I read this book and was immediately struck by one sentence. It has followed me around, unattached and uprooted, for years.

The sentence is: “And yet I adore him. I think he’s quite crazy, and with no place or occupation in life, and far from happy, and philosophically irresponsible— and there is absolutely nobody like him.”

Leave it to Nabokov to make this sentence a promise that the entire book follows through on. The acrobatics he can perform with words are truly mind-boggling. In other words, these words are worth every awkward conversation I had in the past two weeks when people asked me, “So what’s this you’re reading, what’s it about?” And my response was, “Well, you mean in a word? In a word, well, incest.”

But, it’s Nabokov, the mastermind behind the Lolitas, Dollys, Lolas, and Doloreses. What the book is about is hardly what it seems to be about.

Also, the epilogue of this book earns five stars, or perhaps even more. Something that epilogues on their own should rarely be able to achieve.

Nirvana. Nevada. Vaniada.

Üfff, I really didn't want to read it! But as I was reading, I felt as if I was being pulled from every part of me.

Every convolution of my brain, gently prodded and stimulated by the tip of my finger, as if it was being tickled. It was like an insolent examination experience..

Really, how does Nabokov manage to make a person an accomplice to himself? It's truly amazing!

This passage vividly describes the intense and almost involuntary experience of reading. The author's initial reluctance gives way to a sense of being deeply engaged and affected by the text. The description of the brain being stimulated and the comparison to an insolent examination add a touch of drama and mystery. It makes one wonder about the power of Nabokov's writing and how it can have such a profound impact on the reader.

Overall, the expanded text provides a more detailed and engaging account of the author's reading experience, leaving the reader with a greater sense of the author's emotions and the power of Nabokov's work.

Fucking kids, you know?

Seriously, it's really frustrating when kids don't seem to understand certain things.

If that’s actually what you get out of this, I shudder to think of your record collection.

One of Nabokov’s sweetest books ever, and a beautifully sustained love letter to fidelity, destiny, and kicking against Death’s prick.

It's an immortal work that truly deserves to be cherished and understood.

We should encourage kids to explore such wonderful literary treasures and gain a deeper appreciation for the beauty and wisdom they contain.

Rather than simply dismissing or misinterpreting them, we need to guide them towards a more meaningful and enlightened reading experience.

Maybe then, they will begin to see the true value of these great works and develop a love for literature that will last a lifetime.

Hey, dico a voi lassù, immortali muse delle arti. I implore you to give me a sip from the waters of the river Lethe. So that I can forget the reading of this work and be able to read, once again, the terrible, incestuous, depraved and romantic love story of Van and Ada (or Ardore).

Ada batte Lolita 10 a 0. This statement seems to suggest a comparison or competition between the two. Perhaps it implies that the story of Ada is somehow superior or more captivating than that of Lolita.

The use of such vivid and extreme language to describe the love story of Van and Ada makes it sound both scandalous and fascinating. It piques our curiosity and makes us want to know more about their relationship.

However, we should also approach such a story with a critical eye and consider the moral and ethical implications of incestuous love. While it may be a compelling narrative, it is important to remember that such relationships are not socially acceptable or healthy.

Remembrance, like Rembrandt, is dark but festive. If Nabokov is anything, he's clever. However, in my case, being clever isn't always sufficient. So, the lack of a fifth star is a joint effort on both our parts. Fortunately for Nabokov, the remaining four stars make this review a favorable one despite my complaints.

As mentioned in the summary, the book combines fairy tale, epic, thoughts on time, parody of novel, and erotica. The first two had moderate intrigue, and the fifth quickly lost its appeal due to personal preferences. This left the reader to enjoy the aspects of the third and fourth that were pleasing.

  In full, deliberate consciousness, at the moment of the hooded click, he bunched the recent past with the imminent future and thought to himself that this would remain an objective perception of the real present and that he must remember the flavor, the flash, the flesh of the present (as he, indeed, remembered it a half dozen years later - and now, in the second half of the next century).

But here we encounter more misfortune. If you're going to parody names like Mann and Proust, you have to be good enough for the reader to prefer the imitation to the original. For this reader, it was close but not quite there. As for the meditations on time, they had some intricate insights, but compared to those of Borges, they ultimately fell short.

Alright, enough of the lackluster comparisons. Amidst this diverse collection of puzzle pieces, we have the ever-present Nabokov, a crowd-pleaser in the sense of his extraordinary turns of phrase. Other reviews have detailed the linguistic tricks, so I'll leave that to more capable and interested hands. While I do appreciate well-crafted sentences and have even maintained a collection for several years, I'm not overly fond of deconstructing the reasons and justifications. I noticed the alliteration, but the rest of the classifications went over my head. Those who are more interested in that sort of thing, however, are in for a treat.

