Sweet and Salty

Salteens navigate through pop music dichotomies with the same approach they employ to interact with their everyday lives. But if music is reflective, more often than not it’s because of the realization that music comes from the everyday.

The Vancouver-based indie pop ten-piece band released their third full-length album, Grey Eyes, on Oct. 12, and the album was born out of thoughtful contemplation, not an impatient desire to write, record, release, and tour, merely for the selfish fulfillment of performing.

Grey Eyes is the band’s first LP in seven years, and to principle songwriter Scott Walker, it was all about finding the right moment (as opposed to passively waiting). “For a long time, too many things were conspiring against us, whether it be love, work, family, friendships, what have you. But eventually, everything that was going on in our lives we realized ended up really informing the album.” Life creates music, and music contextualizes life. To Salteens, navigating really means more of a balancing act.

The new album is a simple meditation on being positioned between the past and the future. Walker cathartically constructs Grey Eyes as a work that is harboured in the experiences of his past but for the purposes to help him map out days to come, and not just for him.

“I think the lie we’re all taught to believe throughout our youth is that society will take care of us, or that we can just passively live out our lives in the belief that everything will all fall into place someday so to speak,” Walker professed. “But everyone has to have responsibility for their actions, and the truth about life that too many of us learn too late is that you really have to live it actively.”

This balancing act is a critical aspect of Grey Eyes. Even though the album is didactic on the surface, it is cleansed of any politics. It is melancholic yet upbeat and hopeful. Sonically, it is both broody and cheerfully optimistic.

Drawing on failed relationships, death, and illness — indeed, a wide array of various elements that constitute the transition from young adulthood into mature adulthood — Walker’s outlet became Grey Eyes. The album feels despondent at its start, but it foreshadows the firm stance to move forward. Grey Eyes begins with destinations, but ends with arrivals. Over a soft piano, the album’s closer “Don’t Break My Heart” laments about being left alone, but the now wiser Walker says no matter, because he won’t be back.

“I’m always happily surprised how what I write always comes out as a coherent thought,” he said in regards to the album’s flow. “Because to me, the writing process is too fleeting and situational to plan out any sort of cohesiveness.” But an ephemeral outlook on his life through music is, in a way, ironically representative of his attitude to be more active in life. If what dictates life is fleeting, then reflective music is in turn naturally fleeting itself.

The sounds that emanate through Grey Eyes are pop on paper, but only in an indiscriminate way. In other words, you can’t really explain why it’s pop. The songs will either be identifiable through their radio-friendly, modern indie pop melodies or through their eclectic roots that resemble the likes of The Smiths, Bob Dylan, and even Queen (yes, “You Stayed Up With the Lights On” has a Freddie Mercury homage by way of a more modern sound, like The Format). But the classic pop inspirations are contextualized, either through grandiose orchestral-like sounds that, importantly, often come up at unexpected yet welcoming moments, or through sweeping key changes, the playful interaction between instruments, and the varied yet complementing shifts in atmosphere.

“I get really excited when I listen to music that I really like, and if it sparks something in me then it will likely stick around in the back of my mind, so that the music I write will resemble it in a way,” confessed Walker. “But then, of course, by the time I finish writing a song, I’ve made it into something that is completely my own.”

The songwriting process, too, starts off in the past, but ends looking somewhere quite different.

The Sound of Settling In

I began my afternoon adventure with Inlet Sound as the captivated spectator of a bedroom practice session. Preparing for a show at the Casbah in Hamilton for Sep. 26, the five-piece indie folk group made effective use of the cramped quarters, completely undeterred by protruding furniture and low ceilings. The intimacy was perfect, however. The energy signalled a rebirth in the band, and it emanated in each and every song.

It started off as a slow 2010 for the group. Vocalist and guitarist Michael Wexler and keyboardist Sean Hardy had been performing as a duo under Inlet Sound since early 2009, and began making a lot of headway across the province. But school and travel gradually impeded the built momentum, despite the release of a full-length self-titled album this past January.

