How do you “properly” publish a posthumous work? This is something we talked a lot about with regard to WHO IS MARK TWAIN? and it’s a question David Gates takes on in his clear-eyed review of “The Original of Laura,” Nabokov’s eagerly anticipated novel in fragments. Here, Gates points out the slightly exaggerated claims made in the introduction:

The younger Nabokov’s introduction claims that “despite its incompleteness,” “The Original of Laura” is “unprecedented in structure and style.” Brian Boyd recently made a similar claim to The Wall Street Journal: “The opening few words just blew me away. There’s a kind of narrative device that he’s never used before and that I don’t think anybody else has ever used before.” I just can’t see the evidence. The absence of a plot — what we have here is all setup for unknown events to come — indicates that we don’t know what structure Nabokov had in mind. So, in fact, does his son’s implicit invitation to reshuffle the cards. And what’s the unique narrative device in those opening words? “Her husband, she answered, was a writer, too — at least, after a fashion.” Does Boyd mean the device of beginning a novel in medias res, with a character answering a question we don’t get to hear? Virginia Woolf did the same thing in the first sentence of “To the Lighthouse.”

Even Nabokov, it seems, needs a sales pitch. But hey, can you blame them for trying? (That’s a serious question.)

Check the WSJ’s gallery of redesigned Nabokov backlist titles including covers by Chip Kidd and Carin Goldberg. Amazing: