Rating: 
Summary: Rich In Imagery
Review: Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, constitutes Nabokov's largest work and his greatest use of imagery. In fact, Ada reads very much like a wide-screen technicolor extravaganza of the sort that makes millions and millions for Hollywood producers. To produce this kind of technicolor of gorgeousness, Nabokov both concentrates and expands on every detail he provides to the reader. The entire first half of Ada has an extremely visual quality, with images pouring out in such profusion that the reader's mind is almost overloaded with the effort of following them all. The natural setting of the Veen estate and Ardis Hall, itself, are extremely detailed and realistic.Ada also contains all of the sexual escapades that Lolita seemed to promise but never delivered, although each one of them is essential to the story. Almost every character in the book is involved in some sort of torrid affair. The characters of Van and Ada, with their almost inexhaustible capacity for sexual indulgence, have their roots in the fabulous passions of the ancient pagan gods and goddesses. The family tree which Nabokov provides for us at the beginning of the novel recalls the elaborate genealogies developed in the ancient myths, particularly of the water deities. Van's prodigious sexual capacity is reminiscent of certain lecherous pagan deities. It is his father, however, who is the greatest of all the libertines, being consumed by his almost inhuman energy. But even in this world of sexual license, many of the characters in Ada are destroyed through their indulgences. Ada's lovers, in particular, all meet wretched ends, save for one, and many of the other characters in the book share similar fates. It would seem that Nabokov is trying to say that casual "love" is just as illusory as it would seem, and that those who pursue it recklessly will ultimately be destroyed by it. Nabokov's exquisite pictorial detail in Ada creates the atmosphere of a Hollywood movie production while constantly pointing to the falseness of the Hollywood view of things, particularly in the realm of sex and love. This is definitely Nabokov at his finest; even the plot must take a backseat to his lush, witty and playful prose. Ada is definitely a novel in which Nabokov's love of complexity and eye for detail reached spellbinding heights.
Rating: 
Summary: You're so Veen
Review: Ada, Vladimir Nabokov's last novel, offers a beguiling world. On a planet that is like Earth but is not, what we think of as the United States is actually the combination of the cultures of Russia, France and England. Although the world is a peaceful one with strange limitations placed on technology, there is enough electricity so that the characters can use telephones, automobiles and motion pictures in the late 1800s. Scientists, including the protagonist, speculate about the possibility of another earth, which is of course our own. Ada tells the story of Van Veen and his "cousin" Ada Veen, who live in the pleasure gardens of this world's aristocracy. Their names, as it happens, reminds one of "VV" (Vladimir Vladimirovich) and "VN" (Vladimir Nabokov). They possess a life of physical pleasure, material wealth and intellectual stimulation, all related in Nabokov's unique prose style. Now more more baroque than ever before, it is imbedded with puns, word-plays and allusions to other writers (including the opening line of Anna Karenina on the first page). This book is a chronicle of their life (or is it?) Unfortunately, this book is not nearly as interesting or even as likeable as it sounds. To put it frankly, the tale it tells is as sterile as Van Veen conveniently turns out to be. If the book has many levels and hidden depths it is not because Nabokov has written a profound story of human experience but because he has presented a giant crossword puzzle. The book is full of trilingual puns, with German occasionally thrown in for good measure, but none of them are funny. There is a chapter devoted to codes, another chapter devoted to playing Scrabble. There are several heavy-handed allusions to Chekhov and a less than successful and less than affectionate parody of his dialogue. There are sneers directed at Freud and modern art and there is a long and almost incomprehensible chapter which parodies Borges' essays on time. The book contains notes by Vivian Darkbloom, who is in fact a character in Lolita and actually an anagram for Nabokov himself. Many of these notes are actually of questionable accuracy. The alternate earth idea is not really as developed as one might hope for, (though the idea that the blacks in the USA are the descendants of African explorers is a nice touch). As the book proceeds the style becomes more obscure and self-involved, all existing only to show Nabokov's facility with language. There is a passage about a chain of aristocratic brothels which starts out promisingly and where the life is slowly squeezed out by the style. There are earlier passages which appear to portray the intensity of childhood in a moving and memorable manner. But only then do we realize that we have read is simply Pseudo-Proust. The sense