Vladimir Nabokov is one of those writers who didn't simply create books; rather, he constructed entire monuments to literature! Among Russian writers, I've always said that their classics are like Cadillacs of literature. No matter from which perspective you look, both in terms of the technical level and the depth of their works, they always manage to leave me ecstatic after reading, just like after having savored the best of banquets.

What catches my attention about Nabokov is that, despite using themes in novels like this or his famous "Lolita" that blatantly pose very evident moral conflicts for any type of reader, and also using characters who aren't as endearing as you might say, yet somehow he manages to make one fall in love with his words.

"Ada or Ardor" is a love novel. A love that, despite being subjected to many barriers, was able to endure over time and transcend much further. It is also a family chronicle, where we are shown the evolution of lineages up to our protagonists. There is something very strange in "Ada" and that is that it never has any surprises. From the beginning, the author gives us the keys that constitute its greatest mystery, and not content with that, from time to time, he starts a segment of the story from the end, which in many cases could mean something very bad for the narrative. However, Nabokov manages to make that not matter, and confident in his virtues, he makes every small promise, every small anticipation, in the end, be richly rewarded when he unfolds at the tiniest level that small story he wanted to tell, in pursuit of the great whole that he ultimately delivers.

It's a real delight! One of those books that is always a pleasure to read and that always has something more up its sleeve for that reader who dares to follow its paths once again.

Thoughts upon completion-- This was an extremely interesting book for me.

To expand on the narration observation I made earlier, it appears that Nabokov has a penchant for narrating his novels in a rather unique way. It could be described as a second-degree sort of narration, or perhaps it's very direct. I struggle to assign an exact term to what's happening. For instance, in Lolita, which many of you have likely read, the actual story is a confession penned by Humbert Humbert, the main character.

Another novel, Pale Fire, is a poem written by a fictional poet named John Shade, followed by a long series of annotations (in which a story unfolds) written by a fictional poetry critic named Charles Kinbote. Similarly, Ada is an unfinished memoir written by the fictional Van Veen regarding his incestuous relationship with his sister Ada.

Readers of literature and poetry are quick to note that the narrator is not the same as the author, but in these cases, they are closely intertwined. I find myself vacillating between calling the narrative style of these three works indirect and very direct. On one hand, the story is told by Nabokov through his protagonists (or antagonists, depending on your stance on pedophilia and incest), so there are, in a sense, two writers nested within each other, hence my "second-degree" descriptor. On the other hand, it could also be argued that by writing his books in this way, Nabokov brings the narration closer to the reader by making it an integral part of the story. In other words, the person telling us the story is a part of the story we're reading, or perhaps even better... instead of simply telling us a story, Nabokov is telling us about a story being told.

With Ada in particular, the unfinished-novel narration approach is truly fascinating. When I say "unfinished," I mean it's a first draft, with notes by Ada and Van inserted into the text. Honestly, in many ways, it's not a very good novel (Van Veen's novel, that is - Mr. Nabokov's is wonderful). The story is interesting and the characters are rich, but the prose has a plodding, meandering quality and is often interspersed with long philosophical passages, which one can only hope might be edited out in a later version of the book. Another interesting aspect of this narrative choice is that several times, the inserted revision notes reveal events that will occur later on. It's a different kind of foreshadowing that is quite rewarding.

I would also like to briefly expand on something I mentioned in the previous paragraph. I commented that the novel written by the narrator, Ivan Veen, isn't a very good book, yet I said Vladimir Nabokov's novel is lovely. Of course, I've also said that they are the same book, so how can this be? I think I was able to make this distinction because I've read so much Nabokov. I believe this is a book that will be especially rewarding for readers familiar with his prose style, as this novel is NOT in his voice. In an amazing and brilliant way, Nabokov has managed to create a character and a voice for that character that is exactly what we would expect. We learn that Van is proud, jealous, vindictive, and pretentious, and we learn this equally through his actions and feelings as he describes them and through his prose directly. I think Nabokov's ability to invent and then completely inhabit another prosaic voice flawlessly was one of the things that amazed me about this book. If you're familiar with Mr. Nabokov's traditional prose style, you'll truly appreciate this feat.

Nabokov's Ada or Ardor stands as his most ambitious novel, a remarkable synthesis of his linguistic prowess and literary themes, embodying both the joys and dilemmas inherent in his work.

