Playboy wins. VN’s old stomping ground, the first serial-rights publisher of many of his works, has this time acquired the first serial rights to The Original of Laura. The news was detailed yesterday in The New York Observer.

Knopf will publish the full work in November, on either the 3rd or the 17th, depending on your source. The New Yorker, another magazine VN had a long relationship with, was expected to grab the rights. But, according to the Observer story, the magazine’s fiction department turned it down. I suspect that Andrew Wylie, Nabokov’s agent, was asking for too much money. Or they didn’t want to publish such a fragmentary work as TOoL certainly is. Remember that the novel is subtitled “A novel in fragments”.

The most interesting part of the Observer story is the fact that Playboy plans to run the excerpt in its December issue—which would hit the stands on 10 November, a week before Knopf issues its book—to the length of 5000 words. That’s a big chunk—half of the 10,000-word manuscript.

Mixed in with those 10,000 words are emendations in brackets by the transcribers of the cards, annotations by VN, and notes by his son Dmitri. Of the 138 cards on which VN composed the fragments of his novel, 63 are marked as the first five chapters (Ch. 1, cards 1-20; Ch. 2, 21-38; Ch. 3, 39-49; Ch.4, 50-53; Ch. 5, 54-63). Cards 64-78 and 79-87 are provisionally noted as chapters 6 and 7. Cards 88-92 are headed (by VN? by an editor?) “Medical Intermezzo”. And there is a “[Last Chapter]” comprising cards 93-138. However, after the first two cards of the “Medical Intermezzo” (88 and 89), a provisional ending, based on VN’s annotations, has been constructed from cards 93-94 and 112-114. Apparently because VN annotated cards 112-114 with the letter Z,  it is called chapter 26.

It is clear that TOoL is truly “a novel in fragments”. And the fragments contain only eight chapters (plus an intermezzo) of the supposed 26 chapters of the fully-imagined novel. This assumes, of course, that I haven’t missed the train that this project is travelling on and that the elements I describe haven’t been changed by the editors.