Ron Rosenbaum has finally gone to read his white whale-sort of, more like his, hmm, forbidden lust object?-, Nabokov's Laura, which will be published in November and, until then, is locked in a room at Random House. The book will be a collection of Nabokov's 138 index cards for the novel, reproduced-and perforated for detachment and shuffling. (Somehow the book is listed as "304 pages.") Also? It turns out they are mostly illegible.

This is how Rosenbaum describes the contents of the book:

Somehow, without giving the impression that he was frenetically trying to conceal his process, he has completely obscured various words and phrases that it appears he's altered or deleted from the text. These fragments are all but impossible to decipher beneath the scrolling, spiraling curls of his scrawls, which look like Slinkys (although I know that many in future years will try).

It was pretty remarkable. I spent a lot of time trying to make anything out, and I swear the only effacement I may have deciphered occurs in the faint shadow of the erased smudge on the index card on Page 233. It's not in Dmitri [Nabakov]'s transcript, and V.N. himself obviously decided he didn't want it there (at the time, anyway), but I thought I could make out two words in the deletion the transcript may have missed: "the coded."