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May 20, 2008

Karen rated it:

Oh man, what can I say about this book? Just that I could probably reread Ada, and only Ada, for the rest of my life and still feel satisfied. For the most part, I read this book the way I usually read the first time around - that is, superficially, just trying to make general sense of what's going on and enjoying the sexy parts (of which there are many) - but on the few occasions that I sat down and made an effort to decipher the puns and allusions, things just started to click into place, and More...

1 comment like (20 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Aloysius rated it:

Most people give accolades to Nabokov for simply being Nabokov, and I have to admit, I'm always tempted to fall in with the flock rather than give my real opinion of his books. After all, if I don't like it, it must mean that I don't "get it," and if I don't "get it," it must somehow mean that I'm stupid, right?

Let's start off by admitting that Nabokov's books are hard to "get" and that even those with great intelligence don't derive everything offered More...

2 comments like (12 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

Madeline rated it:

Thoughts upon completion-- This was a very interesting book for me. To elaborate on the narration observation I mentioned earlier, it seems that Nabokov has a penchant for narrating his novels in a sort of...second-degree sort of way? Or perhaps you could say it's very direct. I have a hard time assigning an exact term to what's happening, so here are some examples of what I mean. In Lolita, for example, which I'm sure many of you have read, the actual story is a confession written by Humbert Hu More...

0 comments like (6 people liked it)

Oct 14, 2011

Julia rated it:

Perfeitamente escrito. Ada or Ardor (traduzido como Ada ou o Ardor por Jório Dauster) é conhecido como o livro mais ambicioso de Nabokov, e se passa em um planeta chamado Anti-Terra, em que se fala inglês, francês e russo nos Estados Unidos e os telefones são movidos à água. Nesse mundo, os psiquiatras estudam o mítico planeta Terra, com o qual os loucos alucinam depois que a eletricidade foi proibida. E também dois jovens privilegiados passam alguns verões na Mansão de Ardis, e descobrem que sã More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Dec 05, 2007

Pjb rated it:

I often have plot-driven, almost cinematic, dreams. Imagine that I told you that a while back I had a dream about this world called "Anti-Terra" that was basically like this world, but somehow...not. And that this dream was about (well, not really about, but revolved around) a brother and sister who had an incestuous love for one another, but not in a way that was really repulsive. And this dream tracked the various characters through time and space in that disjointed, foggy way of More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Nov 20, 2007

Summer rated it:

Oh man, sometimes goodreads really weirds me out, like just now when I read all of these really well-written slams or relative-slams of this book. This book to me is so beautiful and lush and rich. I pick it up all the time and read favorite pages or phrases over again; it makes me feel full. It's romantic and strange. The tedium of parts of it just reminds me of the tedium of real-life. I fucking love the shit out of this book, y'all.

1 comment like (12 people liked it)

May 05, 2009

Geoff rated it:

Stylistically and structurally, Ada is undoubtedly a masterpiece. Isn't that the joy of reading Nabokov anyway, the joy of watching a master at work? The seeming ease of his complicated prose, the assimilation of polyglot, portmonteau words, annagrammitic tricks, haute vocabulary, allusion, and labyrinthine sentences, is really a wonder. The first 200 or so pages of this book are absolutely hypnotizing. Ada is a parody of the modern novel, from Anna Karenina to Lolita, and its most obvious p More...

11 comments like (8 people liked it)

Nov 23, 2010

Manny rated it:

Suppose things had worked out better for Humbert Humbert. Suppose he'd gone to jail for a while but hadn't had a heart attack there, and suppose Lolita hadn't died while still a teenager, giving birth to a stillborn child. Suppose instead that they'd both survived, had various sordid adventures, and then miraculously reconnected twenty years later, at which point they suddenly realised that they had some something beautiful and unique together. And suppose that Humbert actually wrote his memoirs More...

0 comments like (10 people liked it)

Sep 28, 2007

Jess rated it:

I liked this book despite the fact that I would say 65% of the time I did not know what was going on in it. Liberally peppered with phrases, sentences, and even entire paragraphs/letters in either French or Russian and for the most part devoid of any translation made it difficult for me. Also, the arcane and pedantic tangents about lepidoptery and whatever brand of psychology that Van thought he was involved in really broke up the narrative. But, when the writing unconvoluted itself from its mul More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Sep 17, 2007

Nabil added it

Incredible...for a couple of months while and after I read this book, I thought I was going to be a writer, because I couldn't think of any other way of dealing with the genius displayed in its pages than to emulate/compete with it. Nabokov pries me open, because he legitimizes a personality and attitude to life completely different from my own. He forces me to awareness of the distinction between the intelligent and the moral. With Van he proved that there was nothing incoherent about being hap More...

1 comment like

Nov 04, 2011

Sarah rated it:

"Her long straight hair that seemed of a uniform bluish-black in the shade now revealed, in the gem-like sun, strains of deep auburn alternating with dark amber in lanky strands which clothed her hollowed cheek or were gracefully cleft by her raised ivory shoulder. The texture, gloss and odor of those brown silks had once inflamed his senses at the very beginning of that fateful summer, and continued to act upon him, strongly and poignantly, long after his young excitement had found in her More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Feb 07, 2010

Alan rated it:

I'm always a bit reluctant to essay a review of a recognized work of literature—any book, that is, about which other whole book-length analyses have been written—since my impressions are almost certainly going to be more facile and shallow in comparison. And, too, my first attempt, years ago, to read Ada ended just a few pages in (so that "read count" is, I'm afraid, a matter of inaccurate rounding).

