It is not clear how old Wild is, but he is preoccupied with his own death and sets about obliterating himself from the toes upwards through meditation, a sort of deliberate self-inflicted self-erasure.According to his diaries, Nabokov first noted his work on the project on December 1, 1974, under the title Dying Is Fun.

Dmitri noted that Véra Nabokov "failed to carry out this task, her procrastination due, 'to age, weakness and immeasurable love.

On the one hand, he felt bound to uphold his "filial duty" and grant his father's request, but he also said the novel "would have been a brilliant, original, and potentially totally radical book, in the literary sense very different from the rest of his oeuvre.

'"[9] Scholars and enthusiasts disagreed over whether the manuscript should be made public; as the (London) Times posed the question: "the demands of the literary world versus the posthumous rights of an author over his art.

"[14] In the late 1990s Dmitri Nabokov read a portion of the book to a group of about 20 scholars at a centenary celebration of his father at Cornell University.

[15] Zoran Kuzmanovich, a scholar of Nabokov, said of passages he heard at Cornell University, "It sounds as though the story is about aging but holding onto the original love of one's life.

"[10] The German weekly Die Zeit in its 14 August 2008 issue reproduced some of Nabokov's original index cards which had been obtained by journalist Malte Herwig.

On close observation of the manuscript, one notices that the name contains in fact two capital letters, ‘F’ and ‘L’, as though Nabokov had been loath to give precedence to either name and had instead opted for some typographical monster, a bicephalous cipher of sorts.The Original of Laura was the subject of a 1998 literary prank which capitalized on its cachet as a mysterious "lost work" of a renowned author.

[18] John Banville called the published volume, designed by Chip Kidd, "a triumph of the book maker's art".

[24] A review of the German translation in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung compared the fragment to a "labyrinthine, overgrown garden without a gazebo in its center" and "a puzzle with too many missing pieces".

[25] Alexander Theroux's review of the book in The Wall Street Journal criticized the publication as an exemplar of a writer who has lost his literary powers except for a few hints and "witty Nabokovian moments", comparing the Nabokov of Laura to Lou Gehrig in 1939.

[26] Martin Amis echoed this sentiment somewhat more directly in his review in The Guardian, "When a writer starts to come off the rails, you expect skidmarks and broken glass; with Nabokov, naturally, the eruption is on the scale of a nuclear accident.

"[2] Theroux concluded, "The last card of The Original of Laura is a poignant list of synonyms for 'efface'—expunge, erase, delete, rub out, wipe out, obliterate ... it is a pity that his instructions were ignored and the novel survived in such a form.

[28] A reviewer in the Christian Science Monitor said the book was "filled with sly wit and memorable images" and considered the publication of it "a generous gift to readers".