His writing is a source of perpetual wonder. His admirers are often taken aback when they recall that his style may not be to everyone's liking. Nabokov's sentences are precise yet frequently long and complex, completely devoid of clichés. He is highly attuned to the pleasures of assonance, alliteration, sesquipedalianism, and cross-linguistic puns. At their finest, they offer a sensuous delight that perfectly complements the subject matter; at other times, the descriptions seem so unfamiliar and novel that a reader may feel almost rebuffed. As Clive James astutely noted, Nabokov's aversion to familiar phrasing can lead to passages where the clarity is almost blinding.

In Ada or Ardor, most passages hover between these two extremes, veering towards beauty or awkwardness depending on one's mood or the time of day. His descriptions of various scenes, such as a sunset over a lake, playing Scrabble, or an erection, are both vivid and unique. One of his favored techniques is the use of long sentences filled with subordinate clauses, which may appear rambling but are actually extremely precise in their depictions and often highly perceptive in their choice of details. This technique is somewhat reminiscent of Proust, although employed to create a very different tone.

The book also showcases Nabokov's penchant for shifting from third-person to first-person narration, adding to the confusion of authorship and the overlay of multiple fictional 'editors'. The setting, too, is a kind of alternate-reality version of our own world, with superficial similarities but differences in history and geography. However, none of this really matters. What Nabokov truly cares about, it seems, is that readers experience a shiver of aesthetic pleasure when they encounter his words in the order he has chosen.

Given the sensuous nature of his writing, it is unsurprising that it reaches its zenith when he delves into the erotic mode. The long, dreamy, pastoral scenes of Ardis, where Van falls in love with Ada, are filled with hot afternoons, idyllic playfulness, and the lazy sexiness of remembered summers. Nabokov can be an extremely sexy writer, which is a disconcerting fact when one remembers that the girl is 12 years old, the boy is 14, and they are siblings. Whether this is a testament to Nabokov's writing or something we should be concerned about is a matter of debate. Personally, considering the rest of his work, it seems reasonable to conclude that Nabokov's obsession with young girls is something more alarming and disturbing than a mere literary device.

Nonetheless, this is not the place to explore that issue further. Ada or Ardor presents certain problems and challenges, but for readers who relish Nabokov's unique brand of liquid prose, this book is likely to be a veritable ocean of pleasure.

I had a rather strange realization while delving into this book. It seems that in nearly every instance where an author employs an unreliable narrator, it's always the same archetype: an intelligent, introspective man with a touch of cynicism and a mean streak. He has a high opinion of himself, which is constantly affirmed by the world around him. He succeeds effortlessly in multiple fields, though the success is short-lived (otherwise, where would the plot lead?). He gets into scraps due to his pride but always emerges victorious. And, of course, his life is filled with a parade of lovely women who come and go, flirting and desiring him, only to be ultimately discarded.

It's such an obvious and laughably transparent fantasy of a writer's life that it's hard to take seriously. This implies that no serious author would stoop to writing something so blatantly adolescent. However, if you take this concept as the foundation of your story and then add a veneer of deniability, you can suddenly claim complexity and depth without actually having to create a more unique and captivating protagonist. You can have your cake and eat it too.

Yet, I'm not entirely convinced by this excuse. It's too convenient to simply label anything stupid or insulting in the book as sarcasm and claim that all the good parts were intentional. This might work in a book like Flashman, where the character is clearly despicable and the story is an obvious farce. But as it becomes more subtle, mixed with realism and genuine sympathy, and the character's thoughts and motivations become vague, it loses its sharpness.

Just like with satire, to effectively capture the unreliable narrator, you have to do the hard work of separating the object from the subject it's mocking or commenting on. Otherwise, all you've done is recreate the subject, almost intact, creating a supposed satire that's hardly distinguishable from the original. Just because an author did something on purpose doesn't mean it's good. They still have to do it well.

I've known compulsive liars, and they're not very interesting. Their lies are petty and a bit sad. Their ideas of what will impress are always lacking and revealing. They're trying to fill a void within themselves, and the more they speak, the more that void becomes conspicuous. In this way, an honest person ironically ends up being more strange and mysterious to us than a liar. The liar is always circling around their insecurities and fears, so by their speech, you can precisely identify what haunts them. But an honest man doesn't reveal himself in this way. His plain speech doesn't disclose the shape and depth of his weaknesses through ellipsis.

