The Original of Laura: (Dying Is Fun) A Novel in Fragments
By (Author) Vladimir Nabokov
Introduction by Dmitri Nabokov
Penguin Books Ltd
Penguin Classics
2nd January 2013
6th December 2012
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
813.54
Paperback
304
Width 132mm, Height 197mm, Spine 23mm
272g
The final masterwork that was nearly destroyed, from one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century Dr Philip Wild, a man of brilliance, wit, fortune and tremendous bulk, is used to suffering humiliations at the hands of his wife, the younger, slender, and rudely promiscuous Flora. But in a novel, a 'maddening masterpiece' documenting her infidelities, written by one of her lovers and given to the doctor, she appears as My Laura. Dishonoured, Wild still finds pleasure in life, by indulging in self-annihilation, beginning with the removal of his toes.
Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), born in St Petersburg, exiled in Cambridge, Berlin, and Paris, became the greatest Russian writer of the first half of the twentieth century. Fleeing to the US with his family in 1940, he then became the greatest writer in English of the second half of the century, and even 'God's own novelist' (William Deresiewicz). He lived in Europe from 1959 onwards, and died in Montreux, Switzerland. All his major works - novels, stories, an autobiography, poems, plays, lectures, essays and reviews - are published in Penguin Modern Classics.