Nabokov - The Original of Laura

The following is an excerpt of Vladimir Nabokov's final novel, The Original of Laura. For an extended read of his work, read the December issue of Playboy magazine.

[Flora’s] husband…was a writer… —at least, after a fashion. Fat men beat their wives, it is said, and he certainly looked fierce, when he caught her riffling through his papers. He pretended to slam down a marble paperweight and crush this weak little hand (displaying the little hand in febrile motion).

Actually she was searching for a silly business letter—and not in the least trying to decipher his mysterious manuscript. Oh no, it was not a work of fiction which one dashes off, you know, to make money; it was a mad neurologist’s testament, a kind of Poisonous Opus.... It had cost him, and would still cost him, years of toil, but the thing was of course, an absolute secret. If she mentioned it at all, she added, it was because she was drunk.

She was an extravagantly slender girl. Her ribs showed. The conspicuous knobs of her hipbones framed a hollowed abdomen, so flat as to belie the notion of “belly.” Her exquisite bone structure immediately slipped into a novel—became in fact the secret structure of that novel, besides supporting a number of poems. The cup-sized breasts of that twenty-four-year-old impatient beauty seemed a dozen years younger than she, with those pale squinty nipples and firm form.

Her frail, docile frame when turned over by hand revealed new marvels—the mobile omoplates of a child being tubbed, the incurvation of a ballerina’s spine, narrow nates of an ambiguous irresistible charm (nature’s beastliest bluff, said Paul de G watching a dour old don watching boys bathing).

Only by identifying her with an unwritten, half-written, rewritten difficult book could one hope to render at  last what contemporary descriptions of intercourse so seldom convey, because newborn and thus generalized, in the sense of primitive organisms of art as opposed to the personal achievement of great English poets dealing with an evening in the country, a bit of sky in a river, the nostalgia of remote sounds—things utterly beyond the reach of Homer or Horace.