Incomplete, but publishable

• Nabokov's final, unfinished novel will be published after all.

The son defying the wishes of the father... imagine that.

The Guardian of London reported that Dmitri, 73, told the German magazine Der Spiegel: “I’m a loyal son and thought long and seriously about it. Then my father appeared before me and said with an ironic grin: ‘You’re stuck in a right old mess. Just go ahead and publish.’ ” For three decades the fragments of the novel, “The Original of Laura,” on a collection of 50 index cards, have been in a bank vault in Switzerland, where Vladimir Nabokov, the author of “Lolita” and “Pale Fire,” died in 1977. Dmitri Nabokov, his father’s literary executor, once described it as “the most concentrated distillation” of his father’s creativity. In an interview with the BBC, Dmitri Nabokov said he found “very disturbing” the thought that no one would ever read the manuscript.

We now return to our regularly scheduled programming

Getting back to it.

• Joshua Ferris looks into the importance of work in literature in The Guardian.

Ferris, the author of the current talk-of-the-literati workplace novel Then We Came to the End, gets in some good observations. You might almost consider this a commentary track for his book:

Work, then - broadly defined - is central to literature. Don Quixote goes headlong into the windmill - what is the noble fool doing but his misguided work? Work puts Ishmael on the Pequod. Work brings Esther to Bleak House and sends Humbert Humbert to the house on Lawn Street. Work defines the plot and central moral conceit of Ian McEwan's Saturday. Work as wayward scientific inquiry prompts Tyrone Slothrop's erections during the Blitz and forces him out into the Zone in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, while work as blind loyalty reveals the trouble with blind loyalty in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day. These examples highlight how vocation in literature is never happenstance, never half-hearted decision-making, but artfully premeditated and always purposeful. Work does work in every great book - even if just to allow the characters enough leisure time to pursue the main drama.

As strategically and thematically smart as Fitzgerald is when assigning vocations to his characters - vocations that aid and abet by professional title the novel's personal drama - he nevertheless keeps work-related matters topical. It is the nature of the work, not the work itself, that informs. A different story arises when a writer chooses to go deeper into work, to turn work into one of literature's main characters.

Writers as characters

• The Onion A.V. Club selects 6 Memorable Books About Writers Writing.

The winners: Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon, Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk, The Poet by Michael Connelly, Misery by Stephen King, Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis, and Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov. A fun selection, and much preferable on the whole to Dave White's rather pedestrian "Writers on film" article at MSNBC.

Technicolor dreamers

• A Telegraph article on a Wassily Kandinsky exhibition discusses his synaesthetic touch.

An engaging article on Kandinsky that includes fun footnotes on similarly-gifted writers:

Charles Baudelaire
The influential French poet and chronicler of modern life displayed synaesthetic sensibilities in his 1857 sonnet "Correspondances": "Perfumes, sounds and colours answer each other." In addition to his frequent writings on Richard Wagner's music, Baudelaire was intrigued by sensuous experiences, especially of the body within the city. He also experimented with hashish in order to enhance the intermingling of the senses. Baudelaire's countryman and fellow poet Arthur Rimbaud had synaesthesia, too.

Vladimir Nabokov
The Russian author famed for his English novel of 1955 Lolita, developed his "freakish gift" of synaesthesia during childhood when he complained to his mother that the colours on his wooden alphabet blocks were "all wrong". Synaesthesia is now recognised as a genetically inherited trait, and the Nabokov family was full of synaesthetes; his mother, wife and son Dimitri all had the condition. "The confessions of a synaesthete must sound tedious and pretentious to those who are protected from such leakings," wrote Nabokov.

See also: Choosing the right words.