El original de Laura: (Morir es divertido)

Por Vladimir Nabokov

A poco más de treinta años de la muerte de Vladimir Nabokov, sale por fin a la luz su última novela, inconclusa, que fue durante largo tiempo objeto de insaciable curiosidad por parte de lectores y críticos. Sabiendo que su fin se acercaba, en 1977 el escritor pidió a su mujer que, en el caso de que no alcanzara a completarla, destruyera las 138 fichas manuscritas en que se desarrollaba la primera versión de El original de Laura. Pero Véra Nabokov no tuvo corazón para respetar semejante voluntad y a su muerte, en 1991, el peso de la decisión recayó sobre Dmitri, que durante largos años se debatió en la duda acerca de si obedecer o no aquella solicitud. Por último, prevaleció la decisión de publicar «una obra maestra embrionaria cuyos capullos de genio empezaban a transformarse en crisálidas aquí y allá sobre sus omnipresentes fichas», y que nos sumerge directamente en el singular trabajo nabokoviano.

Oscuro y festivo, dominado por un jocoso concepto de la muerte y por una visión burlesca de los ritos mundanos, El original de Laura gira en torno a una novela dentro de la novela, o sea Laura, personaje inspirado por Flora, que tiene veinticuatro años y es un caprichoso y sensual álter ego de Lolita. Junto a ella, entre los muchos personajes delineados con rápidos trazos brillantes, destaca su marido, Philip Wild, famoso neurólogo y profesor seducido por nuevos experimentos de las células nerviosas, capaces de inducir una gradual aunque reversible extinción del cuerpo.

Nabokov juega aquí, por última vez, a enfrentarse al abismo del fin ineluctable, pero, como siempre, transforma la muerte en un acto revocable que, llegado el instante fatal, se evapora en la magia del ilusionismo. Juega con la osada aspiración de dominar la vida y la inmortalidad para después revelarnos que «morir es divertido». Juega, en fin, con un laberinto de espejos en el que los límites de la realidad y la ficción quedan abolidos y cada uno de esos ámbitos sigue su propio recorrido.

• Idioma: Español
• Editorial: Editorial Anagrama
• Fecha de lanzamiento: 1 abr 2010
• ISBN: 9788433943057

Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov (San Petersburgo, 1899-Montreux, 1977), uno de los más extraordinarios escritores del siglo XX, nació en el seno de una acomodada familia aristocrática. En 1919, a consecuencia de la Revolución Rusa, abandonó su país para siempre. Tras estudiar en Cambridge, se instaló en Berlín, donde empezó a publicar sus novelas en ruso con el seudónimo de V. Sirin. En 1937 se trasladó a París, y en 1940 a los Estados Unidos, donde fue profesor de literatura en varias universidades. En 1960, gracias al gran éxito comercial de Lolita, pudo abandonar la docencia, y poco después se trasladó a Montreux, donde residió, junto con su esposa Véra, hasta su muerte. En Anagrama se le ha dedicado una «Biblioteca Nabokov» que recoge una amplísima muestra de su talento narrativo. En «Compactos» se han publicado los siguientes títulos: Mashenka, Rey, Dama, Valet, La defensa, El ojo, Risa en la oscuridad, Desesperación, El hechicero, La verdadera vida de Sebastian Knight, Lolita, Pnin, Pálido fuego, Habla, memoria, Ada o el ardor, Invitado a una decapitación y Barra siniestra; La dádiva, Cosas transparentes, Una belleza rusa, El original de Laura y Gloria pueden encontrarse en «Panorama de narrativas», mientras que sus Cuentos completos están incluidos en la colección «Compendium». Opiniones contundentes, por su parte, ha aparecido en «Argumentos».

Vista previa del libro

Índice

Portada

INTRODUCCIÓN

AGRADECIMIENTOS

Cap. uno

2

3

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Dos 14

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Dos 18

Tres 1

Tres 2

Tres 3

Tres 4

Tres 5

Tres 6

Tres 7

Ex [0]

Ex [1]

Ex [2]

Ex [3]

Cuatro 1

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Cuatro 4

Cinco 1

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Cinco 5

Cinco 1

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[Capítulo seis]

D 0

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Wild [0]

Wild [1]

Wild [2]

Wild [3]

Wild [4]

Wild [5]

Wild [6]

Los dedos de los pies

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2

Último capítulo

Fin. Penúlt.