of detail is there but the emotions they help to convey are not. There are many complex ruminations about fiction and time: it is all a very elaborate game. But it is not clear why anyone should play. Lionel Trilling once commented that Lolita was the only convincing love story of the 20th century. This was an inapt comparison since the whole point of the novel was that one character was too young and the other too mad to appreciate what love really was. Ada is even less of a love story, although it follows the contours of one. The two characters do not show affection or loyalty or sympathy towards each other. They do not make sacrifices for the other, they do not comfort each other, nor are they really necessary for the other's intellectual or moral growth (which may explain why in fact they do not grow; they are more sexually active and intellectually precocious at 12 than they are at 82). All they really share is lust, their (atrociously written) sex is sort of like an incomparably fine champagne. Sometimes they don't want to share that pleasure, sometimes they want to have cognac instead. And if their love means little, they care even less about others. The death of parents, sibling, spouse mean almost nothing to them. The whole point of their alternate earth is that politics, or history, or other people need never intrude on their lives. Through all the passages of their privileged life the message we get is how wonderful it is to be wealthy and handsome and brilliant and not to be bothered by people who are not. Ada, we are informed, is an expert entomologist. Van is also a fine writer and a world-class scientist. He is also an expert acrobat and superb in chess. One the one hand the incest motif is the worst sort of aristocratic snobbery, the sphere where power comes close to antinomianism. But even worse is the monstrous vanity, the suspicion that Ada and Veen are the same person. The motif collapses to masturbation as we fear that Nabokov's main love is himself. While one might argue that the Veens' affairs should not be taken on their own terms one cannot deny Nabokov's snobbish contempt (and secret envy) of superior writers. Recently a character on That 70s show said "If I could run across the beach into my own arms, I would." That is a surprisingly concise summary of Nabokov's longest and most elaborate novel.
Rating: 
Summary: The texture, sadness and joys of memory
Review: Adding to this compilation of 40 reviews seems superfluous, and yet I love Nabokov's "Ada" far too much not to recommend it to any who may not yet have read it. Nabokov actually provides a review of his own in the book's final paragraphs: "Ardis Hall -- the Ardors and Arbors of Ardis -- this is the leitmotiv rippling through "Ada", an ample and delightful chronicle, whose principal part is staged in a dream-bright America -- for are not our childhood memories comparable to Vineland-borne caravelles, indolently encircled by the white birds of dreams? "Not the least adornment of the chronicle is the delicacy of pictorial detail: a latticed gallery; a painted ceiling; a pretty plaything stranded among the forget-me-nots of a brook; butterflies and butterfly orchids in the margin of the romance; a misty view descried from marble steps; a doe in gaze in the ancestral parks; and much, much more." It's a wonder how powerfully "Ada" connects with readers, since Nabokov seemingly makes no concessions to them and anchors the book so strongly in the unique attributes of his own biography. Drawing heavily on English, Russian and French and employing a complexity of exposition, Nabokov frustrates efforts for a quick or casual reading. Yet his art serves to create a psychological displacement and opens a doorway through which the reader can explore the texture, the sadness and joys of remembrance. This is the point I would stress, since the book's characters and plot are nicely summarized in other reviews you'll find here. Memories. I recall a first, startling encounter with eight improbable chapters of "Ada" (the night of the Burning Barn!) in the April, 1969 issue of Playboy magazine. Over 35 years, I've enjoyed perhaps six re-readings of the book, with each reading uncovering new depths of the chronicle and each leaving memories of its own. This month, I took "Ada" with me on a business trip to Shanghai. The physical and temporal displacement of the trans-Pacific flight complemented the book's style perfectly. I read the book, literally, from a new place. And that Sunday found me at ease in the midst of my bustling Shanghai hotel's brunch -- sipping champagne and slowly, very slowly, working my way through the book's now familiar prose. In that antiterra, Van Veen may have joined me for a bit. You'll have guessed this is a favorite book. I particularly recommend to you the Vintage addition of "Ada" with its helpful notes and because it is also the basis for the references in Brian Boyd's "Nabokov's Ada" -- should you eventually wish to compare your reading with that of someone who has studied it deeply. Please buy and read Nabokov's "Ada" for the memories -- and much, much more
Rating:
Summary: I finished reading this in August...
