Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969)

I only got 23 pages in before setting this aside. I loved Lolita but the writing style of this was quite different and I just couldn't get into it. Maybe another time?

I have trouble writing positive reviews. It's precisely when I love a book that I most strongly feel how little justice my words can do to the experience of reading it, which is how I end up writing reviews like this.

Nonetheless, Ada deserves a review. I'm not a very widely read person, and I rarely feel justified in saying that anything I've read is not read often enough. (How would I know? Maybe everyone else is just off reading other books that are even better.) But I really do believe that Ada has not yet found its readership. A lot of Nabokov fans (Martin Amis and John Updike among them) consider it the moment when their hero went off the deep end. General-lit fans who warmed to Lolita as a conventional 20th-century novel -- which, in many ways, it is -- are put off by Ada's weirdness. And people who love weird, monstrous books for being weird and monstrous don't seem, by and large, to have discovered it yet.

Ada is Nabokov's masterpiece. Sure, it's messier than his other books, and Lolita is far superior as a straight character study. But Ada is longer, richer, more complex, and -- this is the important part -- lacking in the straightforwardness that harms his other books. I know "straightforwardness" isn't a word that most people immediately associate with Nabokov, and certainly I don't mean that every facet of his other work is straightforward. But he does tend to give away his gimmicks, if not the details surrounding them, very early on. We learn that Humbert Humbert is both a brilliant writer and a pedophile on page 1 of Lolita. Someone calls Charles Kinbote "insane" in Pale Fire's Introduction. As well-executed as these books are, that execution consists mostly in following through on a premise already understood by the reader, and as I result, it's easy to finish them in an odd superposition of "wow!" and "that was it?" He's the trickiest of writers in the details, but in the big picture, you always get what you were sold.

. . . Except in Ada, where it's not clear even in retrospect what the gimmick is. It's the memoir of a fictional aristocrat named Ivan ("Van") Veen. He lives in an alternate universe called Antiterra, in which the United States is filled with Russian speakers, electricity is banned, and telephones are replaced by hydrodynamic devices called "dorophones." Or he lives in our universe and has invented Antiterra (to escape from his real life? as a metaphor for it?). He is writing his memoirs, as an old man, in collaboration with his long-time lover Ada, who he met as a teenager, and who happens to be his sister. Or he invented her and lives alone. Or he didn't invent her, but invented the happily-ever-after conclusion to their romance. Or they aren't really brother and sister. He depicts his teenage love affair with Ada as idyllic, even Edenic. But another name for Antiterra is Demonia, and Ada means "of hell" in Russian.

Van's memoir is coming apart at the seams; everywhere you look in the novel you find eerie inconsistencies, enigmatic remarks, passages that seem to protest too much, judgments of events different from those any sane reader would make. Van is not crudely deluded about the facts the way some Nabokov characters are. But there is clearly something very wrong with him, and the nature of that wrongness -- a nature always tantalizingly just out of reach -- haunts the reader throughout the course of the book. Wherever I go in the world, I know that this book will be sitting in libraries sticking its tongue out at me. It is the most consistently baffling novel I have ever read.

Van is clearly meant to be a good writer, and he is, but in a very different way from, say, Humbert. This is not the careful, refined, charming, slightly sterile Nabokov. This is a Nabokov who knows he's getting old and has decided to go out with a bang. The writing bursts with obscure words, bilingual and trilingual puns, untranslated French, anagrams, and much, much more. Reading it feels like peeling off the husk of the English language and lapping up the cream filling inside. It is maximalist where so much of Nabokov is minimalist. There are parts written in stage dialogue, in code, in the form of advertising blurbs. There are references to, and parodies of, numerous works of art and literature. There are long stretches that seem like what a 19th-century novel would be if you put the sex back in. There is so much pure linguistic/literary entertainment there that the reader is drawn into Van's world despite their misgivings, only to be assaulted by the fundamental wrongness, in every sense, of Van's narrative. It is extraordinarily fun to read, and yet it also feels as though it has come from the other side of the looking-glass, and as though it may have been meant to stay there.

Read Ada. It's a difficult book, especially in the first 100 pages. It is Nabokov 301 -- the advanced class -- and you will have to get used to the idea that the author expects you to know three languages, catch references to bad translation of Pushkin, and extract crucial plot points from exchanges like this (in the very first chapter):

"I deduce," said the boy, "three main facts: that not yet married Marina and her married sister hibernated in my lieu de naissance; that Marina had her own Dr. Krolik, pour ainsi dire; and that the orchids came from Demon who preferred to stay by the sea, his dark-blue great-grandmother."

"I can add," said the girl, "that the petal belongs to the common Butterfly Orchis; that my mother was even crazier than her sister; and that the paper flower so cavalierly dismissed is a perfectly recognizable reproduction of an early-spring sanicle that I saw in profusion on hills in coastal California last February. Dr. Krolik, our local naturalist, to whom you, Van, have referred, as Jane Austen might have phrased it, for the sake of rapid narrative information (you recall Brown, don't you, Smith?), has determined the example I brought back from Sacramento to Ardis, as the Bear-Foot, B,E,A,R, my love, not my foot or yours, or the Stabian flower girl's -- an allusion, which your father, who, according to Blanche, is also mine, would understand like this" (American finger-snap). "You will be grateful," she continued, embracing him, "for my not mentioning its scientific name. Incidentally the other foot -- the Pied de Lion from that poor little Christmas larch, is by the same hand -- possibly belonging to a very sick Chinese boy who came all the way from Barkley College."