Compulsive lies become absurd, contradicting one another and placing excessive importance on the most vapid and pointless details. But in writing a book, very few authors are willing to write something that's not clever, engaging, or witty. So they end up with these unreliable narrators whose lies are charming, attractive, and engaging. This is why such narrators rarely work. They fail to触及 the deep insecurity that drives the need to lie, the foolish hamartia of lying to oneself.

The genuine egomaniac doesn't lie because he believes himself to be interesting already. That's his delusion, and so he sees no reason to lie. Perhaps this is why authors have such a hard time with such characters. To be an author means being unsure and self-loathing (at least, the kind of author who writes avant-garde fiction). Why else would one go to such great lengths to prove oneself through clever words?

So they create these 'perfect liars' who tell extravagant, desirable lies to pointlessly cover up their extravagant, desirable lives. But without genuine feeling, real sadness, and dread at the core, there's nothing substantial to anchor the lies. There's no heart to reveal, just a lot of clever flash: a gilt box lacking anything worthy of being held within it.

It's not just the main character, Van, who feels like an escapist ideal of the intelligentsia. The whole structure is also recognizable to any fan of Wes Anderson movies. It's all so aspirational, yet carefully calibrated not to trigger simple jealousy from the moderately sophisticated reader who feels insulted when openly pandered to but will accept all the slightly obscured pandering they can get.

We have the wealthy family of good blood, but of course, they've fallen on hard times, are a bit out of favor, and a bit worn down. Money is never really a problem, but neither is their wealth excessive. The children are all brilliant, charming, well-dressed, good-looking, knowledgeable, and full of clever banter. They're good at everything but never really pursue any of it (like good idle aristocrats), so they just have the occasional success here and there. The sort of thing the average literary person would kill for: a successful book, a following, an appointment to a major academic post. But these are always downplayed by the characters as not really important to them, not as great as you'd imagine. And, of course, they have oodles of free time to waste on little projects or bits of melodrama: can't be rushed, darling.

All these pretty people are just fucked up enough to avoid being completely perfect. Even their flaws are desirable, the kinds of things romanticized in Victorian poetry. They don't fit in, they're biting and cruel, they're careless, they take too many risks, they're prideful. Any ostensibly negative trait that neatly falls under the guise of being 'cool' and doesn't really end up being problematic. It's just so precious that I can hardly stand it.

The whole section about Van's supposedly transformative theory of time was just so dull and long-winded. Some authors can present a fascinating philosophical or scientific digression in their works, but the long pages outlining Van's thoughts didn't feel profound or intriguing. They didn't challenge assumptions; they just seemed vague and half-baked. The whole final section, about how great the book is and how Van's thoughts on time changed everything, felt entirely contrived. Clearly, this is Nabokov, so we're supposed to assume it's ironic and tongue-in-cheek, but I just don't see how that reading makes it any more interesting.

The fantastical elements were a fun twist but were used too sparingly. They weren't as pervasive as in the works of Borges, Gogol, or Conrad and Ford's mostly forgotten The Inheritors. I find such experiments are most effective when they're allowed to change the very texture of the book, rush through it, and alter its meaning and interpretation, as in Harrison's Viriconium. Here, they ended up feeling too much like interludes, not really integrating with the downright ordinary everyday of the very light plot.

The plot really doesn't move, aside from a few more frantic chapters, such as the picaresque series of failed duels à la Dumas père. Indeed, even the inner lives of the characters remain mostly static, so that they're the same people at the end, in their nineties, as they were in the beginning, in their young teens. Of course, this is all meant to relate to the 'illusion of time' as Van explores it, but since the theory itself isn't particularly interesting, it doesn't do much to enhance the experience of watching a few unchanging people go through rather ordinary events. Indeed, they don't even seem to be creating the sort of false melodrama that we all make of our lives, making coherent stories out of unconnected events and coincidences.

The unreliable narrator shtick also means that we don't really get Ada's side of the romance. We're constantly being shown all the little things Van finds attractive about her, what excites him physically, but we don't get to see any of her attraction, how it progresses, what she sees in him, or what excites her. It all becomes rather blandly male-gaze, where the charms of the woman are described over and over, yet the man's physical presence is largely ignored. I mean, we do get Ada's voice peeking through here and there in notes, but it's never quite enough to break through Van's veil and let the reader into a deeper story. Plus, there's the fact that Nabokov had already tackled this dynamic with greater ironic force in Lolita, so it's rather unfortunate that a supposedly transgressive author like Nabokov would end up revisiting the same territory.