Review: and I'm just getting to a point where I'm detached enough from the reading of this novel to comment on it. I will never forget the first half of this novel, with its riveting imagery, beautiful descriptions, and bizarre characters. Only Nabokov can make incest seem natural and almost acceptable. Once Ada and Van got older, I cared less about them. Even though Nabokov wants us to despise them to a certain point, the fact that they are made so despicable made it tougher to slog through the second half, especially that "philosophical treatise on time and space" (as the back cover blurb phrased it) which tantalized me but ultimately shut my limited mind out. If you haven 't read it yet, I recommend the following--- DO NOT read this novel until you have immersed yourself in Nabokov's earlier work for a long time. He alludes quite often to characters from earlier novels of his (much like Joyce did in Ulysses). This novel seems to be a summation / recapitulation of Nabokov's life's work. Don't start here and work your way backwards - if you are like me, you'll be frustrated.
Rating:
Summary: Ongoing delight
Review: Be warned, this will not be an intellectual, rigorous review, just a tribute. I read this book first when I was seventeen, and I recently turned forty-six. There are very few things I loved passionately at seventeen and still love now, but this book is one of them: the heaven of the senses and the intellect that I would love to slip into and live in forever, moral ambiguities and incest and all. When I first read it, I was too young to realize that the reader is not meant to love the Veens as I did, but then again this book wasn't written for feverish, frantically bored little seventeen-year-olds. I think the reader is meant, in fact, to fall in love with Ada and Van, then to realize the damage in their wake and become their critic...and finally understand that anything exquisite and transcendent will be paid for - perhaps by the person who gets to experience it, perhaps by someone else. The book gets at this and other hidden, undiscussed moral laws that lurk behind kneejerk notions of sin, punishment, and accountability. Really, this is a novel that has something for everyone, whether his or her stage of life is Innocence, Experience, or any point between. Ada is surreal and hyperreal...it's like some places which you can inhabit for decades and just keep discovering new beauties, new perils, new complexities in your ongoing contemplation. I don't think it is better than Lolita or Pale Fire, but it's more pleasurable; Lolita is replete with moral outrages, and with monstrousness that has horrible, fully-played-out consequences, and Pale Fire is a bottomless well of sadness and believable grief. (Pale Fire is one of the few books that ever did/still do make me cry. For all its fantastic veneer, it is about no-escape, no-reprieve loss; the kind of severance that happens in real lives and has no transcendent playout, no redemption, and often no real comprehension from others: awfulness that people live with as long as their consciousness extends after the event.) Ada is the one I dip into when I come home clenching my jaw after some particularly hypertensive workday. I put Ada in a special elite class with The Silmarillion and the poems of Sylvia Plath: literature that enhances my experience over time and keeps me ever-aware of what human talent can produce.
Rating:
Summary: its the language
Review: I keep wondering why I don't finish most contemporary novels and just fizzle out half way through. I've decided it's the lack of live language. However, Nabokov's Ada brings me back to what writing can be. Ada is "poerotic" both in subject and in form. The very language is copulatory, rich with multilingual puns and references, and Nabokov's Shakespearean vocabulary seems to have an element of chutzpah that says: "so you think because I'm Russian I can't write in English. Watch me." He has also proven himself in French and German, and is the most ambilingual writer I know. The language of Ada is bracing and invigorating. What relief after so much postmodern been-there-done-thatness. Bakhtin wrote that the novel is "unfinalizable," meaning that it continues to accumulate meanings beyond what the author imagined. Well: few people have, on less than two readings of Ada, even scratched the surface of the original. Give yourself and injection of delight. Read this now 36 year old book. It will make you glad to be alive.
Rating:
Summary: Difficult, Wonderful, Love Story
Review: I loved this book; in fact, now I am going to read two of the critical books about it. At its very heart, it is a love story, yes, despite the incest, taken care of by Van's sterility. Nabokov's language has always just blown me away. There are breathtaking passages in "Lolita", and no less so here. ". . . leaving their tiger-marks on the drapery of dreams. . ", page 253. It is not, granted, for the faint of heart, but oh so rewarding. I do agree that the chapter on Time is unpleasant, but don't you think that that is just what Nabokov intended it to be, the passage of seventeen years without Ada? The book, of course, is about Van, not Ada, and his lifelong (83 years!) obsession with and love of her. Nabakov very neatly separates sex and love, the two not necessarily being tied together in the way we Americans like to think, at least in our professed vanities. This is a master of prose, at the top of his game. Worth rereading. At heart, far more romantic (stripped of all the side bars) than many a modern love story.
