The Original of Laura is an unfinished and fragmentary novel assembled from Nabokov’s index cards after his death. The surviving material suggests two intertwined narrative strands: one concerning Flora, a woman whose earlier erotic novel—My Laura—has mythologized and distorted her life, and another focusing on her husband, Philip Wild, an obese and morbid intellectual obsessed with a metaphysical project he calls “dying in reverse,” a systematic self-erasure. The fragments reveal Nabokov’s late style at its most crystalline and aphoristic, dense with wordplay, philosophical speculation, and narrative teasing. Rather than a conventional novel, the book offers a glimpse into Nabokov’s compositional process and unfinished intentions.

Its publication sparked debate about authorial wishes, but the text remains valuable as a rare window into the final phase of Nabokov’s imagination, poised between abstraction, irony, and metaphysical inquiry.