Primero a

Primero b

Primero c

Primero d

I

II

Aurora 1

Aurora 2

Aurora 3

Aurora 4

Miscel.

Nota de Wild

Notas de Wild

OED1

Budismo

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Wild B

Z

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Z 3

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C

Notas de Eric

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D cuatro

D cinco

Piernas 1

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Piernas 4

Wild recuerda

Notas

Wild D

0

00

Notas

Créditos

INTRODUCCIÓN

En 1977, una primavera templada empezaba a asentarse a orillas de los lagos suizos cuando me llamaron para que acudiera a la cabecera de mi padre, que estaba ingresado en una clínica de Lausana. Mientras se recuperaba de lo que podría considerarse una operación sin importancia, al parecer se había contagiado con un bacilo de hospital que lo había debilitado gravemente. Habían hecho caso omiso de señales claras de deterioro tales como la reducción drástica de los niveles de sodio y de potasio en su organismo. Y había que actuar sin pérdida de tiempo para salvarle la vida.

Se dispuso de inmediato su traslado al Hospital Universitario del Cantón de Vaud, y dio comienzo un largo y angustioso rastreo del nocivo germen.

Mi padre se había caído en una ladera de Davos mientras practicaba la entomología, su pasatiempo preferido, y se había quedado tirado en mitad de una pendiente muy empinada, sin poder moverse y en una postura horrible, mientras los numerosos turistas que ocupaban las cabañas soltaban sonoras risotadas convencidos de que la red de cazar mariposas que se agitaba en el aire y los gritos de socorro provenían de un bromista en vacaciones. El formalismo puede ser muy inhumano: cuando más tarde llegó al hotel, los empleados le llamaron la atención por entrar en el vestíbulo a trompicones, sostenido por dos botones y con los pantalones cortos en un estado lamentable.

Puede que no existiera ninguna relación, pero este incidente de 1975 pareció desencadenar una serie de dolencias que nunca remitiría y que habría de llevarle finalmente a aquellos terribles días de Lausana. Mi padre intentó varias veces volver a su vida anterior en el Hotel Palace de Montreux, cuya majestuosidad acude a mi memoria al leer en una absurda biografía electrónica que el éxito de Lolita «no se le subió a la cabeza a su autor, que siguió viviendo en un hotel suizo destartalado (la cursiva es mía)».

Nabokov había empezado a perder su grandeza física. Su estructura corporal de un metro ochenta de altura pareció encorvarse un poco, y cuando caminábamos por la orilla del lago sus pasos se volvieron cortos e inseguros.

Pero no dejó de escribir. Estaba trabajando en una novela que había empezado en 1975, aquel año crucial: una obra maestra embrionaria en cuyas fichas omnipresentes empezaban ya a aflorar aquí y allá destellos de su genio. Rara vez hablaba sobre los detalles de lo que estaba escribiendo, pero, acaso porque presentía que cada vez le quedaban menos oportunidades de desvelarlos, empezó a contarnos a mi madre y a mí ciertos pormenores de la obra. Nuestras charlas de sobremesa fueron haciéndose más cortas e irregulares, y mi padre se retiraba a su estudio como si tuviera prisa por terminar el libro.

Pronto llegó su traslado final al Hospital Nestlé. Mi padre se sentía peor. Continuaron haciéndole pruebas; los médicos, uno tras otro, se frotaban la barbilla con expresión fúnebre. Al final, la corriente de una ventana que había dejado abierta una joven enfermera que estornudaba continuamente contribuyó a que contrajera un resfriado terminal. Mi madre y yo estábamos a su lado cuando, ahogándose con la comida que yo le urgía a tragar, sucumbió tras tres boqueadas convulsas a una bronquitis congestiva.

