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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780679725220
ISBN: 0679725229
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 624
Publication Date: 1990-02-19
Publisher: Vintage
Product Release Date: 1990-02-19
Studio: Vintage

Published two weeks after his seventieth birthday, Ada, or Ardor is one of Nabokov's greatest masterpieces, the glorious culmination of his career as a novelist.  It tells a love story troubled by incest.  But more: it is also at once a fairy tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of the novel, and erotic catalogue.   Ada, or Ardor is no less than the supreme work of an imagination at white heat.

This is the first American edition to include the extensive and ingeniously  sardonic appendix by the author, written under the anagrammatic pseudonym Vivian Darkbloom.

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Sawing the usual saws.
Review: This being about the dozenth VN novel I've read or attempted to read (why continue?: my astonishment at some people's praise for these things), I have to say I was rather pleasantly surprized over the first few chapters, because the prose had an energy and spontaneity and verve I had come not to expect from this author's more usual laboredly self-conscious attempts to be literary ("Look! I do what Gogol did! The same! See!?").

But it wasn't long before the old familiar VN started to dominate the proceedings: leaden alliteration, absurdly incongruous with the general verbosity; the same old saws and ranting about his laundry list of esthetical defectives (even though I agree with him more than most); aside from the usual vessels of his usual opinions, the rest of the population (I won't say characters, b/c VN doesn't know a character from an axe to grind) being puppet morons for him to belittle and berate; and the continued preoccupation with pedophilia (advanced on the pretext of criticizing the critic for criticizing the author in making the association)--with the pornography being fairly gross here.

Sure, it's like a very clever crossword puzzle (if you don't find such tiresome). I recommend reading any of his books with index cards, to organize your dissection. The clues are all there, and they're really no deeper than the author's agenda of simple-minded philosophizing and, again, ranting--every string and stone to tug or turn stinking from the grip of his fingers. To me the effect is like being stuck next to a drunk on a bus.

I think a comparison to Beckett or Kafka is enlightening--exactly because of the incomparability. Any of them is apt to insert a rather ludicrous or inept figure, a seeming side-note, here or there. For VN, such will generally be an object of derision. But it's precisely in these spots where the great writers open another door, and these absurd figures spring to life in drama or complexity. Think in Kafka of a page obsessed with his uniform, or the feckless lawyer. It's not a moral objection, to not be mean to people. It's just bad technique. It's a failure to write a part where there could be a part written. It's tiresome and tedious and dull. I think I have to agree with those critics who recommend against novels of ideas, or argumentation masked as art.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Maddeningly memorable, allusive & elusive
Review: N.B.: Three stars by comparison with Nabokov's best works, not three stars as given to your usual author!

This uneven yet memorable novel combined two earlier Nabokov works, a non-fictional treatise on time and a fantastic tale of an alternate earth, "Letters from Terra." Such a composition, which salvaged parts of these into the novel published a decade later, "Ada," may account for the awkward style, rambling pace, and shifting focus of this intermittently engrossing but ultimately diffused tale of lovers Ada and Veen. I read this after "Bend Sinister" (see my recent review), "Pnin," "Pale Fire," and "Lolita." Many readers of Nabokov recommend these before the lesser rewards of the much longer "Ada." I agree.

My interest in the two main characters never sparked until very late. Lucette, by comparison, in her earnest courting of Veen, came alive much more as she pursued a shipboard romance. The tone, the diction, the energy all altered, for the better. I get the impression that such episodes marked a lengthy gestation for this novel, and that Nabokov labored to produce narratives that connected disparate scenes he'd previously worked out more in isolation from each other in terms of a larger plot. The novel certainly takes its time, especially in the first half, to tell you often very little of import. The later parts, curiously, speed up the pace somewhat, but themselves come from attenuated periods scattered throughout Veen's long and often uninteresting, however fantastically imagined in fitful starts, life.

I must say unlike others who've reviewed this novel that I found later sections here and there better crafted than earlier ones, or at least Nabokov capitalized on the emotional payoff for characters who often in earlier chapters fail to involve you, caricatured or stylized as they clunk about. who lives as if some Henry James protagonist in a world where Nabokov appears to ape or mimic Borges (lots of forking paths, and at one unconvincing point Veen is shot dead if only momentarily), Jules Verne, and Proust, as well as countless Continental authors! Nabokov, perhaps like Joyce, never lets you forget the artificiality of the tale that his intellectually superior semi-omniiscient narrator (usually Veen, altered by an editorial conceit to tell his tale retrospectively, sort of!) relates, but unlike Joyce, the texture of the mundane world too rarely enters "Ada," for all its plethora of minute detail.