I was, I'm sure, very much at fault that time; I was much too young and far More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Oct 11, 2009

Akiva rated it:

This is a trashy novel about the sex lives of idle aristocrats. However, it is by Nabokov and so it is an exquisite trashy novel about the sex lives of idle aristocrats. The prose is beautiful. The word play is delightful. The characters, sadly, are sort of tedious. The narrator, of course, is unreliable.

This book is weird. It is set in an alternate history earth whose geopolitics seem specifically set up so that the characters can make lots of triple language puns that cross Russian More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Aug 25, 2010

Karen rated it:

The love and time and the impossibility of return in Ada and the love and time and the impossibility of return in Ignorance are blending in my consciousness… I wanted to say like the condensed milk and the espresso in a Vietnamese coffee, after one swirl of the spoon, but it’s more like the coffee and the Kahlua in a Kahlua-and-coffee, after one swirl of the spoon.

The traits of characters in one book I take for granted and transpose onto the characters in the other, willy-nilly, be More...

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Feb 09, 2010

Logan rated it:

Not for the light-hearted, but then again I doubt this will be your first taste of Nabokoviana. It is his longest book, and quite convoluted. It is at once an alternate history and a love story, as usual a forbidden love story (love conquers all!). Beautifully written, deeply and lovingly described, and well worth needing on occasion to peek at the appendix to decipher some foreign languages. Yes, VN had an ego, and throws in your face the fact that he was fluent in Russian, French and English, More...

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Aug 18, 2009

Krystle rated it:

Ada, or Ardor takes place on an alternate world called "Antiterra" which has a lot of similarities to our own. This novel follows Van and Ada through the trials and tribulations of their incestuous relationship - first believing they are cousins, only to find out later that they are, in fact, brother and sister. This is one of the last books Nabokov published, and is his longest. Clocking in at 586 pages. I prefer the Vintage prints, they have the nicest covers.

The novel ha More...

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Dec 25, 2010

Asif rated it:

To write a review of Ada is almost impossible except to say that it is the book in which Nabokov, the greatest prose stylist in English, uses his mastery of the language and his great knowledge of European literary history to his greatest extent and evidently enjoys himself! The whole book is choc-a-bloc with word-play, literary puzzles, allusions to other works, hidden quotations, alliteration, streams of consciousness, history, science fiction, dollops of French, helpings of Russian, laces of More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jul 30, 2011

Kezia rated it:

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 too - Ada, the character, is a continental sophisticate, Lolita a crass American. The reason Lolita is the more popular and celebrated of the two novels is that while it also at its surface is More...

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Jan 24, 2012

Lindsay rated it:

This is one of those books that came in sideways and blindsided me with adoration. I loved it. I expected to LIKE it. I expected a level (rather high level, actually) of deviancy, I expected sex, and I expected overly verbose, didactic passages that weaved between plot. All of that was present, and how. But, beyond that I found that I really cared about these characters, necessary and ancillary, despite all their glaring flaws. In brief, since a description of this novel is nearly impossible in More...

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Dec 05, 2011

Jillian rated it:

I couldn't stand this. It read like unintelligible science-fiction and I only made it to chapter four because I loved Lolita and a friend said it was her favorite book.

Granted, I have a low tolerance for most fiction that falls under magical realism, sci-fi, or is so confusing that it needs a flow chart to keep the characters straight. There are so many great books I have yet to read that I don't have time for exasperating tomes that I can't understand.

Most of the review More...

0 comments like

Aug 04, 2010

Emily rated it:

I can't believe it actually took me so little to finish this one... I borrowed it from the library and I was afraid I wouldn't finish on time to return it!

So... too many things to comment here. And, at the same time, I don't know exactly what to say. Really complex, I've surely missed lots of puns and references (besides, i read a crappy Spanish translation with lots of typos), but still, the main storyline was intelligent, provocative and beautiful. Two cousins who turn out to be half More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

May 24, 2011

Jim rated it:

I have come to the realization that reading a Nabokov book could be a lot like reading a Tom Clancy book. In both you are reading about a world very similar to the one you think you know - but the author has such a weird and monomaniacal view of it that it seems utterly bizarre.

Clancy and Nabokov excel in wrapping the plot in extraneous information that you need an encyclopedia or fingertip internet access to unravel. With Nabokov you get botanical terms, whole French and Russian sen More...

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Aug 26, 2011

The Brunette Bibliophile rated it:

http://thebrunettebibliophile.blogspot.c...

A few days ago I finished Nabokov's longest novel, Ada, or Ardor. Full disclosure: I am, thus far, a Nabokov fan. Despite his preoccupation with "budding nymphettes," (and by preoccupation, I mean full blown obsession) his prose is positively beautiful, rife with lyricism. A joy to read, even when the story can't really be described as such. Ava, or Ardor follows the life and loves of one Van Veen, as, at the tender age of fifte More...

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Jan 06, 2008

Kim rated it:

I have read this book several times and will read it again. No one can get inside me like Nabokov; though Pale Fire was my first love of his it may be Ada that holds the seat of honor in the library of my heart. Nabokov was the one who taught me how to use words (blame the student, not the teacher for my faults.)

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Nov 13, 2010

Peter rated it:

To me, this is a shade better than Lolita. The opening is baffling and can be intimidating for that reason. I've read this book many many times -- my copy is bound together with packing tape because the paper cover is disintegrating -- and I still don't entirely understand the phrasing of some of those sentences in the opening chapters. Best plan, perhaps, is to get a plot synopsis from wikipedia or something before you embark. You know, just in case. