being a novelist in love who has published a thinly-veiled story about a girl named Flora titled Laura--the novelist Philip Wild's wife--and Wild is dying, and while in the hospital, he methodically imagines each of his bodily appendages and organs being removed, which becomes a kind of ecstasy to him. That is it.
Now, some passages are pretty good, but they are never attached to anything else to make them stand out as "great." This is not a great novel, or even a good novel, or even a bad novel. It is not a novel. It is supposedly "a novel in fragments," and in the introduction Dmitri states that "despite its incompleteness, was unprecedented in structure and style," (xvii) and maybe I'm not reading closely enough, but it hardly seems like Nabokov intended for so many of these index cards to abruptly cut and move on to something completely unrelated.
If Nabokov had lived another year or so, Laura might have germinated into something truly wondrous, a volume that could fit alongside his absolute best work. It is true that the basic story could have been a winner. But I am sorry, I feel bad saying this because I want to like this book, and I like Dmitri--his writing style is clever enough as it is--but I really feel that Vladimir's wishes should have been respected.
Take out the index cards, shuffle them as the author probably did, read them aloud at a dinner party, and laugh about how "dying is fun." But don't expect to read a real novel. Here's looking forward to Ada, and another entry in the "most difficult books to read reviewed on Flying Houses" category.
I love Nabokov; I am one of his biggest fans. But it was a mistake to read The Original of Laura before the majority of his other work. Oh, I have tackled Lolita three times, Pale Fire once, Speak, Memory once, Bend Sinister twice, Laughter in the Dark once, Despair once, Pnin once, and several of his short stories out of the sixty-five in the collection I have of his--but Ada looms as the final masterpiece that I have yet to digest--and it will be soon.
But still, even with Ada sitting on my shelf, there are so many others remaining: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Invitation to a Beheading, The Defense (which seems boring--if it is about chess...), The Eye, Look at the Harlequins!, King, Queen, Knave, Transparent Things, and I am probably forgetting one or two others. I bet all of these are far superior to Laura, and yet it is Laura which will receive far more attention than anything he has done since Lolita.
Why is Laura such a hot topic? Well, it's the myth surrounding it, but let me clear something up, probably the only time I feel like I am being a good samaritan since my review of the Times New Viking album back when this blog started--this is more of an arts and crafts/board game "Let's Play Author!" than a real novel. When I checked it out from the library, I was like, whoa, that's thick. Some 270 pages, not a slight novel in the least--but there is all that talk about index cards, and how there are only 120 or so, and that comprises all of the text....
Okay, so the edition is beautiful, credit where credit is due. It goes for $35.00 and I would be shocked if they print this in paperback. It's the index cards that represent the majority of the publishing costs--they are lovingly re-created, and anyone interested in Nabokov's handwriting will love it.
But it was one of the most bizarre reading experiences of my life--every two pages would not contain even a whole paragraph. As if this weren't annoying enough, almost half the time, the next index card poses no resemblance to the previous one, which means the story has almost zero continuity.
Well, here is the myth that surrounds this volume and accounts for its popularity--Nabokov revivalism. Probably around the 30th anniversary of his death, his son Dmitri must have decided that it would be a good time to put a different sort of book into the marketplace. Basically, Vladimir was working on this at the time of his death, and he told his wife to burn the index cards if he never completed it. Well, she didn't, and years later, Dmitri decided it should be published, despite intimations from the man himself that the work was not up to code.
Dmitri's introduction to the volume is probably the best thing about it, because you get about five or six pages of memories of Vladimir, as he neared death, and it is quite alluring, for example, to read about how he once collapsed while hunting for butterflies, and his cries for help were laughed at by passerby. But Dmitri compares himself to Max Brod, publishing Metamorphosis and The Trial after Kafka's death, though Kafka instructed him to burn them. The Original of Laura is not Metamorphosis. No. Fucking. Way.
What is Laura about? Well, it seems to me to be a highly self-conscious (which makes it seem interesting for Nabokov lovers, but really it's not so much) meditation on being a novelist in love who has published a thinly-veiled story about a girl named Flora titled Laura--the novelist Philip Wild's wife--and Wild is dying, and while in the hospital, he methodically imagines each of his bodily appendages and organs being removed, which becomes a kind of ecstasy to him. That is it.
Now, some passages are pretty good, but they are never attached to anything else to make them stand out as "great." This is not a great novel, or even a good novel, or even a bad novel. It is not a novel. It is supposedly "a novel in fragments," and in the introduction Dmitri states that "despite its incompleteness, was unprecedented in structure and style," (xvii) and maybe I'm not reading closely enough, but it hardly seems like Nabokov intended for so many of these index cards to abruptly cut and move on to something completely unrelated.
If Nabokov had lived another year or so, Laura might have germinated into something truly wondrous, a volume that could fit alongside his absolute best work. It is true that the basic story could have been a winner. But I am sorry, I feel bad saying this because I want to like this book, and I like Dmitri--his writing style is clever enough as it is--but I really feel that Vladimir's wishes should have been respected.
Take out the index cards, shuffle them as the author probably did, read them aloud at a dinner party, and laugh about how "dying is fun." But don't expect to read a real novel. Here's looking forward to Ada, and another entry in the "most difficult books to read reviewed on Flying Houses" category.
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