Vladimir Nabokov's final, incomplete work was meant to be burned, according to the author's last wishes. But neither his wife nor his son had the heart to do as they were asked, and after several decades of indecision, the work was finally made available to the public: not handed over to another writer to complete, as often happens, but preserved in exactly the state Nabokov left it, fragmentary and handwritten.
Some critics disapproved, saying the work was not up to the standards of Nabokov's greatest writing and should not have been shared. Martin Amis said cuttingly in his Guardian review, "Writers die twice: once when the body dies, and once when the talent dies."
Those critics' mistake, however, is in thinking of The Original of Laura as a novel. It's not—it is more like the skeleton of one. It's a collection of index cards, helpfully printed on thick paper and perforated so that readers can tear them out, shuffle them, and play Nabokov for a moment, tantalized by such phrases as "a vertical line chalked against a plum tinted darkness" and "heart or brain—when the ray projected by me reaches the lake of Dante or the Island of Reil".
What Nabokov would have made of these notes, we can only imagine—and the imagining is a great part of the experience of this book. It resists cover-to-cover reading, but it invites quick dips, page skips, and the search for talismanic sentences.
The final page is a pencilled note like the others, in Nabokov's hand, bearing a list of synonyms: efface, expunge, erase, delete, rub out, wipe out, obliterate. I, for one, am glad none of these things happened to The Original of Laura.