“When the album was first released, promotion was tough to come by, and it had been a while since we were even able to play a show,” says Hardy. “But things really started opening up in the summer, and it felt like a new beginning for both the band and the album.”

Contacted by A&R reps from both Sony and Universal to play a large show show at Toronto’s Mod Club in August, the two seized the opportunity. Quickly added to the line-up was violinist and mandolinist Steven Gore, guitarist Ian Russell, and percussionist Matt Cramp to augment the band’s now more nuanced sound.

“It was definitely a turning point for us,” says Hardy of the show invitation. “It presented us the opportunity to really recreate our band, and now we can make great sounds that Mike and I wouldn’t have been able to do before.”

After the practice session, the group made a trip down to Cootes Paradise, instruments in hand, to play some songs and shoot some promotional videos and photos. In between the photo snapping and video recording, they played some songs for the pleasantly surprised passersby on the various bridges and paths of the nature preserve. The interactions between the guys certainly indicated a newfound energy within the band.

“Having Steven, Ian, and Matt in the band now really makes a lot of sense for us,” says Wexler. “It really falls in line with the philosophy that Sean and I had from the outset. We chose the band name for a reason: an inlet is a narrow place where rivers or creeks will meet. The idea of convergence has always been at the centre of our music.”

What each new member now brings to the table is distinct, yet the band is progressing as an organic whole. “It’s a funny thing,” Hardy remarks as we make a steep climb up a forestry hill in Cootes. “We each bring something different to the music now, but at the same time, we all like the unified direction we’re heading in.”

The members’ mix of styles and backgrounds really feeds off of the equally diverse album, and to Hardy, the correlation is both welcoming and fulfilling. “For us, there is as much of an importance and emphasis on the creative process itself as there is on the music or the message that we can impart.

“In regards to the album, I’ve honestly tried on many occasions to pin down some sort of concrete theme to it, but I don’t think there is one. To label it with a theme just wouldn’t feel right.”

The intimate experience with people that day at Cootes was an extension of the band’s overarching goal to make their music an interactive and personal endeavour, particularly in the environment out of which the band was born.

“It can certainly be a stressful balancing act sometimes. We’re all students who come from different places and have different backgrounds and varying priorities and obligations,” says Wexler on the conflicting interrelation between the band’s increasing popularity and their commitments as students. “But, simply put, if you love something enough, then you have to do it—there’s no compromise.”

Sweet Dreams

Inception
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Ken Watanabe, and Cillian Murphy
4/5 stars

The first rule you learn in Creative Writing 101 is to never end a story with “It was all a dream!” The development of Inception’s narrative leading up to its conclusion is too complicated for it to fall victim to this writing cliché. But then you start to wonder, with previous films such as Memento and Insomnia, how long will it take before writer/director Christopher Nolan finally exhausts all other alternatives? Maybe there will be a lot of upset people in a couple of years with Nolan’s upcoming follow-up to The Dark Knight, when they find out that Batman never really existed.

With Inception, Nolan is doing what he does best: taking a somewhat trite plot device or tired story concept and adding his own nuanced twist. He extrapolates from the dream cliché, creating a story that in itself blurs and fiercely questions the distinction between reality and dreams. Heck, the fact that he situated this concept into an action-heist narrative is a bonus at this point.

Just as he did with Memento (although with a vastly different approach), Inception is a textbook example of the difference between plot and story. Nolan achieves this distinction in Memento through chronology. With Inception he does it through degrees of complexity. The story is incredibly complex, but the general plot is entertainingly simple.

Leonardo DiCaprio is Dominic Cobb, an “extractor” who infiltrates the minds of others to steal ideas from their subconscious. Cobb and his partner Arthur, played by an increasingly likeable Joseph Gordon-Levitt, are hired by a businessman (Ken Watanabe) to do the unthinkable: enter the mind of rival businessman Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), not to steal an idea, but to implant a new one. It’s not extraction; it’s inception.