Yet, although the overwhelming amount of inside jokes (I read the Library of America ed. with Brian Boyd's endnotes as well as "Vivian Darkbloom's" and often tired of flipping back and forth twice over) in Russian, French, English, and various other Terran or Anti-Terran idioms did not entertain me much, parts of this smug, hermetic, and very self-satisfied tale managed to intrigue me at least for a few pages.

Philosophically, time conceived as a fissure or slit along which we move out of the unknowable eternity previous to our life and then back into it as we age was similarly explained in "Bend Sinister," so I'm not sure it needed to be expounded again in "Ada" totalling perhaps at fifty times the length for that topic. (1.42, p. 252. Libr. Amer. ed.) Suffice to say: "Time is memory in the making. . . Life, love, libraries , have no future." Even Veen despite his privileged life finds, in evocative sections towards the end, his own mortality slowing him, as "the Tortoise of the Past will never overtake our Achilles of the future, no matter how we parse ourselves on our cloudy backboards."

Veen sums up his creator's method with his "philosophic prose" about "a treatise on the Texture of Time, an investigation of its veily substance, with illustrative metaphors gradually increasing, very gradually building up a logical love story, going from past to present, blossoming as a concrete story, and just as gradually reversing analogies and disintegrating again into bland abstraction." Ada, for once, shows insight about the worth of all this talk, and for me, of Nabokov's expectation that we should be as enchanted with his often cruel characters as he seems to be-- seems the qualifier. Ada wonders "if the attempt to discover those things is worth the stained glass. We can know the time, we can know a time. We can never know Time. Our senses are not meant to perceive it. It is like--" (so ends part 4, pp. 448-51)

The fragile wonder of life breaks into these thickly scaffolded pages, and their surface glows for a bit before the tedious prose again dulls the effect of their burst, all too true to life! In their old age, which in parts becomes tender when in the past I sensed it supercilious at least as conveyed, Ada "never refused to help him achieve the more and more precious, because less and less frequent, gratification of a fully shared sunset. He saw reflected in her everything that his fastidious and fierce spirit sought in life. (5.3, p. 456) Grudgingly, I in the final episodes began to admire the couple more than I had for most of the previous 450 pages. In their decline at their life's sunset, they became more human, and less artificial.

Van wonders if we are "really" free. He recalls Chinese caged birds who on wakening hurl themselves against their bars as if by wild reflex only to then settle down each day to their routine. (1.20) One's life is imagined as raw film footage that we always think we will have the chance to go back and edit and retouch "before death with its clapstick closes the scene." (1.38, p. 202). Appropriately, one character's last moments attain real poignancy: "what death amounted to was only a more complete assortment of the infinite fractions of solitude." (3.6, p. 396).

So, a meager if sufficient satisfaction that kept me plowing through dozens more chapters in which I frankly cared less about Veen. For a novel set on an alternate earth, there's both too much extraneous material and too little for this aspect to attain vividness. Nabokov appears to have given us his rough draft more than a finished product, but being who he is, I still remain suspicious that as one of the cleverest of authors, he may well know more than I do about his "true" intent. For example, in the middle I began comparing (negatively for me) the novel to Henry James; within a page or so, there's an aside to "Dr. Henry's oil of Atlantic prose" which Boyd glossed for its nod to Jamesian style! (3.5, p. 388) However, if you wonder what James crossed with brother William and blended with steampunk, late-Victorian reveries, Scrabble, and a splendid section (the original kernel of the novel) on that fin-de-siecle's invention of Villa Venus and the "floramor") on what brothels might once have been upon a time, this may be the bedside book you've never known you've been waiting for.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Between the ha-ha an Aroma of Antiterra
Review: Serious fiction is very difficult, requiring multiple readings, notes, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and it always results in higher entropy decorating the study. It is cruel and comic. Ada or Ardor demands an intense sort of dictionary big enough to sit on, and for those not familiar with the peculiarities of Russian history, Bosch, Temporal mechanics, Tolstoy, and Orchids--encyclopedias are a must. Several if possible. This is not to be lightly thrown in your shopping cart with `Tuesdays with Morrie', `The Davinci Code', and `Breakfast of Champions' for the sake of some lightheaded intellectual fix. Reading the back cover and casually announcing `this looks interesting, how about I give this a try' will not do. Young laymen and lemans keep out, I implore.

