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Knopf
November 2009
On Sale: November 17, 2009
304 pages ISBN: 0307271897 EAN: 9780307271891 Hardcover
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Fiction Family Life
When Vladimir Nabokov died in 1977, he left instructions for
his heirs to burn the 138 handwritten index cards that made
up the rough draft of his final and unfinished novel, The
Original of Laura. But Nabokov’s wife, Vera, could not bear
to destroy her husband’s last work, and when she died, the
fate of the manuscript fell to her son. Dmitri Nabokov, now
seventy-five—the Russian novelist’s only surviving heir, and
translator of many of his books—has wrestled for three
decades with the decision of whether to honor his father’s
wish or preserve for posterity the last piece of writing of
one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. His
decision finally to allow publication of the fragmented
narrative—dark yet playful, preoccupied with
mortality—affords us one last experience of Nabokov’s
magnificent creativity, the quintessence of his unparalleled
body of work.
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