In the end, I wasn't completely overwhelmed to the point of ignoring the predecessors of the past. But I can assure you, the whole is far more than the sum of its parts.

  \\"If I could write,\\" mused Demon, \\"I would describe, in too many words no doubt, how passionately, how incandescently, how incestuously—c'est le mot—art and science meet in an insect, in a thrush, in a thistle of that ducal bosquet.\\"

Lolita is not just a novel; it is the zenith that can be reached after passing through ada or desire, lolita, and the pale fire. In this sense, it is the masterpiece of Nabokov's masterpieces and also sets the standard for Nabokov's readership. There is almost such a test in the first fifty pages: Did you read Lolita with horror and by creating resistance? Here, you will encounter much more. You will think that Pale Fire is actually an easy-to-read novel. After that, a feast that you will not want to end and that will not end anyway will begin.
Ada or Desire is a novel about time, love, childhood, and existence. Just saying this and the thought of reading these from Nabokov is already a great promise, isn't it?
We will also think and feel about time, we will remember our childhood, our childhood love, our childhood happiness, we will smile, we will be sad, then our future, our old age, our death will come to our minds... No, these are not, at least not just like this in this novel. This novel, with its mind-boggling subtlety, the striking nature of its details, its irony that turns everything, including itself, into a parody, its colorful and multi-voiced, multi-lingual nature... Let's say it's enchanting and end with the words when the novel ends: “…and what else, what else…”

I'm 541 pages into a 589-page book, and I just can't bring myself to read the rest.

I persisted for a while, hoping to reach the so-called "masterpiece" part. However, that didn't happen.

I didn't like this book at all. Although the language used was beautiful, I simply had no interest in the characters.

It seems that no matter how beautifully the words are crafted, if the characters don't engage me, the story loses its charm.

Maybe I was expecting too much from this book, or perhaps it just wasn't my cup of tea.

Either way, I'm disappointed and have decided to put it aside and move on to something else.

Who knows, maybe the next book will be the one that truly captivates me.

I've generally felt that Lolita reads as a character study for Ada.

Ada, the book, is a far more epic, more upbeat family dramedy - dramedic from its first line to "Vivian Darkbloom's" endnotes.

It's specious to "review" Ada in the traditional sense, and comparing the two is also inappropriate. Ada, the character, is a continental sophisticate, while Lolita is a crass American. The reason Lolita is the more popular and celebrated of the two novels is that although it also superficially deals with a morally inappropriate relationship, it strikes some painful blows at common targets such as youth, pop culture, parenthood, and suburbia. These successful efforts also make it his most modern and accessible work. However, Ada is the more layered and Nabokovian, and - you may snort at the irony - timeless. It's an aesthetic pinnacle of wit and wordplay, plot and ploy.

Lolita may be the "light of my life, fire of my loins, my sin, my soul," but Ada is the brains behind the operation.

Perhaps the popularity of Lolita lies in its ability to touch on these universal themes in a more immediate and relatable way. But Ada offers a deeper exploration of human nature and relationships, with its complex web of characters and storylines.

Both novels have their own unique charms and merits, and it's unfair to simply compare them. Instead, we should appreciate each for what it is and the different perspectives it offers on life and love.

Whether you prefer the tragic beauty of Lolita or the intellectual depth of Ada, one thing is certain - Nabokov was a masterful writer who had the ability to create unforgettable characters and stories that continue to captivate readers today.

Io con Nabokov la devo smettere. His style and his rivers of words have a strange hold on me, both enchanting and confusing. Ada, just like Lolita, has left me exhausted and disconcerted. Nabokov's writing is a complex web of beauty and mystery. His use of language is so rich and vivid that it seems to transport me to another world. But at the same time, it can be overwhelming and difficult to fully understand. Ada is a story that delves deep into the themes of love, desire, and identity. It is a tale that challenges our perceptions and makes us question what we know about ourselves and others. But it is also a story that can be emotionally draining, leaving us with a sense of unease and uncertainty.

An excerpt from Beowulf on the Beach about Lolita, which is praised, states that the author thinks Nabokov is overrated. One of his literary friends claims that Nabokov's novel Ada is among her favorites, so he attempts to \\"read\\" it. He describes pedaling the square-wheeled trike of Nabokov's prose and questions the rhythm, comparing it to a besotted Cossack. His friend admits he's right and says she liked it for the incest.

This is not a book solely about the sin of incest. It's a romantic and insatiable incest, set in a world outside of ours. Nabokov creates a parallel world that is different from ours but has similarities to his privileged childhood. It's an America full of indulgent landowners with all-knowing, psychologically damaged but loyal servants. The well-educated landowners speak a mixture of English, French (untranslated), and Russian (translated playfully). Things happen out of sequence with real history, and they discuss Proust in the 1880s, with technologies having different timing and style. The main purpose seems to be to allow Nabokov to create things as he pleases for convenience. Philosophically, there are games, especially with time, memory, and imagination and their interplay.