"Good for you, Pompeianella (whom you saw scattering her flowers in one of Uncle Dan's picture books, but whom I admired last summer in a Naples museum). Now don't you think we should resume our shorts and shirts and go down, and bury or burn this album at once, girl. Right?

"Right," answered Ada. "Destroy and forget. But we still
have an hour before tea."

(The plot point here, by the way, is that the characters are full siblings.)

But the book can be enjoyed even where it is not comprehended. And it is an enjoyable book -- a marvelous, disturbing, memorable, remarkable aberration of a book that is, as far as I can tell, like no other on (this) earth. ( )

Perfeitamente escrito. Ada or Ardor (traduzido como Ada ou o Ardor por Jório Dauster) é conhecido como o livro mais ambicioso de Nabokov, e se passa em um planeta chamado Anti-Terra, em que se fala inglês, francês e russo nos Estados Unidos e os telefones são movidos à água. Nesse mundo, os psiquiatras estudam o mítico planeta Terra, com o qual os loucos alucinam depois que a eletricidade foi proibida. E também dois jovens privilegiados passam alguns verões na Mansão de Ardis, e descobrem que são irmãos na mesma época em que se apaixonam.
Ada é um livro cruel. Seus personagens são belos, ricos, inteligentíssimos, e destroem o que mais amam. Também é, como todos os livros de Nabokov, sobre suas maiores obsessões.

SPOILER
“Having cradled the nacred receiver she changed into black slacks and a lemon shirt (planned for tomorrow morning); looked in vain for a bit of plain notepaper without caravelle or crest; ripped out the flyleaf of Herb’s Journal, and tried to think up something amusing, harmless, and scintillating to say in a suicide note. But she had planned everything except that note, so she tore her blank life in two and disposed of the pieces in the W.C.; she poured herself a glass of dead water from a moored decanter, gulped down one by one four green pills, and, sucking the fifth, walked to the lift which took her one click up from her three-room suite straight to the red-carpeted promenade-deck bar.”
“While dragging herself up she had to hang onto the rail. Her twisted progress was that of a cripple. Once on the open deck she felt the solid impact of the black night, and the mobility of the accidental home she was about to leave.
Although Lucette had never died before—no, dived before, Violet—from such a height, in such a disorder of shadows and snaking reflections, she went with hardly a splash through the wave that humped to welcome her. That perfect end was spoiled by her instinctively surfacing in an immediate sweep — instead of surrendering under water to her drugged lassitude as she had planned to do on her last night ashore if it ever did come to this. The silly girl had not rehearsed the technique of suicide as, say, free-fall parachutists do every day in the element of another chapter.
Owing to the tumultuous swell and her not being sure which way to peer through the spray and the darkness and her own tentaclinging hair—t,a,c,l—she could not make out the lights of the liner, an easily imagined many-eyed bulk mightily receding in heartless triumph. Now I’ve lost my next note.
Got it.
The sky was also heartless and dark, and her body, her head,and particularly those damned thirsty trousers, felt clogged with Oceanus Nox, n,o,x. At every slap and splash of cold wild salt, she heaved with anise-flavored nausea and there was an increasing number, okay, or numbness, in her neck and arms. As she began losing track of herself, she thought it proper to inform a series of receding Lucettes—telling them to pass it on and on in a trick-crystal regression—that what death amounted to was only a more complete assortment of the infinite fractions of solitude.
She did not see her whole life flash before her as we all were afraid she might have done; the red rubber of a favorite doll remained safely decomposed among the myosotes of an un-analyzable brook; but she did see a few odds and ends as she swam like a dilettante Tobakoff in a circle of brief panic and merciful torpor. She saw a pair of new vairfurred bedroom slippers, which Brigitte had forgotten to pack; she saw Van wiping his mouth before answering, and then, still withholding the answer, throwing his napkin on the table as they both got up; and she saw a girl with long black hair quickly bend in passing to clap her hands over a dackel in a half-tom wreath.
A brilliantly illumined motorboat was launched from the not-too-distant ship with Van and the swimming coach and the oilskin-hooded Toby among the would-be saviors; but by that time a lot of sea had rolled by and Lucette was too tired to wait. Then the night was filled with the rattle of an old but still strong helicopter. Its diligent beam could spot only the dark head of Van, who, having been propelled out of the boat when it shied from its own sudden shadow, kept bobbing and bawling the drowned girl’s name in the black, foam-veined, complicated waters.” ( )

story about a little girl doge who died.
Source Pierce College
age 5

At first I thought I didn't "get" this book. Pale Fire and Lolita are each built around a central joke; get that joke, and the books are funny, even if occasionally individually little jokes within them go over your head. I couldn't find any such unifying comic theme to Ada. Based on how I've read that it's actually the result of Nabokov taking two different novels he was in the beginning stages of writing and deciding to jam them together into one, I think the problem isn't that I don't get it and that the novel simply just isn't coherent enough to "work" (in the sense of be consistently funny).

Another aspect of my not "getting" this book is that our narrator here is a pretty repulsive human being. Given that the narrators of the previous two Nabokov novels I read were obviously deliberately unsympathetic I'm inclined to give the author the benefit of the doubt about this and assume we aren't meant to like him, but... that is not a thing I would think if I didn't have prior experience with Nabokov. He's showered with praise by other characters; he mouthpieces numerous personal opinions of the author; the bulk of the story is devoted to a consensual love affair in which his role is a sympathetic one. I don't know what's going on there.

Those who hated the section in Pale Fire where Kinbote starts ripping on Shade's wife's translation abilities should be warned that this novel contains a good eight to twelve varations on that gimmick. ( )