Poco se dijo sobre las causas exactas de su enfermedad. La muerte del gran hombre parecía velada por un silencio incómodo. Unos años después, cuando, con una finalidad biográfica, quise saber con exactitud qué le había sucedido, no conseguí tener acceso a los

Comentarios para El original de Laura

[ennuiprayer · Calificación: 4 de 5 estrellas]

The novel - written on index cards which were scanned and used in the book (as evidence, I suppose), which are also detachable (which is annoying) - doesn't follow anything linear. That's to be expected, of course, as it appears the book is consisting of notes by the author. However, its deviation - per se - of conventionality doesn't keep it from consuming its reader. At once I was sucked into his prose, very much in the same way that Lolita drew me in when I first read it.

But because of its - should I say unique? - style, it's hard to come up with an accurate description of the story, let alone a review that would do it justice. The prose - much like that of Lolita - being the only other novel I've read by Nabokov, not including a few short stories here and there during my college years - is quite poetic and well structured. The wording hypnotic at times. It's hard to ignore the aspects - the potential - of how great the novel would have been if Nabokov was able to complete it before his death. The novel mixes in the erotic and a sort of dark comedy of morality - hence the subtitle Dying is Fun.

While it was never meant to see the light of literary world, I'm glad that Dmitri Nabokov went against his father's wishes and published the novel rather than burn it. And now I but sit an wait until the letters of James Joyce are finally allowed to see the light of day. It's just another year, right?

[jimelkins · Calificación: 4 de 5 estrellas]

Reviews of this book were repetitively concerned with three things: whether Dmiti Nabokov should have published it, against his father’s wishes (I can’t see the interest of this question), and what effect it will have on Nabokov’s reputation (it will do “severe damage,” according to Jonathan Bate in “The Telegraph,” November 15, 2009; the book is “better suited to a college ethics class,” according to Alexander Theroux, “Wall Street Journal,” November 20, 2009). Almost every review (thirty are listed on complete-review.com) also praised some of Nabokov’s sentences and panned others (I can’t see what’s learned by that).Reviewers also agreed there isn’t much in the fragments—that too much had been made of them. Philip Henscher (Spectator, November 25, 2009), called the book “a sphinx without a secret,” and Michiko Kakutani said more or less the same in the NYT. But the book does have secrets. As Kakutani points out, this is the author of Pale Fire and other “postmodern” novels, and so we could have expected something similarly clever here. The closest any review I’ve found comes to this is David Gates (“Nabokov’s Last Puzzle,” NYTBR, November 11, 2009). He points out the open-endedness of the fragments:“How did Nabokov plan to connect these two strands of his story — the mistress-destroying lover and the self-annihilating scientist? We’ll never know. Wild’s arcane technique of self-erasure must be connected somehow or other with the novelist’s annihilating his mistress “in the act of portraying her”; the association of depiction with destruction is common to both. But the writer can’t have destroyed her in the literal act of writing, since at one point we see the still-living Flora beginning to read a paperback copy of the novel in which Laura dies. “Let me show you your wonderful death,” says a friend who’s already finished the book. “You’ll scream with laughter. It’s the craziest death in the world.” So does the novel “destroy” Flora in some figurative sense? Perhaps reading it goads her cuckolded husband (who calls it a “maddening masterpiece”) into using his mental eraser on her? We assume that the original of Laura has to die some “crazy” death or other, as her fictive double does, but their creator beat them both to the finish line.“And here’s a puzzle for hard-core Nabokov obsessives. From a freestanding paragraph headed “End of penult chapter,” we infer that after Wild dies of a heart attack, the novelist-lover gets hold of his “testament” — they seem to have the same typist — and arranges for its publication, though we don’t know how, where or why. Are we to suspect that the lover has invented Wild’s mystic manuscript? And even Wild himself? (Readers of “Pale Fire” still argue over whether Shade invented Kinbote or vice versa.) Yet the lover has already made Wild a character in the “Laura” novel, under the transparent name of “Philidor Sauvage.” Would even a trickster like Nabokov invent a character who invents a character and then invents a pseudonym for him? Nabokovians are welcome to take it from here, as long as I don’t have to go with them. And while they’re at it, who’s the oddly named Ivan Vaughan, who seems to know Flora and who appears in one uncompleted chapter to tell us that “the novel My ‘Laura’ ” was “torn apart by a book reviewer in a leading newspaper”?”This kind of puzzle — which I am not interested in solving — bears on the hope, also noted by most reviewers, that the book might give us a glimpse into Nabokov’s writing method. It does, but not in a way I have seen any reviewer mention: it shows that at least in this case, he wrote around or between the cruxes of the plot. They would have been clear to him; the flesh between those bones would have been what took line-by-line inventing. It is possible there may be novelists for whom this is helpful.And one other thing: the central surviving image of these fragments is the mental exercise of drawing yourself in your imagination on the inner surfaces of your closed eyelids, and then erasing yourself: an imagined—and then real—act of deliberate self-destruction. That is am amazing idea for a novel, even today, even after Deleuze’s “BwO,” Ballard, and all the rest. It's an amazing idea, more memorable in itself than most books I've read this year.