Then there's the prose itself. The first thirty pages are famously overstylized, with the wit jangling and clanking along so conspicuously that it leaves little room for subtlety or naturalism, for genuine emotion and connection. It's all such an obviously indulgent performance, like that of a precocious child who must be interrupted: ‘Yes yes, you’re very clever - now was there something you wanted to tell me?’.

After the initial bombast, it settles down, and the style almost completely changes for the rest of the book. The change is jarring and doesn't seem to have any purpose or reason behind it. Though Nabokov doesn't lay off the wordplay at that point, it just settles out a bit. Indeed, it started to make me tired of puns, which is odd since I've been a longtime proponent. It began to feel like too much work for too little payoff. Puns simply work better in conversation than in books because a book is so carefully crafted, and one can afford to take one's time and perfect it, polish it up. While a rough pun's strength lies in its suddenness, its extemporaneous quality. But with Nabokov, the sheer amount of work seems to be the point: that all the glitter and movement on the surface is worth all the trouble it takes, that we're not meant to appreciate the joke itself or the punchline but all the circuitous labor the author went to in order to set it up in the first place.

I began to feel a funny parallel between Nabokov's style and the chapter about the fellow who cheats at cards with mirrors, surrounding himself with all these ostentatious, flashy bits that he's constantly tweaking and nudging to get them to work. And we're supposed to think of him as pitiful, watching as he's easily defeated by the 'true' sharpness of Van, who instead manipulates the cards without it ever being obvious due to his sheer mastery (well, until he can't hold it in and flashes one from his sleeve at the end). Yet, one begins to think that if Nabokov were at the table, he wouldn't be able to resist flashing his sleeve every hand, thereby ruining the effect from the outset.

And such a style can work for a farce because it's so overblown, and the characters and plot aren't really central but act as set pieces for absurd situations and wry commentary on the nature of life. It can also be effective in works like Sartor Resartus, Moby Dick, or Gormenghast, where the language is inextricably linked to the characters, where an almost overbearing style is used as a tool to delve deeply into their minds, their point of view, to force the reader into the thoughts and senses of a completely different person, a world with colors, textures, and relationships that pierce through its very fabric, through the land itself, the characters' flesh, hearts, and minds, and then drag the reader back through that hole on the baited hook.

But Nabokov's voice isn't pervasive enough. It spends its time flitting along the surface and so fails to fully engage with his world and characters. It begins to feel more like a compulsion for wordplay than a deliberate construction, a love of words just spilling out onto the page because Nabokov is fascinated with language. The fact that the book spends a chunk of time discussing how to play Scrabble should tell you all you need to know. After all, he was a man who grew up multilingual, suspended between various languages, dialects, and forms of communication, and who wrote the English version of Lolita himself.

Of course, it should be noted that my own language skills outside of English are fairly poor. My years of Italian and Latin were some time ago, and so I undoubtedly missed countless little asides and jokes. Yet, the jokes I did get, even the more obscure ones (like a veiled reference to an old name for Tasmania which I only got because I happened to reference it in my book), weren't especially amusing to begin with. So it simply didn't seem worth the time to go through and decode the rest of it, just another case of more time spent for insufficient reward.

And yet, conceptually, it has its strengths. It's an interesting and unusual book, clearly a case of an author throwing himself into a wild experiment, which certainly takes courage. And if he didn't always succeed, at least he was always moving, always probing, and doing something. It wasn't an insulting work; it wasn't simplistic or flat. And that's what kept me reading through to the end, that even if I don't think all the pieces quite came together to make it work, it was something curious, something worth experiencing and turning over in my mind.

2.75
Suffering, masochism, suffering
I don't even have the strength to read the raptures of literary critics. I really don't give a fuck. It was a flop. I see certain elements that worked as they should, but I felt similar to when reading The Magic Mountain (which I hate with all my heart). I don't know where the enthusiasm for the novel comes from. The masochism and childish pornography don't excite me.

I just couldn't get into this work. The story seemed to lack depth and coherence. The characters were not well-developed, and their actions and emotions felt forced. The so-called "masochism" and "childish pornography" were just cheap attempts to shock and titillate the reader, rather than adding any real value to the narrative. I was left feeling disappointed and unfulfilled after reading it. Maybe others will find something to like in it, but for me, it was a waste of time.

