Item: Ada, or Ardor
Rating: 4.00
Author: jamiereadthis

by Vladimir Nabokov

Published two weeks after his seventieth birthday, Ada, or Ardor is one of Nabokov's greatest masterpieces, the glorious culmination of his career as a novelist. It tells a love story troubled by incest.

It is also at once a fairy tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of the novel, and erotic catalogue. Ada, or Ardor is no less than the supreme work of an imagination at white heat.

This is the first American edition to include the extensive and ingeniously sardonic appendix by the author, written under the anagrammatic pseudonym Vivian Darkbloom.

I read this book for one sentence, a sentence that’s followed me around, unattached, uprooted, for years:

“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 that sentence a promise on which the entire book follows through. The acrobatics that man can do with words would stand anyone on their head. Words, in other words, worth every awkward conversation the past two weeks: “So what’s this you’re reading, what’s it about?” “Well, you mean in a word? In a word, well, incest.”

But, it’s Nabokov, of the Lolitas, Dollys, Lolas, Doloreses; what it’s about is hardly what it’s about.

Also, the epilogue earns five stars, more than five; something that epilogues on their own should hardly be allowed to do.

Nirvana. Nevada. Vaniada.

Ada, or Ardor

by Vladimir Nabokov

Reviewed by jamiereadthis on Apr 22, 2010

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