[.ca] Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (ISBN 0679725229)

Ongoing delight:
Be warned, this will not be an intellectual, rigorous review, just a tribute. I read this book first when I was seventeen, and I recently turned forty-six. There are very few things I loved passionately at seventeen and still love now, but this book is one of them: the heaven of the senses and the intellect that I would love to slip into and live in forever, moral ambiguities and incest and all. When I first read it, I was too young to realize that the reader is not meant to love the Veens as I did, but then again this book wasn't written for feverish, frantically bored little seventeen-year-olds. I think the reader is meant, in fact, to fall in love with Ada and Van, then to realize the damage in their wake and become their critic...and finally understand that anything exquisite and transcendent will be paid for - perhaps by the person who gets to experience it, perhaps by someone else. The book gets at this and other hidden, undiscussed moral laws that lurk behind kneejerk notions of sin, punishment, and accountability. Really, this is a novel that has something for everyone, whether his or her stage of life is Innocence, Experience, or any point between. Ada is surreal and hyperreal...it's like some places which you can inhabit for decades and just keep discovering new beauties, new perils, new complexities in your ongoing contemplation. I don't think it is better than Lolita or Pale Fire, but it's more pleasurable; Lolita is replete with moral outrages, and with monstrousness that has horrible, fully-played-out consequences, and Pale Fire is a bottomless well of sadness and believable grief. (Pale Fire is one of the few books that ever did/still do make me cry. For all its fantastic veneer, it is about no-escape, no-reprieve loss; the kind of severance that happens in real lives and has no transcendent playout, no redemption, and often no real comprehension from others: awfulness that people live with as long as their consciousness extends after the event.) Ada is the one I dip into when I come home clenching my jaw after some particularly hypertensive workday. I put Ada in a special elite class with The Silmarillion and the poems of Sylvia Plath: literature that enhances my experience over time and keeps me ever-aware of what human talent can produce.

amazing. and difficult.:
this book is a postmodern masterpiece. while reading this, i was constantly aware of the history that went into this work. from the superficial references to writers and styles, to the adoption of styles, and the very subtle placement of the action of mr. nabokov writing this very book, it's thick and warm. time exists in this book, but i think it is too often overlooked what it really means in this context, too often seen as a purely narrative device (which it is, in part). there's a brilliant consistency between the characters actions, the actions of the book, and the actions of the book with in a history. nabokov has fully exploited his audiences associations with modes of literature, utilizing the romantic fairytale and a characteristic formality, textbook attention to detail, and blending it with a narratively driven intimacy (through timelessy futuristic sidenotes) which echoes his own act of writing the novel and his own fears, doubts, hesitations, triumphs. enough though, stop reading my scatterbrained thoughts and read the book. (oh one more thing, this novel demands an extreme level of participation from the viewer, akin to living inside a video installation).

The texture, sadness and joys of memory:
Adding to this compilation of 40 reviews seems superfluous, and yet I love Nabokov's "Ada" far too much not to recommend it to any who may not yet have read it. Nabokov actually provides a review of his own in the book's final paragraphs: "Ardis Hall -- the Ardors and Arbors of Ardis -- this is the leitmotiv rippling through "Ada", an ample and delightful chronicle, whose principal part is staged in a dream-bright America -- for are not our childhood memories comparable to Vineland-borne caravelles, indolently encircled by the white birds of dreams? "Not the least adornment of the chronicle is the delicacy of pictorial detail: a latticed gallery; a painted ceiling; a pretty plaything stranded among the forget-me-nots of a brook; butterflies and butterfly orchids in the margin of the romance; a misty view descried from marble steps; a doe in gaze in the ancestral parks; and much, much more." It's a wonder how powerfully "Ada" connects with readers, since Nabokov seemingly makes no concessions to them and anchors the book so strongly in the unique attributes of his own biography. Drawing heavily on English, Russian and French and employing a complexity of exposition, Nabokov frustrates efforts for a quick or casual reading. Yet his art serves to create a psychological displacement and opens a doorway through which the reader can explore the texture, the sadness and joys of remembrance. This is the point I would stress, since the book's characters and plot are nicely summarized in other reviews you'll find here. Memories. I recall a first, startling encounter with eight improbable chapters of "Ada" (the night of the Burning Barn!) in the April, 1969 issue of Playboy magazine. Over 35 years, I've enjoyed perhaps six re-readings of the book, with each reading uncovering new depths of the chronicle and each leaving memories of its own. This month, I took "Ada" with me on a business trip to Shanghai. The physical and temporal displacement of the trans-Pacific flight complemented the book's style perfectly. I read the book, literally, from a new place. And that Sunday found me at ease in the midst of my bustling Shanghai hotel's brunch -- sipping champagne and slowly, very slowly, working my way through the book's now familiar prose. In that antiterra, Van Veen may have joined me for a bit. You'll have guessed this is a favorite book. I particularly recommend to you the Vintage addition of "Ada" with its helpful notes and because it is also the basis for the references in Brian Boyd's "Nabokov's Ada" -- should you eventually wish to compare your reading with that of someone who has studied it deeply. Please buy and read Nabokov's "Ada" for the memories -- and much, much more

Difficult, Wonderful, Love Story:
I loved this book; in fact, now I am going to read two of the critical books about it. At its very heart, it is a love story, yes, despite the incest, taken care of by Van's sterility. Nabokov's language has always just blown me away. There are breathtaking passages in "Lolita", and no less so here. ". . . leaving their tiger-marks on the drapery of dreams. . ", page 253. It is not, granted, for the faint of heart, but oh so rewarding. I do agree that the chapter on Time is unpleasant, but don't you think that that is just what Nabokov intended it to be, the passage of seventeen years without Ada? The book, of course, is about Van, not Ada, and his lifelong (83 years!) obsession with and love of her. Nabakov very neatly separates sex and love, the two not necessarily being tied together in the way we Americans like to think, at least in our professed vanities. This is a master of prose, at the top of his game. Worth rereading. At heart, far more romantic (stripped of all the side bars) than many a modern love story.

Ada, or Ador:
All I have to say is that I have read hundreds of books and this is the BEST book I've ever read in my life. Nabokov will always be brilliant for generations to come.