Ada or Ardor often receives criticism (John Updike is famous for bad mouthing it) for being clumsy and impossible, tossing those lemans I mentioned out with a thud. Pale Fire receives similar hate mail. Nabokov achieved a kind of artistic perfection in Lolita, most any decent reader can shake hands and nod to that, but with Pale Fire Nabokov starts to twist fiction's arm and mold it into something more dynamic. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight did something similar with biography, though not with the same degree of excellence. Nabokov bends fiction further, parodying in Ada numerous intellectual disciplines and writing styles (both academic and creative styles) to deal with a variety of planes: physics, metaliterature, astrology, metaphysics, time, literary theory, consciousness, linguistics, etcetera.

So with the intellectual puns and obscure facts, why read? Artistic joy, literary excellence. Fun. Read it for fun. It's his best as far as I understand it, and I've read Lolita six times and Pale Fire three. Transparent Things four times. And I have a better grasp of the components of those novels. Ada and I really are only acquainted through two very intense readings, but the structure and other components that I have grasped (and that in itself excels the other three) mesmerize every time I read: "a pretty plaything stranded along the forget-me-nots of a brook; butterflies and butterfly orchids in the margin of the romance; a misty view described by marble steps; a doe at gaze in the ancestral park; and much, much more." and close the back cover each time with a sort of spiritual tranquility. This is a work for rereaders and scientists.

And in Ada or Ardor, W. B. Yates is a physicist that is kidnapped by a laundryman and transported to Tartary.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: more please
Review: in LOLITA's afterword nabokov writes that there are 2 kinds of stories american publishers would never accept: 1) a white/negro marriage that ends happily w/lots of children and grandchildren and 2)an atheist who lives happily well into his 106th year.

ADA is nabokov's refutation that stories involving a taboo should end in misery, the premise being that misery is never inevitable and that there is too much of it in fiction as it is to warrant another.

of course incest is no laughing matter so to object to ADA on the basis of its subject matter is understandable. to die hard nabokov fans, however, i suspect that, on the basis of its length, ADA would be the book to choose if he were allowed one book to include among his provisions on a deserted island. i would.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Ada, our ardors and arbors
Review: "Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle", Nabokov's longest novel, is also, indisputably, his most involute. Without having read his entire oeuvre (nearly half-way through!) I can still assert this with confidence - and I'm sure most Nabokov fans would concur. Those who have read "Lolita" or "Pale Fire" will already be aware of the density of his writing, his penchant for allusions, puns, his rouguish tendency to deceive the reader. Some readers object to this; they like their prose "simple and sincere", easy to digest, as straightforward as possible. I would advise such readers to stay far, far away from this book.

I must concede, my first attempt wasn't a success. I got about half-way through before slamming it down in a frenzied rage (as I am wont to do). It was exhausting. "Nabokov has gone too far," I remember saying. But a few weeks later I had the strange urge to return to it, as if summoned by the characters. I'm glad I did - I'm glad they did.

Even for the Nabokov aficionado, accustomed to the density, "Ada..." proves startlingly abstruse. The first fifty pages in particular - in which he focuses on the genealogy of the family (the prefatory family tree is indispensible) and the Terra/Antiterra business - are apt to bewilder and discourage the ardent reader. It does then become less challenging, as the protagonist and "writer" of the book, Van Veen, travels to Ardis, the magnificent New England manor, where he meets and falls in love with his cousin (whom we discover, in the first chapter, is actually his sister). Their life-long love affair is persistently condemned and thwarted. But keep in mind that Nabokov himself isn't interested in condemning or advocating incest. As he said in an interview: "Actually I don't give a damn for incest one way or another. I merely like the 'bl' sound in siblings, bloom, blue, bliss, sable."

But the book is more than a 600-page cornucopia of enticing allusions and puns. It is an astonishing paean to memory, love and imagination. The prominent criticism of Nabokov's work is that he is so over-concerned with stylistics that his novels lack depth or poignancy (ugly word, but apt!). This accusation is not wholly unjust - at times he goes overboard; maybe he'd even admit that himself - but when he's at his best, Nabokov is unparalleled (well, nearly), both in emotional and aesthetic literary perfection.

I couldn't say that "Ada..." was Nabokov's greatest achievement - "Lolita" remains for me his total masterpiece - but this may well change upon rereading the book, which I most certainly will do.

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