With the benefits outweighing the risks, Cobb accepts the assignment, and he and Arthur begin to recruit a ragtag team for the job, including someone to construct the dream world within Fischer’s mind. Cobb discovers a bright graduate student named Ariadne (Ellen Page) to be his architect, a job he is unable to do himself because of the traumatic memories which haunt his own dreams.

The film’s ingenuity arises from its seemingly clear transitions between realities and unrealities – transitions which garner increasing doubts as the film progresses, and which function under the guise of the heist-genre style of the plot.

Indeed, the film’s apparent lack of surrealism is what I originally found slightly frustrating about the narrative, considering so much of it takes place in dreamscape. The first half of the picture is devoted to the methodological planning of the inception, contextualized within a world where dream extraction not only goes unexplained, but also unquestioned. The visually stunning dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream inception operates within a relatively straightforward, action-movie formula. It features everything from a car chase in a rainy downtown metropolis, to a very intricate fight sequence in a hotel building, to a semi-militarized break-in at a snowy mountain fortress.

As much as I was impressed with the story’s concept and entertained by the plot’s structure and the film’s visual aspects, I couldn’t help but have a lot of questions. Why is Ariadne not the least bit suspicious when Cobb first explains the concept of being able to create and enter dream worlds inside others’ minds? Even Neo from The Matrix needed a lot of convincing upon his “I don’t believe it” response after learning the world he knew wasn’t really reality. It felt as though Page’s character was written as a mere superfluous device to move the plot along.

Aside from his recent collaborative history with Nolan, why is Michael Caine thrown into this movie for a mere five minutes of screen time to play a clearly expendable character?

Why is Nolan’s conceptualization of dreams as (un)reality so literal? What is significant about dream extraction and inception? How did it come about and why is it important? I can summarize all of these questions by asking, simply put, how did we get here?

But then, I realized in retrospect, Cobb rhetorically asks that same question on separate occasions to both Ariadne and Fischer in order to expose the dream worlds they’re in as unreality. Suddenly Cobb’s own back-story can be understood in a new light: all of the realities that are taken for granted throughout the film should come under question.

It is difficult to be critical of any transitory, fleeting, exuberant or inexplicable aspect of this film, therefore, if only because that’s what dreams are.

Students Hope to Paint the Town Purple

It’s two days before opening night, and Grant Winestock is five minutes late for my interview with him. I’m sitting on an outdoor bench at McMaster University, with my notebook and a coffee, nervously looking from left to right to see if anyone is approaching.

I don’t know what he looks like, but I gave him a pretty good description of myself: “I’ll be the guy sitting on the bench…with a notebook and a coffee.” I’m starting to wonder if I should’ve added more.

Suddenly an unshaven man in a dirty white T-shirt comes into view, frantically jogging from the nearby parking lot in my direction. I didn’t need to ask.

“I’ve never been this stressed before in my life. Writing exams at school is a walk in the park compared to what I’m going through this week,” he jokes in a voice that is anxious, excited and, well, dead, all at once.

The McMaster University student, along with Max Rose Begg Goodis, have written and will be directing the play Purple, which is set to be performed at this year’s Hamilton Fringe Festival from July 16-25.

The two first started writing the play over two years ago and finally got their opportunity to produce it at this year’s Fringe, Hamilton’s largest annual theatre festival. It’s a dark comedy that deals with issues of life, death, morality, and romance, all set in a fictional world that faces crises of mutant pigs, contaminated milk, and a destructive snow storm.

“It’s a dark, dark, dark comedy,” Winestock elaborates. “It’s funny at times, but it changes on a dime.” He was too noticeably tense and burdened for the rhyme to have been deliberate. His trembling hand might as well have been holding a fast-burning cigarette. “The play mostly deals with love and death, because really, those are the only two things that matter. I definitely didn’t want to fall victim to the student pitfall of writing a play about the life of a student. I live that shit; I don’t want to see it on stage.”