Rating:
Summary: BYOM - Bring your own morals
Review: My attitude towards the real nature of Ada has changed with time and "distance" from my original reading. When I first read it, I was seduced by the novel's fictional "authors" Ada and Van Veen. On the surface it is the romantic and dashing story of two incestuous lovers, whose love overcame all obstacles. Ada and Van, who write their own story, are far from objective portrayers of their own story, polishing to a sheen their own virtues and talents, while almost obscuring their moral depravity and cruelty. Those who fall by the wayside, are written off by the couple, and made to play bit parts supporting their "grand romance". Coming back to the novel ten years later, I can see why Nabokov said "I despise Van Veen",the novel's "hero". In fact, the Veens are much subtler Humberts, but much more effective. While few readers would gush about the romantic Humbert, it is easy to brush of Van and Ada's faults,and "buy in" to their interpretations of their lives. Now, with maturity, I see that Nabokov presented me with a story of moral depravity, daring me to find the true story behind the Veens'gloss,and to use my independent moral judgement. In his "Strong Opinions" Nabokov suggested that future generations may come tounderstand him as a fierce moralist. This is not easy to see, because most of his narrators are in fact depraved. In Lolita, King Queen Knave, Ada, and Pale Fire, this is very much the case. Nabokov was a moralist in the negative sense. He typically showed the immoral, and assumed that his readers would draw the appropriate conclusions. Like an artist who charcoals a canvas, and draws with an eraser. He was probably amused that leftist literary types in America liked Lolita BECAUSE of Humbert's depravity, and felt more disdain for the American motels and roadside diners described in the novel than they did for Humbert's actions. The novel gets only four stars, because I didn't like it as much as Pale Fire or Invitation to A Beheading. The novel was unnecessarily difficult, which was of course part of the purpose of the Veens, but Nabokov created them, so he still gets some blame. For moralistic books I much prefer a positive rather than a negative presentation, in the way that Ayn Rand presents morality in The Fountainhead, or Atlas Shrugged.
Rating:
Summary: I dreamed I read this novel
Review: Nabokov has written novels with better plots, better word-play and puzzles, more acute looks into single characters, but Ada brings it all together in an attenuated amalgam of all things Nabokov. The overall impression is as of watching an epic movie through a gauze curtain on a breezy day. Hints of vivid scenes and characters show through occasionally, but are obscured by a veil of history, language, and diversions. This book belongs in another era, but still challenges the concepts with which we define modernity.
This was easily the most difficult of his books that I've read, and is second in my mind only to Pale Fire. But where Pale Fire only hints at alternate reality and history, Ada plunges in. Where Lolita ultimately exposes the sticky-sweet banality of the nymphette obsession, Ada's poignant and heart-breaking love story challenges our assumptions of propriety. Nabokov seamlessly blends intellectual depth and playfulness with the pure physicality of the human body and its needs and desires.
Rating:
Summary: amazing. and difficult.
Review: this book is a postmodern masterpiece. while reading this, i was constantly aware of the history that went into this work. from the superficial references to writers and styles, to the adoption of styles, and the very subtle placement of the action of mr. nabokov writing this very book, it's thick and warm. time exists in this book, but i think it is too often overlooked what it really means in this context, too often seen as a purely narrative device (which it is, in part). there's a brilliant consistency between the characters actions, the actions of the book, and the actions of the book with in a history. nabokov has fully exploited his audiences associations with modes of literature, utilizing the romantic fairytale and a characteristic formality, textbook attention to detail, and blending it with a narratively driven intimacy (through timelessy futuristic sidenotes) which echoes his own act of writing the novel and his own fears, doubts, hesitations, triumphs. enough though, stop reading my scatterbrained thoughts and read the book.
(oh one more thing, this novel demands an extreme level of participation from the viewer, akin to living inside a video installation).
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