Sealed New First Printing (1 results)
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Seller: THE BOOKSNIFFER, Lewes, East Sussex, United KingdomTHE BOOKSNIFFER
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Hardcover. Condition: New. Dust Jacket Condition: New. 1st Edition. SEALED PENGUIN CLASSICS EDITION.David Lodge wrote a brilliant review of this essential book. I would like to quote a section from it, and I hope David Lodge will not mind me doing so: "The way the manuscript has been ingeniously edited and reproduced overcomes t…o a large extent the disappointment and frustration inherent in reading an unfinished and disconnected narrative, and achieves an interesting aesthetic effect unintended by the author. If the manuscript had been printed in the conventional way we would have hurried through it vainly seeking some coherent plot or hint of its ultimate direction. As it is the book invites us to linger over the text's quiddity, relishing not just its stylistic feats but also the physical marks on the index cards, the poignantly shaky hand of an ailing author, his revisions and insertions and smudged rubbings out, and the tantalising space he left to be filled in later when he found the right word. 'The only way he could posse! ss her was in the most position of copulation'. Few readers will probably read the whole text continuously from the cards, but the matching printed text underneath also has a defamiliarising effect on the act of reading when, quite often, the last line does not extend to the margin. Page 7 for instance ends 'when they and their dog do not happen', and by habit one's brain tries to make sense of this as a complete clause before turning the page to find 'to need it.' This is an effect akin to a caesura in poetry, and indeed the structure of the work as a whole is more akin to modern poetry of the Eliot-Pound kind than a conventional novel, shifting from one voice to another without explanatory links. Towards the end these jump cuts become more abrupt, and there are more cards which bear just a few lines, sometimes evidently Nabokov's notes to himself. A line from The Waste Land, 'These fragments I have shored against my ruins', might have been a suitable epigraph for The Original of Laura, but the last lines of page 21 would make a better one: 'Only by identifying her with an unwritten, half-written, rewritten difficult book could one hope to render what'. Is it, as the blurb claims, Nabokov's 'final great book'? No. Does it contain brilliant, funny, astonishing sentences only Nabokov could have written? Yes. Should it have been preserved and published? Definitely." This new copy is still sealed. It is a heavy volume, and it is undoubtedly a typical Nabokov conundrum. To all addicts of this extraordinary writer this is utterly essential. Extra postage may be needed depending on destination. Language: eng Language: eng 0.0 Language: eng 0.0 Language: eng 0.0 Language: eng.