Purple features a cast and crew of mostly current or former McMaster students, so campus has become a hub of sorts for the group during this extremely stressful and busy week. It's also the reason I agreed to meet him on campus, for his own sanity. “We’ve been doing desperate last-minute rehearsals in lecture halls. We’ve got less than two days left and we’re still doing rewrites, building sets, everything. And because everyone has their own schedules, if we didn’t have campus as a central spot, we’d be done for.”

Indeed, Winestock looks up and says, “Oh, here’s Jimmy, our sound guy.” Jimmy walks by, not even knowing that Grant would be there giving an interview. Well-trimmed, thick dark beard; heavy glasses; gelled hair; stocky but not overweight stature; slightly below average height; unpretentious dark wardrobe. He looked like my my non-existent older brother if I were a character in a '90s teen movie. “I’ve only been working on this project for a little while now,” says Jimmy Skembaris. “I think they had issues with their last sound guy, so there’s still lots of stuff I’m trying to figure out. But to be honest, I think despite the problems, sound is the least of Grant and Max’s concerns,” he jokes.

Grant didn’t have a response, as he was busy giving instructions to his girlfriend and brother, both cast members, who had also just walked by: “Quickly, go down to the copy shop before it closes and get these promos done.” He then started apologizing to me for Goodis’s absence, saying she really wanted to be there for the interview but that she got caught up at home making a prop of a paper-mâché three-headed purple pig.

I started to feel as if I was intruding, taking precious time away from Winestock as he had only a day and a half to finish doing about a month’s work of preparation.

But he was confident that in the end, it would all work out. “I’ve been in this situation before, as an actor and not a director mind you, in which there is absolute chaos literally right up until the 11th hour. But as soon as the curtain goes up, everything somehow always magically works out.

“Having been involved so much with theatre over the years, doing it is at the end of the day just a lot of fun.”

I didn’t even bother asking him if the play’s mutant pig was also going to have wings. I was afraid of the answer.

For further information, including show times, visit www.hamiltonfringe.ca.

This Trench is Deeper Than it Looks

There’s a plethora of surprises at the bottom of Marianas Trench once you dive underneath the surface (no, not the ocean floor). In regards to genre categorization, this Vancouver quartet might as well be the pop-punk equivalent of yesteryear’s emo kid: once you get to know the real him, turns out he’s just a misunderstood, complex guy.

“Sure, sometimes you get classified as pop-punk, rock, whatever, but I think the nice thing about the record is that, yeah, it appeals to the masses through the radio and stuff,” guitarist Matt Webb explained to me, “but if you take a closer listen to it there’s a lot to hear, and if you read in between the lines, there’s a lot more to it than just a pop band.”

Indeed, last year’s Masterpiece Theatre features the pop-punk anthems “Cross My Heart” and “All to Myself” that we’re all so familiar with thanks to constant media exposure over the past several months, but the band also wanted to up the ante and challenge themselves conceptually and sonically. The album’s backbone is structured by three separate title tracks—the opener, the interlude, and the closer—that mesh together The Black Parade, The Crickets, “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and Pet Sounds.

You can even hear some of these experimental flairs creep into some of the album’s more traditional pop-punk songs. I told Matt that the opening vocal melody to the band’s latest single, “Celebrity Status,” immediately reminded me of The Beach Boys. “Beach Boys are a huge influence to the band,” he responded. “You know, in the bridge of that song, the ‘look around round’ part, it’s very unusual, like you never hear any other rock/pop band do that kind of stuff. And the fans appreciate that because it’s something a little bit different and we’re working hard at it.”