After the rather prickly first few chapters, once we enter into the heart of the story, it is almost impossible to resist the charm of Nabokov's pen. Just as in Lolita, in this case too we find ourselves faced with a disturbing and scandalous story - indeed, in this novel the scandal surely reaches even greater heights - and yet not once did I feel annoyance, not even in the most explicit scenes. This is because Nabokov is an enchanter. Through his prose full of suggestions, incredible metaphors and rhetorical flourishes, he manages to capture the attention of the reader who, overwhelmed by so much skill, can do nothing but follow the enchanter to the end of the story.

The way Nabokov weaves his tale is truly masterful. He has the ability to make the reader both repulsed and intrigued by the events unfolding. The characters are complex and multi-dimensional, and the setting is vividly described, transporting the reader into a world that is both familiar and strange. Despite the controversial nature of the subject matter, Nabokov's writing is so beautiful and engaging that it is impossible not to be drawn in.

Overall, this novel is a testament to Nabokov's genius as a writer. It is a work that will stay with you long after you have finished reading it, making you question your own beliefs and values. If you are looking for a book that will challenge you and make you think, then this is definitely one to add to your reading list.

*Spoilers*

I have been deeply pondering over Ada. Evidently, it is rife with theory and has minimal impact on the real world. It is纯粹的想象; Nabokov's time system has not altered the stance of any audience, neither in the 20th century nor in the 21st century. Nor did he even expect it to.

The more I reflect, the more I view it as the imaginative longing of someone whose theory is inapplicable on earth. This is because compared to what is currently in use, it is unnecessarily convoluted for people to follow. I sense that Nabokov simply wrote it to share his thoughts on the matter. And this is the essence of art – to convey complex concepts to others as we cannot do so with mere human language.

However, Ada doesn't attempt to influence reality. It is a theory of what the world could be like with another time system, but without actually striving to convince the world to adopt it. When mathematicians formulate theories, it is for progress, to add something – a formula, a theorem – to the body of data that can enable further advancement. The idea of communicating this concept to others is fine, but the concept itself, an unsustainable theory, leaves me unsatisfied.

According to Albert Einstein, the only way a moving person and a stationary person could measure the speed to be the same was if their sense of time and space differed, with the clocks inside the spaceship ticking at a different rate from those on the ground and so on. Although this is true, it doesn't matter to Van. Because for him, time is the consciousness that we are alive; we obtain this consciousness in "no time", even less time than the ticking between the needles of each of Einstein's two clocks.

Humanity persists in measuring time by clocks, yet this brief moment of consciousness, the interval within the ticking of the clock's needle, is the only thing that matters. Let's say the clock's ticking progresses from moment A to moment B. The interval AB encompasses our flow of consciousness where we can察觉到 that we are alive. During that brief moment (A;B), we cannot be certain that we will be alive when the clock reaches the extremity "B". In our present moment, this "B" extremity is the future. Admittedly, an infinitely near future, but it remains the future.

Humanity has organized time according to clocks, according to the "future". For Van, the future does not exist because nothing can prove that we will be alive from one minute to the next, from one second to the next, from one moment to the next. For him, the future should not be part of the concept of "Time" as its occurrence cannot be proven by our consciousness.

I know that You and I were born, but that doesn't prove we经历了过去的出生阶段. The only thing that proves it is that brief span of consciousness in the present moment, which gives me the knowledge that I was born at some point in the past since my reason tells me I am currently alive.

Another criticism Van received is that death is a part of the future and everyone knows they are going to die. But Van replies: What can prove to your consciousness that you will die? The only thing that makes people aware that they will die is their knowledge of unconsciousness (because they know other people will die and through science/research studies), which is part of what Van considered as "Imperceptible Time".

Imperceptible Time is defined as a moment of our life that we can't perceive in our mind despite our own flow of consciousness in the present moment. Of course, people can imagine their death, but it hasn't actually occurred yet. Thus, their death, although it will happen in the future, falls under imperceptible time.

Van argues that we shouldn't include the laws of "Imperceptible Time" to govern the world. Simply because in the hypothesis where the human race had evolved according to ***solely*** Imperceptible Time (a moment of life that we can't perceive in our mind despite our own flow of consciousness in the present moment), if humans had evolved solely according to Imperceptible Time, we wouldn't have a way to locate ourselves in time to know when we die. Since our moments of procreation and so on would hypothetically be part of the time that we wouldn't be able to remember/perceive.

