New Nabokov from Penguin
19.04.09 | Benedicte Page
Penguin is to publish Vladimir Nabokov's unfinished final novel, The Original of Laura. Penguin Classics editor Alexis Kirschbaum bought the book, together with continuing rights to the Nabokov backlist, in a six-figure deal through Andrew Wylie. The Original of Laura will be published as a Penguin Classics hardback at £25 on 3rd November, and simultaneously by Knopf in the US.
Nabokov left the novel unfinished when he died in 1977, asking for it to be destroyed. His son Dimitri Nabokov finally took the decision to publish, bearing in mind that his father once also intended to burn his best-known work, Lolita.
Kirschbaum said: "[Penguin Classics m.d.] Stefan McGrath and I went to Dimitri's home in Montreaux with Andrew Wylie, for a three-day stay. It was important that we meet because it was a big acquisition, and it was quite emotional for Dimitri because it was a big decision to publish, which took him decades.”
The Original of Laura was written, like all Nabokov's novels, on index cards. Penguin will reproduce all 138 cards, with a transcript of the text on the opposite page. Kirschbaum said the cards add up to "a good chunk” of text taking "several hours” to read. "I'm an avid, obsessed fan of Nabokov and for other fans it's incredibly interesting to see his handwriting and read his prose—not necessarily extremely polished, but you can still see kernels of genius in everything he wrote,” she said.
The novel is narrated by a man who, when young, fell obsessively in love with a young girl, but who is now unhappily married to a promiscuous wife with whom he is infatuated. Kirschbaum said the book was both dark and comic, and continued the theme of nostalgia for young love begun in Mary and continued in Lolita and Ada. She added: "In this novel he is also very interested in psychology and in what it means to hate yourself and want to disappear.”
Penguin Classics will also republish Nabokov's entire backlist, beginning in November with six of his novels that explore themes of childhood and young love. The list will also publish a collection of Nabokov poems never before published in English (November 2010) and a collection of previously unpublished letters by Nabokov to his wife Vera (November 2011).