Making meaningful connections with their fans is certainly no alien concept to Marianas Trench. Widely known for personally creating and orchestrating many grassroots-styled contests and promotional events, such as Marianas Trench Day and fan t-shirt designs, the band recently invited fans to post video performances of the song “Good to You” onto YouTube, and the winner will perform a duet of the song with the band on stage for their Toronto show at Massey Hall tonight.

“We put that contest out there and we have crazy awesome fans that’ll go to great lengths to do anything for us, which is amazing,” Matt commented. “It’s important to interact with the fans. They have done amazing things for us and we like to make them as involved as possible. People know that we’re just normal dudes, and we’re always looking for advice and feedback from the fans.”

The band’s concert in Toronto tonight is part of Canadian Music Week, which will feature over 700 shows during the weekend in 45 venues throughout the city. There will also be several award ceremonies, and Marianas Trench has been nominated for three Indie Awards, as well as the Canadian Radio Music Fans’ Choice Award, up against Hedley and Nickelback, among others.

I’m personally hoping for a heated battle to the death between Marianas Trench and Hedley, so I inquired about maybe starting a rivalry with Hedley. “Oh, that’s existed for years, my man,” Matt joked. “I actually used to live across the street from Dave Rosin, their guitar player, so we’re all really good buddies. I’m sure there’s a little bit of a rivalry there, of course; but those guys are good guys, and we always have a lot of fun hanging out with them.” Ah yes, the old friendly rivalry. Those aren’t nearly as exciting as hate-filled rivalries, but, I’ll take what I can get.

Right now, Marianas Trench is focused on touring as much as they can in support of Masterpiece Theatre, and they hope to be back in the studio sometime next year. Although, following up a pocket symphony album is never an easy task. “I think the record is pretty impressive, and it’s going to be tough to follow it up for sure,” Matt admitted. “But I think every band should evolve to a certain extent. You know, your fans grow up and you grow up; we’re not going to be writing the same songs a year from now as we were from before.”

I recommended to him they pull an In Utero and write an album with all double-time songs. “Yeah that’s not a bad idea,” he responded, completely straight-faced. “We considered doing like a trombone record, where it’s just all going to be trombones.” A small part of me doesn’t think he’s joking.

Did It Leak?'s Alan Carton, 23

In a music culture ever so increasingly reliant on and fixated by digital downloads, torrents, rips, file sharing, and the like, getting a jump and a head’s up on the latest online leaks of upcoming releases is essential for high-cultured music aficionados and ardent music journalists and critics alike. For about the past two years, everyone’s “it” source appeared to be the online blog Did it Leak? (http://diditleak.co.uk/), and later its Twitter counterpart, @diditleak, which ultimately claimed an impressive amount of over 12,000 followers.

The website and its corresponding Twitter account had quickly established a growing reputation for being a reliable source of album leak notifications—and it was always the first to know about every leak. The reputation, in turn, was able to increase the accuracy and consistency of Did it Leak?, as well as make it even more up-to-the-minute, as there were more passionate fans and followers, which meant more potential sources of leak notifications for the blog’s creator/administrator.

But who was this administrator, this enemy of the Recording Industry Association of America, this person so vehemently despised by any and probably every corporate big-shot music executive, this beloved character of music fans and critics around the world? Well, his name was Alan Carton, and he died a little over three weeks ago. He was 23.

For years Carton kept his anonymity for several reasons, namely to protect himself from any legal trouble and to keep the integrity and efficiency of his project intact. But few people knew this Edmonton native and Vancouver film student had been diagnosed with cancer at the age of 18, and throughout all of the turmoil, all of the pain and suffering, and all of the exhausting hospital visits, he continued to release leak notifications, even from his hospital bed as his cancerous lungs filled with fluids.

After high school, Carton developed a lump on his leg and originally dismissed it as a cyst. When it was revealed to be cancer, he was at first apathetic about the potential dangerous consequences, confident that if Terry Fox had the determination to beat a similar cancer, why couldn’t he? But then a full MRI proved to be tragic, as the cancer had spread to his lungs. Doctors had to remove 45% of the muscle in his leg, which left Carton dependent on crutches and soon confined him to a wheelchair, but it did little to improve his bleak odds of survival.