Van therefore chooses to abolish the notion of Imperceptible Time (the future, specifically) from his concept of time because this first couldn't create a taxonomical landmark for the human race. Unfortunately, it would be absurd to imagine that a human being could convince the whole world, which has been established for centuries, to operate according to new laws.

So Van created, through his autobiographical Memoir, when he envisions himself in an imaginary world called "AntiTerra", carefully and gradually constructing a love story (his own love story with Ada) that eventually dissolved (mirroring his concept of time without a Future).

The first 3 parts of the novel represent Van's memoir. Van's aim was to give new life to Time by severing Siamese Space and the future. By composing an autobiographical Memoir in the form of a treatise on the texture of time, it will reveal its veiled substance:

Part a: "with illustrative metaphors gradually increasing": His unending lines were a means for him to present how he conceives time soaring over the years. Their captivating power on the reader was to create a sort of continuum. The parentheses and over-explanations were to imply "the fall of time's folds". The ear-candy intent of his rhymes was to express "Time as a rhythm" of consciousness. Finally, the abstract metaphors were to express both the cutting off of Siamese space (not relying on things we can see, touch, but on "abstractness" – metaphors –) and also the impalpability of time's grayish gauze.

Part b: -very gradually building up a logical love story. Events should not be narrated too quickly as doing so would cause the reader not to care about what's happening, not to care about the character dynamics, and any conclusion/message that one intends to convey through them would be meaningless, and Nabokov is aware of this. His way of making us engage with his narration is felt in the little moments of romance where time stops, softens, the unfolding of external actions is slowed down, and the reader finds himself entering the intense spirit of Van as he is dazzled by Ada's simple mannerisms.

Many people fall in love because of a fixation on beauty features that evoke intensely positive impressions in their souls. Nabokov emphasizes those beautified features, those positive impressions. Despite his own dynamic prose, he is able to convey a sense of time stopping as he jots down, for example, for more than 8 pages, the intimate sensations that pass through Van's imagination as he gives a simple peck on Ada's hair. It's like a giant ladle inspecting the scene with such a microscopic vision, the pressure increasing with his caresses, his hand deepening in his trouser, his left wrist wiping his hair, each presented under a certain mystical, exotic guise that makes his narrative so gripping, so vivid, so alive.

"nothing in his sordid venery of the past winter could duplicate that downy tenderness, that despair of desire". Moreover, this is related to his treatise on the texture of time. He aimed to faithfully convey this sensation of the gradual buildup of time while simultaneously writing a novel that compels readers. This theme imparts layers of profound meaning to each of Nabokov's core linguistic characteristics.

Part c: going from past to present. This structure mirrors his definition of the past as an accumulation of sensa. Our perception of the Past is not marked by the link of succession to as strong a degree as the present and the instants immediately preceding its point of reality. The past is a coherent reconstruction of elapsed events, some of which are retained by the ordinary mind less clearly, if not at all, than the others. Similarly, the novel does not methodically follow every single step of Van and Ada since birth until their love story, but rather a coherent reconstruction of elapsed events related to the buildup of their love story.

Part d: -blossoming as a concrete story (Part 1 of the book), and just as gradually reversing analogies and disintegrating again into bland abstraction (part 2 of the book - they broke up). Similarly, as time has no future in Van's theory, Van and Ada's love story had no future in the first 3 parts of the novel.

Why did he choose "love" to express his texture of Time? When you find yourself alone, try to imitate the sound emitted by the ticks of the needle of a clock… *tick*… *tick*…. *tic*. There is a soft, peaceful silence that occurs during the interval between the two resonant strokes of the needle. This feeling of tenderness and serenity is easily associated with the poetic form of love.

"Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm; not the recurrent beats of the rhythm but the gap between two such beats, the gray gap between black beats: the Tender Interval." (time, that tender interval, as a love story). But that was just the story of Van!!

Ada, or Ardor is a fictional story: whose main characters are Van and Ada. The first 3 parts of the novel are actually the autobiographical memoir of Van, told in an imaginary realm ('antiTerra'), where he chronicles the love story he shared with Ada during his life. That memoir, centered around their love story, serves as a metaphor for the nature of time as a rhythm, which refutes the idea of the future.

That is why the memoir stops when Van and Ada break up and go their separate ways; there is no future for their love. At Part 5, the memoir is over; the story is no longer being narrated within that imaginary world. We are out of AntiTerra, that fictitious realm created by Van in his memoir to depict his own texture of time. At part 5, the story (the novel Ada, or Ardor) continues with the characters Ada and Van but in the realm of the actual novel, 'Terra'.

