If I may continue for a moment on a thread from my last posting:

I forgot to mention Cortazar's Hopscotch, which can be read straight  
through ending at Chapter 56, or read following a pre-set non-
chronological sequence which incorporates many more of 99 "expendable"  
chapters.

Markson has written several "novels" composed of fragments or  
statements of historical fact, many simply single sentence entries to  
achieve a type of tapestry effect for lack of a better description.   
( This is not a Novel; Vanishing Point; etc. )

Dunn's Ibid: A Life, is a "novel" whose narrative has been lost by the  
publisher or something, and only contains the footnotes to the  
missing, unknown text.

( Of course there's Wallace's Infinite Jest, and Koster's Dissertation  
modeled on the Pale Fire scheme with a hundred or 2 hundred pages of  
notes following the text. )

I guess my point is Nabokov broke ground for so much of this  
experimentation-- I know there's Ulysses, and Tristram Shandy; and I  
know he was the ultimate perfectionist dictating how the reader  
received his work-- but did it ever cross his mind to try something  
like Hopscotch, or Michner's shuffled page Kaleidoscope, or the  
current incarnation of Laura allowing us to "rearrange" at our whim?

Darryl Schade