Just over thirty years after Vladimir Nabokov's death, his last, unfinished novel, which had long been the object of insatiable curiosity from readers and critics, has finally been published. Knowing his end was near, in 1977 the writer asked his wife that, should he not manage to complete it, she destroy the 138 handwritten index cards containing the first draft of The Original of Laura. But Véra Nabokov did not have the heart to respect such a wish, and upon her death in 1991, the burden of the decision fell on Dmitri, who for many years wrestled with the doubt of whether or not to obey her request. Ultimately, the decision prevailed to publish "an embryonic masterpiece whose buds of genius were beginning to transform into chrysalides here and there on its omnipresent index cards," and which immerses us directly in Nabokov's singular work.

Dark and festive, dominated by a playful concept of death and a burlesque view of worldly rituals, The Original of Laura revolves around a novel within a novel, namely Laura, a character inspired by Flora, who is twenty-four years old and a capricious and sensual alter ego of Lolita. Alongside her, among the many characters sketched with quick, brilliant strokes, stands out her husband, Philip Wild, a famous neurologist and professor seduced by new experiments on nerve cells, capable of inducing a gradual, though reversible, extinction of the body.

Here, Nabokov plays, for the last time, at confronting the abyss of the inevitable end, but, as always, he transforms death into a revocable act that, at the fatal moment, evaporates in the magic of illusion. He plays with the audacious aspiration to master life and immortality, only to reveal to us that "dying is fun." In short, it plays with a labyrinth of mirrors in which the limits of reality and fiction are abolished and each of those realms follows its own path.