It is so fitting to conclude this love story outside of his memoir, to express that on Earth the future is still considered an integral part of time while also providing a positive ending to love. The future, here, is the love story between Ada and Van that ends with the two reunited, and not in a state of disintegration (like in Van's memoir where it ended when their relationship had long since ended, 'divorced').

I think it is the ultimate goal of every novelist to discover themes that赋予 the most profound meaning to each of their charming prosaic characteristics, and this is what, in my opinion, Nabokov achieved to the highest degree. With all his goofy and exciting humor even in the most intellectually demanding moments, Nabokov knows how to entertain his readers while achieving his aim (parodying the history of time). Van's self-confidence to challenge the world never fails to sparkle like diamond beads in the eyes of the reader.

‘

I highly recommend reading this book, not because it is the masterpiece that it purports to be. Instead, I suggest reading it and as much of Nabokov's body of work as you can endure to understand that Lolita was not an isolated incident. It is not a masterful attempt to inhabit the mind of a pedophilic pedant, an exercise in empathy. No, that is simply the perspective from which Nabokov consistently wrote and glorified.

The fact that Nabokov is still revered as a deity of the Western literary canon is a symptom of a world that continues to idolize Woody Allen, Luc Besson, and Roman Polanski. It is a society that protected Epstein for decades, that赋予权力 to people like Trump and Bill Clinton, and the list goes on.

By all means, read Nabokov if your objective is to understand what semen-gilded garbage constitutes the corroding foundation of 20th-century American literature. However, please, stop assigning it in your classes. There are numerous better authors - authors who did not delight in sexualizing children, authors who were not so intimidated by female writers that they used their own powerful platforms to degrade them, and even, astonishingly, authors who were not white, male, and wealthy - who deserve the place that Nabokov's flabby posterior crowds out in the literary pantheon.

This is a trashy novel that delves into the sex lives of idle aristocrats. However, since it is by Nabokov, it becomes an exquisite trashy novel about the sex lives of those idle aristocrats.

The prose within it is truly beautiful, and the word play is delightful. Sadly, though, the characters are sort of tedious. And, of course, the narrator is unreliable.

This book is extremely weird. It is set in an alternate history earth where the geopolitics seem specifically arranged so that the characters can make numerous triple language puns that span Russian, French, and German and completely go over my head. For some unknown reason, electricity has been banned. Somehow, there is a water-powered telephone. This alternate history setting also provides Nabokov with an excuse to make clever jokes about actual historical figures, such as the four-term ruler of America named Gamaliel.

The main plot of the book revolves around an incestuous relationship between a brother and sister who thought they were cousins. Much of the first segment of the book is concerned with them engaging in extremely underage sex. So, yes, it is a weird book. It may not be as good as Lolita or Pale Fire, but there are moments of obvious brilliance that shine through.

I have great difficulty in writing positive reviews. It is precisely when I am in love with a book that I most strongly sense how inadequately my words can convey the experience of reading it. This is how I end up penning reviews such as [this](http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/459485748).

Nevertheless, Ada merits a review. I am not a widely read individual, and I seldom feel justified in stating that anything I have read is not read often enough. (How could I know? Perhaps everyone else is simply occupied reading other books that are even superior.) But I truly believe that Ada has not yet found its intended readership. Many Nabokov fans (including Martin Amis and John Updike) consider it the moment when their hero went off the rails. General-lit fans who were drawn to Lolita as a conventional 20th-century novel - which, in many respects, it is - are deterred by Ada's strangeness. And those who love weird, monstrous books precisely for their weirdness and monstrosity do not seem, by and large, to have discovered it yet.

Ada is Nabokov's magnum opus. To be sure, it is messier than his other books, and Lolita is far superior as a straightforward character study. But Ada is longer, richer, more complex, and - this is the crucial part - lacking in the directness that detracts from his other works. I am aware that "directness" is not a word that most people immediately associate with Nabokov, and certainly I do not mean that every aspect of his other work is straightforward. But he does tend to reveal his tricks, 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 refers to Charles Kinbote as "insane" in Pale Fire's Introduction. As well-executed as these books are, that execution mainly consists in following through on a premise already understood by the reader, and as a result, it is easy to finish them with a strange combination of "wow!" and "that was it?" He is the most devious of writers in the details, but in the big picture, you always get what you were promised.

