It could have been drab phonetics. But when Vladimir Nabokov, in between chasing butterflies, wrote — “Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.” — language metamorphosed into a 12-year-old girl sunning on the lawn. After Lolita, there was Laura too — hardly-seen, much-talked-about Laura. Before his death in 1977, Nabokov was writing his last novel, typically with a pencil on index cards. He made his wife Vera and son Dmitri promise that they would destroy the draft if he left it unfinished.

Thankfully, they did not keep their word. After being locked away in a Swiss bank vault for over three decades, privy only to a few eyes and giving rise to heated arguments over whether the 138 index cards should be burnt or saved, the novel, now called The Original of Laura, will finally be published by Alfred A. Knopf on November 17. Nabokov will be speaking again; it is being called the publishing event of the year. The only hitch is that nobody knows the correct order of the index cards.

So the publishers have come up with an ingenious idea. The book will contain photographic reproductions of Nabokov’s handwritten cards, followed by transcriptions of the cards’ contents. The cards will have perforated edges so that you can just tear them, arrange and re-arrange until you get the plot, or a plot you seem fit. That would be the most literal act of deconstructing and reconstructing a novel.

... contd.