The Original of Laura

This book reveals Nabokov at his most eloquent: an expert architect, building meticulous sentences of lovingly chosen prose. As his son Dmitri puts it, by this point in Nabokov's life, English had become "an instrument as expressive, docile, and poetic as the mother tongue he had so thoroughly mastered."


The Original of Laura is, as its subtitle informs us, a novel in fragments. Rather than allowing this to inhibit the story, the book embraces its identity. On each page of the text, there is a photograph of Nabokov's original index card, and below the card, a typed transcript. The cards are fully perforated "and can be removed and rearranged, as the author likely did when he was writing the novel."
A story about mortality, love, and cocktail parties, the brilliance of Nabokov's prose shines on every page.