...Except in Ada, where it is not even clear in hindsight what the trick is. It is the memoir of a fictional aristocrat named Ivan ("Van") Veen. He lives on an earth-like planet called Antiterra, where the United States is populated by Russian speakers, electricity is prohibited, and telephones are replaced by hydrodynamic devices called "dorophones." Or perhaps he lives on our earth 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, whom he met as a teenager and who happens to be his sister. Or maybe he invented her and lives alone. Or perhaps he didn't invent her, but fabricated the happily-ever-after conclusion to their romance. Or maybe they aren't really brother and sister. He portrays 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 falling apart at the seams; everywhere you look in the novel, you encounter eerie inconsistencies, enigmatic remarks, passages that seem to protest too much, and judgments of events different from those any sane reader would make. Van is not crudely deluded about the facts in the way that some Nabokov characters are. But there is clearly something very amiss 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, taunting me. It is the most consistently perplexing novel I have ever read.

Van is clearly intended to be a good writer, and he is, but in a very different way from, say, Humbert. This is not the meticulous, refined, charming, slightly sterile Nabokov. This is a Nabokov who knows he is getting old and has decided to go out with a bang. The writing is filled with obscure words, bilingual and trilingual puns, untranslated French, anagrams, and much, much more. Reading it feels like peeling away the husk of the English language and savoring the rich 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 added the sex back in. There is so much pure linguistic/literary entertainment 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 enjoyable to read, and yet it also feels as though it has emerged from the other side of the looking-glass, and as though it may have been intended to remain there.

Read Ada. It is a challenging book, especially in the first 100 pages. It is Nabokov 301 - the advanced course - and you will have to become accustomed to the idea that the author expects you to know three languages, catch references to bad translations 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 fully understood. 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.

This is an extremely challenging book to peruse.

Just like with Nabokov's other works, one has to read it twice to have even a glimmer of hope in understanding all that is transpiring.

However, this particular one makes references to numerous other works in often quite subtle manners.

In fact, listing all the reference materials would consume all the available space in this review.

Similar to Under The Volcano (yet another dense piece), there is an online guide that is extremely helpful.

This one can be found at adaonline, http://www.ada.auckland.ac.nz/.

Prior to reading Ada, one should at least be familiar with Eugene Onegin by Pushkin and Proust's In Search of Lost Time.

There are many others such as Poe, Dickens' Bleak House, Shakespeare, Madame Bovary, but those two seem essential in untangling this book.

The Rape of Lucrece is perhaps the most crucial Shakespearean work to read before delving into this one.

However, I found the entire novel to remind me more of A Midsummer Night's Dream than anything else.

The actors, the dreamy, otherworldly aspect, the time-bending chronology, Ardis (arrow) - cupid's arrow, and many of the characters being actors, etc.

Maybe it's just my perception.

In a nutshell, the first few pages are nearly incomprehensible (but don't give up!), and the rest of the book is manageable yet very difficult.

Nabokov sometimes writes in other styles as he parodies or burlesques other authors like Flaubert or Proust and likely many Russian authors I'm not familiar with.

But it can still be an enjoyable read even without fully grasping all the references and jokes.

Chapter 4, which deals with time, might be my favorite section of any of his works, and that's saying a great deal!

What is Nabokov's pen but a strange instrument that grieves your mind and burns the moths of your heart so that you may live in a forbidden imaginary garden where your scales and thoughts are turned, where the sky is smeared with honey to ignore the prohibitions and the reader continues reading his huge novel trying to decipher its codes without blushing, without screaming?!

Ada or the Style is a wonderful literary work, even a comprehensive pictorial encyclopedia of literature, for the classic art of languages, the science of insects, natural geography, and a detailed and precise research on the philosophy of time and its dimensions.

Nabokov accompanies us on a deep psychological analysis journey of the philosophy of love between two children who grow old together, and their love does not age and their style does not fade.

So the mathematician, the philosopher, the doctor, the wise man, the writer, the lover, the madman,

Ada, the style that burned the garden of Ardis with what was in it,

Loses the ashes remaining from the burned style of Ada.

Madmen that Nabokov plays with as he plays with the pieces of the chessboard in a game where everyone loses.

Oh my God, what have I read?!

How do you, Nabokov, manage to smear with all this endless scientific, literary, and linguistic knowledge?!