Ada o l'ardor (1969)

47. Ada or Ardor : A Family Chronicle by Vladimir Nabokov
published: 1969
format: 589-page 1969-edition hardcover
acquired: 2011 – from my in-laws collection
read: Sep 19 – Oct 12
time reading: 26:25, 2.7 mpp
rating: 4
locations: Antiterra – an alternate world with an America heavily influenced by Russians and Russian culture
about the author: 1899 – 1977. Russia born, educated at Trinity College in Cambridge, 1922. Lived in Berlin (1922-1937), Paris, the US (1941-1961) and Montreux, Switzerland (1961-1977).

An excerpt from [Beowulf on the Beach], (about [Lolita], which is praised): "...I think Nabokov is overrated... One of my most literary friends told me that Nabokov's novel Ada is among her favorite books, so I "read" it, if pedaling the square-wheeled trike of his prose can be called reading. And I said to her, "You really like this book? What about the 'rhythm'? Didn't it clunk and stagger like a besotted Cossack?" "I guess you're right," she said, "I just liked it for the incest."

This is not a book on the sin of incest. It's a romantic incest, insatiable. And outside our world. Nabokov creates a world that is parallel to ours but different…and happens to be a lot like Nabokov‘s privileged childhood world was. This is an America full of indulgent landowners of households run by all-knowing, psychological damaged but mostly loyal servants. And these well-educated landowners speak in a mixture of English, French (untranslated) and Russian (translated, but probably playfully). So things happen out of sequence with real history. They discuss Proust in the 1880's, and technologies are a little different ours in timing and style. It's main purpose seemed to me to be to allow Nabokov to make things anyway he wanted that was convenient. But philosophically there are games, especially with time, memory and imagination and their interplay.

Ultimately we never really know what happened to Van Veen. He writes this book in 3rd person looking back at the lifelong incestual love of his life, and all its rewards and bitter disappointments. But he's our only source. And he fill his version with playful literary references and linguistic games.

I read the first roughly 80 pages and understood nothing that was going on and loved it. I can't place why, but it was romantic and Nabokov can do some things. But the sex starts and Nabokov can't stop. For large chunks of this book, that, the sex, was not only continuously prevalent and the entire focus, but seemed to be the only reasonable purpose. Plodding through pages and pages of this I got tired and bored. I pick up other books...and that's when this one called and I realized I liked this. It's an oddly endearing parody, and the tone of this parody has a hard to place awkward comfort. I finished the book feeling much better about it, and its ideas and purpose, than I did in that middle section. So, mixed recommendation at best.

(side note - Nabokov's influence on Thomas Pynchon is really clear here, especially that "square-wheeled trike" prose.)

2021
https://www.librarything.com/topic/333774#7629959 ( )

600 pages so heavily freighted with information that I, a person of average intelligence, was in no way capable of absorbing, organizing, or recalling. The textual density does thin somewhat about 300 pages in, though by then you're encountering names and places that will send you back into the preceding pages--an ebook version proved an invaluable aid. Also invaluable is Brian Boyd's annotated edition that is freely available online (I wish a print version could be published, similar to the Annotated Lolita). Unfortunately, Boyd's freely available annotations cease with Part 2, Chapter 3, and after that the annotations are only available to subscribers of the Nabokovian.The novel is at least as shocking as Lolita. I will be rereading this one. On an unrelated note, I kept wondering if Wes Anderson is a Nabokov fan. ( )

Good writer but not a geat book; self-indulgent. Probably somewhat autobiographical but includes too many situations of little interest except apparently to himself and a few friends. Too much Russian and French with wordplay therein of little use unless you speak those languages. Some sense of a journal written for his personal amusement. ( )

This is a baffling book. I had to read its Wikipedia page to get my head around it at all after the first chapter. After that I plodded through it, but just didn't really ever get going or enjoy it. And I usually love Nabokov. As if all that wasn't enough the final page was literally just the blurb on the back of the book. No idea if it's like this for all editions, but it was not the ending I expected or wanted! ( )

This was very, very hard going. Nabokov is not an easy man to keep up with when he puts all the power of his mind into something, and he just couldn’t stop himself with this one.

The story of two siblings who hit it off and eventually end up lovers and then they grow up and then … I forget. I really do.

Although I’m sure there are some sublime moments in there somewhere, I was so utterly confused and confounded that I simply couldn’t see them. The storyline didn’t help. It’s not particularly interesting and there’s no desperately clear plotline to help things along.

The writing is complex and, I thought, littered with puns and plays on words which, after a while, had all the entertainment value of dad jokes at a Christmas dinner. I found the whole thing really laborious.

When Nabokov wrote Lolita, he was on fire. By the time he had Ada published, he seemed locked in his own world. His flame was no less powerful, but it had more of a scorching effect on me than a warming one at this point. ( )