Vladimir Nabokov wrote in pencil on index cards. Those cards could then be shuffled and reordered — a sensible way to write, since language, like life, is not linear. Still, as E. M. Forster observed in his collection of essays, Two Cheers for Democracy, the novel must tell a story. It must, but the Post-Modern experiment has been to bend the story, to ask “What story, whose story?”

This has been, in a sense, a return, though from a different psychic vantage point, to the 18th-century playfulness of Tristram Shandy, who can never quite begin his story because he can’t quite be born, or the introspective inventions of Gulliver’s Travels. The 19th-century novels of beginning, middle and end, with plenty of storytelling and social observation — Dickens, Balzac, Tolstoy, Eliot, Austen — dazzled novel-writing away from its other possibilities for nearly 100 years. Even though we celebrate Joyce and Woolf and Borges and the Modernist reimaginings of what prose can do, we still think of a novel in a very particular way, and the Post- Modern novel is often lamented as a poor thin thing: annoying, over-intellectual and eviscerated when compared with the meaty standards of “proper” novels.

Nabokov’s Laura could be read as the ultimate Post-Modern novel, in that it exists only in fragments and only on 138 index cards. Its story is in bits — obviously — and Nabokov did not live long enough to finish it or to revise it. He wrote it during his final illness, and left instructions to destroy it should he die before completing it.

As someone who has burnt a novel and who burns all drafts, I think his was a sane decision. It is true that Mrs Nabokov had saved Lolita from the incinerator, and so how could she burn Laura? Dmitri Nabokov has finally made the decision to publish his father’s last work.

The Penguin hardback is beautiful, and the inspiration to facsimile the original cards — so much so that that you can tear them out by their perforations if you would prefer your own card-index version — is better than a gimmick. Faith to the original in every sense is essential here, because what we are really doing is looking at a curiosity, not reading a masterpiece.

The story is unsurprising for a man who has always been obsessed by middle-aged longing for girls too young for sex with middle-aged men who long for them. There is a story within a story, about loving Laura, and there is the story of loving Flora: “The cup-sized breasts of that twenty-four year old impatient beauty seemed dozen years younger than she, with those pale squinty nipples and firm form.”

Flora and Laura, who are the same person, are for sex, and neither manifestation of the character has any personality outside sex, but that is not unusual for a Nabokov female. Female beauty in Nabokov is under-age, and under-femaled — by which I mean his women become disgusting very quickly, and for no better reason than that they grow up and grow old. In The Enchanter, a pre-Lolita story, the man who wants to get at the daughter and marries the mother to do so muses on the ageing body he must sleep with: “the formless anklebones ... the repulsively listing conformation of her ponderous belly ... the rancid emanations of her wilted skin . . .”

In Laura, Flora’s husband, Philip Wild, a man whom she marries for money, is obese. But he is interesting. If you are a Nabokov male you can be obese and interesting. Interestingly, he loathes himself, and perhaps at last self-disgust as a key to Nabokov, usually projected on to his females, is allowed to find its true home. Wild, like the dying Nabokov, is trying to dissolve his own body — to get rid of it completely. And so, the spectral females, the girls who by growing up effectively “disappear” as objects of desire, are more understandable, at least to me as a woman reader, when I find their author trying to vanish himself in a bout of self-loathing.

There are some wonderful index cards — the sex act as an unfinished, unfinishable book. The image of the self restored “in chalk-bright details” on the blackboard — and after the wipeout of disease and death. The final card, so poignant, that says, the words in rungs like a ladder, “Efface, expunge, erase, delete, rub out, wipe out, obliterate”. A man who ended his novel-in-progress that way probably did want it destroyed, or perhaps thrown in with his own dead body, as Dante Gabriel Rossetti did with his poems to Lizzie Siddal, only to have her exhumed later when he changed his mind and wanted to publish them.

The problem is that Laura is slight, and it doesn’t do any good to pretend otherwise. A literary sensation it is not, and I think it might have been better to have left it in a Swiss bank for scholars to play with. Dmitri Nabokov thinks that his father would have wanted Laura published. We cannot know. “Dmitri’s dilemma”, as he calls it, becomes difficult when we look at his own prose style in the introduction. Spring, for instance, does not “settle”: the whole point of spring is that it, well, springs. And as for “virtual limbo”, what other kind is there? These misuses of language make me wonder whether — on literary grounds — he has the authority to disregard his father’s wishes.

Yet, if nothing else, I am glad to have seen that last index card, not because it defends Roland Barthes’ 1967 essay The Death of the Author, in which Barthes claims creation is annihilation (it isn’t), but because that little ladder of words is the pain of the human condition, in all its contradictions, and ultimate loss. Joy, yes, but ultimate loss, and Nabokov, through his vanishing objects of desire, and at last his vanishing self, was a man who wrote about loss so that his readers knew where to find it.

The Original of Laura: A Novel in Fragments by Vladimir Nabokov
Penguin Classics, £25; 304pp Buy the book

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy