This happened to me in 2009, when I read The Original of Laura-which consists of unedited fragments of Vladimir Nabokov's unfinished last novel-and noticed that, after 35 years of writing in English, the author had still struggled to spell bicycle. I had imagined Nabokov's leap away from Russian, his native language, as an instantaneous, effortless transformation, but now I realized that it must have been an ongoing struggle-one that enhanced his dazzlingly precise fiction.