Novel: The Original of Laura

Overview
The Original of Laura is a fragmentary late text by Vladimir Nabokov, published posthumously in 2009 and assembled from thousands of index cards left at the author's death. Dmitri Nabokov, who defied his father's reported instruction to destroy the papers, curated and ordered the surviving cards into a readable sequence that preserves both striking passages and the relentless incompletion of the project. The result reads less like a conventional novel than like a compendium of aphorisms, set pieces, and half-developed scenes that orbit a central, anguished preoccupation.
At the heart of the fragments is an aging writer's obsessive fixation on a young woman named Laura and on the notion of an "original" template, an ideal, irretrievable source behind any beloved face. Scenes and notes repeatedly return to love, loss, bodily decay, and creative desire, each snippet refracting a single set of anxieties about mortality and artistic legacy. The book's jagged, elliptical form makes narrative continuity optional; repetition, variation, and sudden inversions carry thematic weight in lieu of plot resolution.

Characters and Themes
The anonymous narrator, often read as a Nabokovian alter ego, is a brooding, erudite figure who alternates between courtly wit and mordant despair. Laura appears as both a concrete lover and a metaphysical puzzle: her charms, deformities, and fate are sketched in brisk, sometimes shocking strokes that serve the narrator's ruminations more than they build a conventional romantic arc. Other figures, barely suggested, act as foils or echoes, emphasizing solitude, rivalry, and the corrosive effects of jealousy.
Key themes include the interplay of memory and invention, the tyranny of mortality, and the artist's desire to fix an ephemeral beloved in permanent form. The "original" functions as a metaphor for the irretrievable source of inspiration and for the impossibility of capturing life in art without loss. Language itself becomes the battleground: crystalline, playful sentences pursue formal perfection even as they register physical decline and emotional disintegration. The tension between Nabokovian virtuosity, ornate wordplay, multilingual allusion, visual precision, and a bleak, almost clinical obsession gives the fragments their unsettling charge.

Form, Style, and Reception
Formally, The Original of Laura is a collage of index-card aphorisms, vignette-like episodes, and marginalia; it privileges compressed epigram and sharp, imagistic description over long, sustained scenes. Nabokov's characteristic pleasures, intricate lexical games, tactile, visual metaphors, and sly intertextual references, are present throughout, but they are tempered by a late-career austerity and a preoccupation with decay. The prose frequently fractures into notes that read like the scaffolding of a larger design, revealing the author's working methods as much as any intended finished product.
Publication provoked ethical and scholarly debate. Critics and readers have alternately mourned the loss of a completed novel and celebrated the opportunity to witness Nabokov's creative process at a late stage. Some prize the fragments as a moving, often brilliant testament to the novelist's last obsessions; others regard the book as an intimate set of private papers that should have remained unread. Regardless, The Original of Laura endures as a haunting, tantalizing artifact: a work that refuses closure and insists on being read as an elegy to desire, language, and the stubborn human impulse to create against time.