单选题 Even by the standard of genius, Vladimir Nabokov"s work habits were odd. He wrote much of Lolita in the backseat of the family car, a black 1946 Oldsmobile. (He said it was the only spot in America where he wasn"t plagued by noise and drafts.) He didn"t use regular paper. Instead he wrote in pencil on index cards, which his wife Vera later typed up for him.
Nabokov spent his last years in a grand hotel in Montreux, Switzerland—after Lolita he could afford it—working on a novel called The Original of Laura . But he died before he could finish it, leaving behind a box of 138 index cards that he instructed Vera to destroy. This she did not do.
Neither did his son Dmitri. Now Dmitri Nabokov has published The Original of Laura —what there is of it—in an elegant edition, priced at $ 35, that reproduces each index card on a single page. "Nobokov intended to win his 100-card dash against death but, given the course of events, could not foresee the exact form in which the book would ultimately appear," Dmitri explains in a written interview with TIME. "He was sure, however, that it would appear. He had been working on the novel since 1974 and, when asked in 1976 what three favorite books he was reading and would want to keep, he listed a new translation of Dante"s Inferno, a volume on North American butterflies and The Original of Laura . Those are not the words of an author who intends to have that novel burned."
The Original of Laura is a fragment, or a collection of fragments—"the novel was probably half or one-third "written" in the strictly technical sense," Dmitri says. It is not a series of consecutive chapters. Nobokov liked to attack his subjects on multiple fronts, from all directions, an approach facilitated by his use of index cards. The book begins at a party attended by a woman named Flora. Her husband is not present, and she slips away to an absent-minded tryst with a lover, which Nobokov renders delicately but unsentimentally. "That first surrender of hers was a little sudden, if not downright unnerving. A pause for some light caresses, concealed embarrassment, feigned amusement, prefactory contemplation."
We meet, in due course, the deceived husband as well: "A brilliant neurologist, a renowned lecturer [and] a gentleman of independent means, Dr. Phillip Wild had everything save an attractive exterior." Phillip is older, eccentric and miserly, and he"s less interested in Flora than in a bizarre experiment he"s conducting on himself. As he feels his aging flesh deteriorating, he develops the habit of entering a trance wherein he pictures his body and then mentally erases portions of it; he begins with his toes, which instantly become numb. By this means, he imagines that he is bringing about his own death, piecemeal—seizing control of it and turning it into a volitional act, even an enjoyable one. "The process of dying by auto-dissolution affords the greatest ecstasy known to man," he tells us. The subtitle of The Original of Laura is Dying Is Fun.
For readers who are devoted to Nabokov (I"m one), The Original of Laura affords its own ecstasies. It comes at you as a reprieve, a final appearance from an old friend you thought was already gone for good. It"s a shambles, a heap of shards, but they"re Nabokov"s shards and no one else"s: the "nasty compassion" the partygoers direct at a drunken Flora; the "alien creams" Flora spots in someone else"s bathroom (recalling the "solemn pool of alien urine" deposited by Mr. Taxovich in another bathroom in Lolita ); the playful half-rhyme of belie and belly ; the perhaps overly wink-winky inclusion of a pedophile named Mr. Hubert H. Hubert; and one lost, evocative phrase off by itself in the upper margin of a card, without a context—"the orange awnings of southern summers."
Flora"s surrender to lazy, loveless sexual pleasure and Phillip"s intensely strange abdication of bodily life together make, or would have made, The Original of Laura a melancholy meditation on our fleshly predicament. And what else? The novel"s title refers to a novel-within-a-novel called My Laura , about a character based on Flora. This in turn rhymes with Aurora, the name of an early love of Phillip"s who Flora physically resembles, creating a chain of resemblances and echoes that leads us... where?
We"ll never know. The Original of Laura is a beautiful ruin, like the Venus de Milo , not a novel. To pretend otherwise is wishful thinking, no different from Phillip"s belief that he can master death. At some moments the book seems to anticipate its shattered future—Nabokov compares Flora to "an unwritten, half-written, rewritten difficult book." That"s part of her appeal and, oddly, part of Laura"s too. You admire what you can see, and you dream about what you might have seen. ( Time , December 28, 2009-January 4, 2010)

单选题 The reasons why the author says "Even by the standards of genius, Vladimir Nabokov"s work habits were odd." include all of the following EXCEPT ______.

单选题 All of the following statements can be inferred from the second paragraph EXCEPT ______.

单选题 According to the passage, which of the following is true as regards Flora and Philip in the novel?

单选题 According to paragraph 6, which of the following statement can be considered as one of the ecstasies of The Original of Laura ?

单选题 Which of the following statements can be inferred from paragraph 7?

单选题 What does the sentence "That"s part of her appeal and, oddly, part of Laura"s too." in the last paragraph mean?

单选题 What can most probably be the author"s intention of writing the passage?

单选题 Which of the following can best serve as the title of the passage?