So at such an unfortunate and terrible young age, Alan Carton began to live out his bucket list. He travelled around the world with friends and family, taught himself the guitar and keyboard and wrote music, and fulfilled his dream by attending the internationally renowned Vancouver Film School, where he would go to class during the week, and fly home to Edmonton periodically on certain weekends for his chemotherapy, back in time for class on Monday morning in Vancouver.

But his biggest accomplishment began in the fall of 2007: Did it Leak? The popularity of the site grew so fast, it was not long before interview requests were pouring in from newspapers from around the globe. Even the Chicago Sun-Times tried to contact him for leak-hunting advice. But Carton turned them all down for the sake of his anonymity.

By the spring of 2008, the tumour was pushing against Carton’s lungs, and he was down to 90 pounds. The hospital visits began to increase in both frequency and length. He could have had the tumour surgically removed, but that meant the removal of his lungs, which also would have logically entailed being strapped to an oxygen tank for the rest of his life. In any event, it was not long before the cancer continued to spread, as a tumour in his brain was soon found.

But Carton was not without a phone for receiving leak tips and a laptop for reporting them by his hospital bedside. Little did the world know that the first person to publicly announce the leaks of the latest Ringo Starr, Usher, Lil Wayne, and Mary J. Blige albums was just a kid confined to his deathbed, bored and with nothing else to do.

His last post was on his blog on Jan. 4 and on his Twitter account by the next day for the new Vampire Weekend album Contra, which went on to peak at the top spot on five different Billboard charts, including the Billboard 200. On Jan. 16, doctors filled him with morphine and drained his lungs, and he died later that day.

Meanwhile, @diditleak remains stuck on Jan. 5, forever to read “Vampire Weekend – Contra leaked, due out January 12th.” Alan Carton was a trailblazer in music journalism, and he was only 23 years old. RIP.

Hawksley Working Man

Is it any surprise that the virginity of 2010 is still in its infancy and we already have a Hawksley Workman release? Not really. Here comes Meat to deflower the year, especially with its visually avant-garde album cover: a silhouette of a somewhat distorted, naked woman’s torso, plump breasts in the top-left corner ready for breast feeding, as the head of singer/songwriter Workman (real name Ryan Corrigan) consum(mat)es her womb.

Meat is Workman’s eleventh full-length album since 1999—not to mention its counterpart Milk, which is soon to be released digitally, and countless EPs. This small-town Ontario cabaret glam rocker doesn’t live music; he breeds (through) it.

Anti-urban themes have always underlied Hawksley’s music, but with Meat he takes it one step further; the album art is merely suggestive of what to expect: songs about constructivism, solidity, determination, wholeness. If his previous albums were a defence for and a celebration of natural man and an attack on urban man, then Meat is a repositioning, almost as if Hawksley has experienced defeat and he has to (re)create himself.

Sonically, Meat is Hawksley’s most nuanced work yet. The album is heavier than the mellower Treeful of Starling and Between the Beautifuls, and while it incorporates some of the rock elements of Los Manlicious and his earlier albums, “Song for Sarah Jane” for instance—the album’s best—is John Lennon with a piano gone gritty, while “French Girl in LA” and “(The Happiest Day I Know is a) Tokyo Bicycle” employ poppier elements, such as a catchy woodwind melody in the former.

Some of the more experimental rock moments are, however, annoying, including the unnecessarily long outro in “You Don’t Just Want to Break Me (You Want to Tear Me Apart)” and the very odd screams in “(We Ain’t No) Vampire Bats.” The end result is that Meat has scant traces of bone.

Oh, FLaura, my sin, my soul!