[meredy_1 · Calificación: 1 de 5 estrellas]

Dmitri should have just let it go.Seeing the capacious and exquisitely subtle mind of Nabokov itself reduced to unintelligible fragments was more than painful. It felt like an intrusion into a disordered mind stripped of its former magnificence, as if we might peer into Leonardo's closet and see what he painted after losing his eyesight.

[mariaalhambra · Calificación: 4 de 5 estrellas]

Not a 'novel in fragments' as Dmitri's cheeky subtitle suggests, but merely fragments of a novel/novella Nabokov started before his death. It is an extremely interesting book, a glimpse of Nabokov at work frozen in time. The surviving fragments sketch the story of Flora, a promiscuous woman immortalised in a lover's novel, and her obese husband, Philip Wild, experimenting with mental self-annihilation. Wild's sections are the most startling and original (with excellent description of toe nail troubles), but the Flora section also contains parts of great artistry (I like the description of the exam cheating techniques). Of incredible interest for Nabokov admirers, it is also a very well designed and beautiful edition.

[jcbrunner · Calificación: 4 de 5 estrellas]

After all the brouhaha about the publication appears this obese mouse. I welcome the choice of printing detachable facsimiles of Nabokov's index cards. For the sake of legibility, they should have arranged them differently putting more than one paragraph on one page. Having to turn a page after each paragraph is distracting (especially as Nabokov did not limit each paragraph to an index card. As it is, this edition is not reader-friendly. At the same time, it lacks a critical apparatus (despite having ample space on the opposite page), thus is only a starting point for research. Given its long gestation, I would have preferred to see an annotated version by Brian Boyd, for example.

[kryseis · Calificación: 3 de 5 estrellas]

This really would make a lovely coffee table book. It has photographs of the index cards on which Nabokov wrote the original manuscript. Contrary to the atmosphere suggested by the published review (from Slate), this book certainly does not have "the musty air of an estate sale". There aren't any mouldy, crumbling books or broken heirlooms or discarded costumes from Mardi Gras of years past. The atmosphere of this book is quite a bit sparser. This manuscript is far from being a novel. The first few sections, having more polish than the rest, do seem to promise a very interesting novel to follow. There's some phrases that catch the reader's eye, like "[...] strelitzias (hateful blooms, regalized bananas, really)", and Flora, the original of Laura, is introduced to the reader, in a fashion. But a goodly portion of the book is what would be more aptly called "rough notes" and "scribblings". There might be a novel here; there might be themes, a plot, main characters, etc. But, if there is, the reader would have to read them into the book. If you're a Nabokov fan and you have the patience to read through half a manuscript, followed by a collection of half-written scenes, followed by pages of incoherent scribblings - all of which are interesting and good fodder for imagining what might have been - then this is a lovely book, beautifully bound, and the tacky, punch-out index cards contain samples of Nabokov's handwriting and evidence of his writing process. Otherwise, there's not much here in the way of a novel.

[anamuk_1 · Calificación: 5 de 5 estrellas]

Firstly I have to say this edition is lovely. You can pop out the index cards & give them a Nabokovian shuffle, but I think I'd need a 2nd copy for that.Next the publish/burn controversy. I wanted to read it, so I'm on the side of publish so no debate here.Brass tacks, this is not a novel, its the skeleton or scaffold of a novel, what appears to be an interesting multi-layered novel with potentially one or more novels inside. Is it genius ? Well it shows potential, it also shows potential to sprawl in the way Ada does.What else is there to say ? I'm happy with it, I'm happy with the price I paid both for the form of the book & its contents.