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Tooling Along Towards Laura (2)

April 17, 2009 in bibliography, publications | 1 comment

Penguin is going to publish The Original of Laura on 3 November in the UK, according to an item today on the website, theBookseller.com (part of The Bookseller, a British business magazine for the book industry).

Penguin Classics editor Alexis Kirschbaum bought the book, together with continuing rights to the Nabokov backlist, in a six-figure deal through Andrew Wylie [the Nabokov estate’s literary agent]…Penguin Classics will also republish Nabokov’s entire backlist, beginning in November with six of his novels[,]…a collection of Nabokov poems never before published in English (November 2010) and a collection of previously unpublished letters by Nabokov to his wife Vera (November 2011).

It is also being reported today on the blog, The Londoner’s Diary (part of the London Evening Standard). In the U.S., Knopf had already announced that it was going to publish ToOL on 3 November.

I think that the mention of “Nabokov’s poems never before published in English” is a mistake and should be “Nabokov’s prose”. Brian Boyd is the editor and co-translator with Olga Voronina of the book of letters, to be titled, To Véra: Nabokov’s Letters to His Wife.

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The Dearest Lolita

March 31, 2009 in bibliography, publications | No comments

A Moscow publishing house, Deich, issued a Russian Lolita in 2008 in a large format with a leather spine in a leather box, and with black-and-white illustrations, limited to 99 numbered copies, none hors commerce, ISBN 978-5-98691-042-0. Price: €1700. At the current exchange rate that’s more than $2250.

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Tooling Along Towards Laura

March 29, 2009 in bibliography, publications | No comments

The publication of The Original of Laura: (Dying Is Fun) is moving ahead. It’s listed on the Random House/Knopf website for release in November. You can pre-order it from amazon.com at $23.10 (discounted from $35.00) for November 3rd delivery (ISBN: 0-307-27189-7/978-0-307-27189-1). If you’re in Britain, amazon.co.uk is asking £22.22 for the same edition.

There is no dust jacket image yet. The Knopf blurb describes the 288-page package:

At last: Vladimir Nabokov’s final and unfinished novel, in print—thirty years after his death, years in which the fate of The Original of Laura was in constant and closely watched question.

When Nabokov died in 1977, he left instructions for his heirs to burn the 138 handwritten index cards that made up the rough draft of The Original of Laura. But Nabokov’s wife, Vera, couldn’t 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-four— the Russian novelist’s only surviving heir, and translator of many of his books—has struggled for 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 will be passionately welcomed by both scholars and general readers. And the ingenious format of the book (which includes removable facsimiles of the index cards) will make an even more extraordinary occasion of this publishing event.

In its fragmented narrative—dark yet playful, preoccupied with mortality—we are given one last experience of a writer’s unparalleled creativity, a glimpse of his last days, and a body of work finding its apotheosis.

The book will include a short introduction by Dmitri Nabokov. In addition, Knopf is issuing an “eBook” version (ISBN: 0-307-27325-3/978-0-307-27325-3) at the same price to be released also in November. There’s no mention of the eBook on amazon.com.

I have no information on foreign language rights. I wonder if The New Yorker is going to take on serial rights. The Nabokovian, in a real sense, already has taken the first serial rights (see No. 42/Spring 1999, pp. 34 (#2) & 37 (#5)).

A voice hums in my head: Laura is a wild and florid set of fragments. And then I hear: The book, he answered, is a novel too—at least, after a fashion.

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DN Sighting

March 20, 2009 in publications | No comments

For those interested, Dmitri Nabokov has contributed an afterword to Wednesday Is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia (MIT Press). VN’s mother and he himself had synesthesia, a cross-sensory perception in which among other possible combinations, one sees numbers or sounds as colored. Dmitri too is a synesthete and writes about the lineage and experiences of the gift. Details are on amazon.com.

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VVN’s V&V

March 16, 2009 in bibliography, publications | No comments

Have you gotten a hold of Verses and Versions yet? Do. It’s a tour and a tour-de-force, Nabokov-style. It’s an enriching stroll through another one of those literary gardens that Nabokov was always taking us on: Eugene Onegin, The Song of Igor’s Campaign, A Hero of Our Time, the lectures. I often feel that, right up there with his sense of form and his use of language was his intense desire to share with us what he loved so much, literature—and in particular, Russian literature. He was a teacher. And isn’t every great artist?

Verses and Versions, Harcourt, 2008

Verses and Versions, Harcourt, 2008

Excuse me. The point of this posting isn’t to wax eloquent over VN’s writing but to let you know a few things about V&V, bibliographically speaking. By my count, it contains 172 Nabokov works (with five more works embedded inside of those 172) going back to 1929: mostly translations—some of whole works, many of parts of works—but also essays, notes, poems, and criticism. A great number of the pieces are extractions from the original and the revised editions of Eugene Onegin. The notes at the back are extremely useful for tracking down the origins of the works.

The book is fully 480 pages long. It is very attractively designed with a recurring graphic on the dust jacket, facing the title-page, on section pages, and on a few other pages. I think that it is called an arabesque. But I’m not sure. Does anyone know?

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O Digital VN, Where Art Thou?

March 15, 2009 in publications | No comments

Let’s begin by talking about not-quite-books.

I got a call from a friend last week who asked why, out of 240,000 books available on Amazon’s Kindle digital reader, not one book of Nabokov’s can be found. He pointed out that he can buy a digital version of all of Dickens’s works for only $4.95. So, why not even one of Nabokov’s at any price?

All I could tell him was that first of all, Dickens is in the public domain and Nabokov isn’t. And second of all, as far as I know, Dmitri Nabokov, in the process of controlling the rights to all of his father’s works, has not licensed any of them for digital publication. Will he change his mind? Maybe, if the price is right. Apparently it’s also not quite right either for John Grishem or J.K. Rowling. In the meantime, without much difficulty, you can find many of Nabokov’s works in text files (though they are unauthorized—the equivalent of piracies—and probably full of typos) across the internet.

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