Vladimir Nabokov, arguably one of the most talented and acclaimed writers of the twentieth century, was in the process of writing The Original of Laura at the time of his death in 1977. Knowing his health was failing him, he began to fear that he would not live long enough to finish his final work, so he gave explicit instructions to his wife Véra to have the manuscript burned in case of such an occurrence.

Woefully, Nabokov succumbed to severe congestive bronchitis before ever completing the first draft, and of course Véra, and her son Dmitri, could neither bring themselves to incinerate the 138 handwritten index cards that comprised the manuscript, nor publish them. Torn between respecting her husband and his father’s dying wish and the increasingly scrutinizing demands of the literary world, their resolve was to dismiss the cards into the mystical confines of a Swiss bank vault.

Upon Véra’s death in 1991, Dmitri became Nabokov’s sole executor, inheriting an intense and piercing pressure. The term “Dmitri’s dilemma” had entered the university and literary vernacular as a metonymy for the tension between the art world and the rights of the artist. To whom does great art belong: the public or the artist? Thus was Dmitri’s dilemma.

Dmitri shared the manuscript with only a few scholars, and only scantly allowed short excerpts for publication. He himself only dared, at least initially, as he admits in his introduction to the book, to read the index cards but a handful of times, and mostly only for editing purposes. Three decades had produced a magical aura of The Original of Laura; those mere 138 shabby and elementary index cards had become the subject of deified wonderment by too many. For Dmitri, the cards increasingly became a “disturbing specter.”

Hence his announcement in 2008 to finally publish the manuscript — in full. The BBC’s Newsnight declared that it was “likely to be the literary event of 2009.” On November 17, 2009, The Original of Laura (Dying Is Fun): A novel in fragments, over 32 years after Nabokov’s death, was officially published for the first time.

An abomination! How could Dmitri do this? Alas, I cannot help myself! How could he not? Nabokov, ever the lover of language, is perhaps matched only by the likes of few as one of the greatest literary wordsmiths of all time. Naturally, only his ecstatic and playful prose could produce the horrid pedophiliac incest abound in Lolita and have it applauded as “the only convincing love story” of the twentieth century by Vanity Fair. Surely Nabokov would have regretted denying the world something written so rapturously. If he really wanted the manuscript burned, he would have done it himself.

Such was Dmitri’s defence in his introduction to the book. He reminds us of his father's own admission in the afterword to Lolita about almost tossing a draft of the novel into his incinerator before Véra intervened — and, worried “the ghost of the destroyed book would haunt” him, he was glad she did. As Dmitri asks, would the ghost of Laura not also have haunted his father?

I am not prepared to go into any length summarizing the plot. Some chapters are complete; others are merely scattered paragraphs interspersed with Nabokov’s notes and research.

As far as I can tell, the middle-aged Dr. Philip Wild is married to the young and unfaithfully promiscuous Flora, who reminds him of a woman he had once been in love with, Aurora. A novel within the novel, My Laura, written by a once rejected admirer of Flora’s, depicts his affair with the girl. I think Laura is Flora, but the coy Nabokov conflates the matter, even using the hybrid FLaura at one point. Is the original Aurora? Or is it some variant of FLaura?

In any case, it seems to drive Wild mad, as he becomes obsessed with death and a kind of metaphorical suicide of self-erasure. Extended passages that read like a Freudian case study portray his attempts to expunge himself through meditation, “a mounting melting from the feet upward.” When reading, expect a mixed reaction of frustration and confusion because of the novel’s fragmented incompleteness, with exulting jubilance over rich wordplays that almost reflect vintage Nabokov.

The book was published using thick pages, a photograph of each index card per page, perforated so they can be removed and rearranged as actual index cards, something which I think is both interesting and insultingly trivializing. Below each card is a typed transcription.

Ultimately, despite the lively prose, part of me was saddened (aside from being perplexed) to read Nabokov’s work so incomplete and unpolished. But anyone who criticizes Dmitri’s decision, I daresay, is a hypocrite.