Ultimately, we never truly know what happened to Van Veen. He writes this book in the third person, looking back at his lifelong incestuous love, with all its rewards and disappointments. But he's our only source, and he fills his version with playful literary references and linguistic games. The author read the first 80 pages, understood nothing, but still loved it. He can't explain why, but it was romantic, and Nabokov can do certain things. However, when the sex starts, it becomes overwhelming and seems to be the only purpose for large chunks of the book. The author gets tired and bored, but then realizes he still likes it. It's an oddly endearing parody with a hard-to-place awkward comfort. He finishes the book feeling better about it than in the middle section, giving a mixed recommendation at best.

(Side note - Nabokov's influence on Thomas Pynchon is evident, especially in the \\"square-wheeled trike\\" prose.)

47. Ada or Ardor : A Family Chronicle by Vladimir Nabokov was published in 1969. It's a 589-page hardcover in the 1969 edition. The author acquired it in 2011 from his in-laws' collection and read it from Sep 19 to Oct 12. The reading time was 26:25, with 2.7 minutes per page. The rating is 4. The locations are in Antiterra, an alternate world with an America heavily influenced by Russians and Russian culture. The author, Vladimir Nabokov, was born in 1899 and died in 1977. He was educated at Trinity College in Cambridge in 1922. He lived in Berlin (1922-1937), Paris, the US (1941-1961), and Montreux, Switzerland (1961-1977).

Onirico, Ucronico, Erotico, Scandaloso.

There are a whole bunch of things in this book. I'm giving it 4 stars only because I believe Nabokov has written better (The Gift and Pale Fire are a notch above). Sometimes it seems that so much aesthetic care overshadows the content, as if it were a style lesson.

Nevertheless, it remains a stunning book. The vivid and imaginative language used by Nabokov creates a world that is both alluring and disturbing.

The characters are complex and multi-faceted, and the plot weaves together elements of the dreamlike, the utopian, the erotic, and the scandalous in a way that keeps the reader engaged from start to finish.

Despite its flaws, this book is a testament to Nabokov's genius as a writer and is well worth reading for anyone interested in literature and the power of language.

I'm always a bit reluctant to essay a review of a recognized work of literature. Any book about which other whole book-length analyses have been written makes my impressions seem almost certainly more facile and shallow in comparison.

My first attempt to read Ada years ago ended just a few pages in. I was too young and callow to appreciate the depth of Nabokov's mature achievement then. But Michael Chabon's judgment means a lot to me. When I read his recommendation of Ada in Maps and Legends, I decided to give Nabokov and myself another try.

Though I finished this time, I still had to struggle with this complex and challenging book. Part of the challenge is the complexity of the language or, rather, languages employed. Nabokov's novel travels easily among English, French, and Russian, with occasional side trips into other tongues for variety. Despite my passing familiarity with English and a couple of semesters of Russian in college (no French, apart from the little I've picked up along the way), Nabokov's vocabulary kept me reading and rereading sentences very slowly.

Such multilingualism is plausible in the novel's context. Nabokov's alternate Earth is a less homogeneous world than our own. The great powers of Terra do not exist on Demonia, and their analogues are weaker and less bellicose. North America was split among settlers who amicably share the continent, and Eurasia is a more fragmented patchwork. The great wars of our Terran century remain unfought on Antiterra, which is a more pastoral, bucolic, and happier world, at least as seen through the eyes of Ivan (Van) Veen, the protagonist and primary narrator.

Technology has advanced more slowly than in our world. A world-wide revulsion against electrical and magnetic devices has led to their legal ban in most jurisdictions. The Demonians have not eschewed all invention, though. There are bits of science-fictional furniture here to delight any steampunk fan.

All these toys are just background furniture for the novel. Ada is a work of sf, but it's not a typical one. It doesn't dwell on its worldbuilding. What it's really about is the long-lived and very physical romance between Ivan (Van) Veen and his sister, the titular Ada.

Incest is taboo on Antiterra, and Van and Ada's relationship is both legally and culturally forbidden. Their efforts to conceal their love are not entirely successful, but it turns out that those who find out are not as upset as they had thought.

When reading this book from a 21st-Century perspective, the incestuous nature of their relationship is not the hardest part to adjust to. The part I found hardest was the ages of the partners. When their sexual relationship starts, Van is fifteen and Ada is twelve. Nabokov's descriptions of their bodies and the sexualization of children in the book are very disturbing.

Ada is a tremendous literary achievement, but it's also a difficult book for me to recommend wholeheartedly. If you're reading it for the first time these days, you should be prepared for its themes as well as its lyrical prose.