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Lead book review

Nabokov’s love letters are some of the most rapturous ever written

A review of ‘Letters to Vera’, by Vladimir Nabokov. Most love letters would not be worth reading. But Nabokov turns what he sees into sentences of pure magic

27 September 2014

9:00 AM

27 September 2014

9:00 AM

Letters to Véra Vladimir Nabokov, translated by Olga Voronina and Brian Boyd

Penguin Classics, pp.864, £30, ISBN: 9780141192239

After the publication of The Original of Laura, Nabokov’s last and most disappointing novel in a very sketchy draft, you might have been forgiven for thinking there wasn’t much left to discover in the great novelist’s writings. If the posthumous fiction has been mostly fairly thin, this extraordinary and wonderful collection of letters to his wife restores him to us as the virtuoso of prose.

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