Ada
Two young children engage in an inocent tryst only to later discover a wonderful and terrible secret about themselves. "The arbors and ardors of Ardis."
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7recommend
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2008–2026years
73% recommend27% neutral
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What Hacker News says
- A read I enjoyed in college was Ada, or Ardor by Nabokov.
- While I don't think you need to be 'extremely literary' to enjoy it, Pale Fire is strong stuff, and challenging in surprising ways -- as the linked review expounds on, at some length.
Lolita is probably Nabokov's most accessible book, or at least the most accessible of his I've read, but I bet part of what you liked there is that you, the reader, don't interact with Humbert Humbert in quite the same way that Humbert thinks about himself, or might expect you would interact with him. Nabokov is profoundly good at this sort of authorial/editorial/linguistic misdirection.
On those terms, Pale Fire is a sort of 3d chess version of Lolita. Obviously the topic is different, at least, the surface topic is different. Obsession is still very much a topic.
Anyway, you might enjoy reading more Nabokov! Don't give up on him! To my mind he's one of the literary gifts from the 20th century. And you might enjoy Pale Fire on a re-read, but I'd recommend something else by him (or a few palate-cleansing/getting deeper on the Nabokov vibe choices) if it left you cold. It left me a little cold, too. I've been re-reading Ada or Ardor recently which I'd say is really outstanding, if longer and more florid than Lolita.
- I'm not sure I agree with the idea what we primarily like stories that take place in familiar (moral) universes. For a lot of pop-fiction that's surely true but generally works we think of as being of merit challenge the reader.
A lot of Borges stories come to mind. Stanislaw Lem's work like Solaris, on moral issues surely Nabokov's Lolita or Ada or Ardor. The Master and Margarita in the Soviet Union, Le Guin's the Left Hand of Darkness with takes on sexuality way ahead of their time and so on. If I go through my list of favourite books there's a lot of those.
- Nabokov, which incidently is one of the too-impressive great writers mentioned in the comments, beside writing some of the best novels ever, taught literature for years in Cornell. I cannot recommend enough his "Lectures on literature". His take on literature is not post-modern at all (he was not too fond of surrealism and he loved Joyce for his style and not his devices). In one of these lectures, the famous "Good readers and good writers" (http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/goodre.htm...) he said that
"There are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: he may be considered as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. A major writer combines these three — storyteller, teacher, enchanter"
(Nabokov himself strongly leans to the latter...)
I will quote the end of this short lecture, as an answer (a very Nabokovian answer) to that nagging and essentially unimportant question: what makes a great novel?
"It seems to me that a good formula to test the quality of a novel is, in the long run, a merging of the precision of poetry and the intuition of science. In order to bask in that magic a wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle even though we must keep a little aloof, a little detached when reading. Then with a pleasure which is both sensual and intellectual we shall watch the artist build his castle of cards and watch the castle of cards become a castle of beautiful steel and glass."
Yes, Ulysses is a precise work, full of riddles and references. Having an annotated edition may give you good grades, or give you insights on the making of the novel, but the device used are not that important - what makes it exhilarating is the joy of the language, the way it sings uniquely, and the way this song builds or subsums the world.
That's my take on what Nabokov meant when he said a great writer is an enchanter. Nabokov's "Ada or Ardor" is an enchantment, as a whole and fractally, down to each single sentence, to each single word. Proust's "A la recherche du temps perdu" is an enchantment, a very long river of neverending sentences. Flaubert's "Madame Bovary" is the work of a mean and sarcastic enchanter who uses rythm as a weapon. Just as reading Joyce makes you speak in his special brand of English (or if you venture into Finnegans Wake, his special brand of Gibberish), reading Proust, Flaubert or Nabokov (or Céline or Pynchon) infects you with what they've made of their language to suit the needs of their work.
- You know what's full of explicit incest? Nabokov's Ada, or Ardor. It's also one of the most beautiful books I've ever read.
But it looks like it's not available on Kindle either, now that I check :)
http://www.amazon.com/Ada-Ardor-Chronicle-Vladimir-Nabokov/d...
- I enjoyed it, but if you want epic Nabokov, check out ADA. It's a HUGE book, but very rewarding if you have the patience.
