(illustration by Neal Fox as appeared in The Guardian)
A whole lot of fuss is being made about Vladimir Nabokov's final, unfinished novel, The Original of Laura, being published yesterday. Nabokov was a renowned perfectionist (not uncommon among genius writers), and prior to his death in 1977 commanded that any unfinished projects were to be destroyed. In other words: perfection, or fuck it.
A lot of folks in the literary world are pissed, as the above cartoon suggests. The executors of Vlad's literary estate didn't fulfill his requests, whatever their reasons were. Money was to be had, after all.
Personally, I don't care that much. I'll probably never read The Original Laura. Hell, I didn't even like Lolita. I did read Albert Camus' final novel though, The First Man, which he didn't complete before dying in a car crash. It wasn't great, completely different than The Stranger and The Fall, but it was obviously still a draft. Didn't mar or tarnish my image of him. In fact it humanized Camus even more.
Me? If I ever become a famed writer (ha!) and die with unfinished works, I say go ahead and publish the junk. Burn the money though.
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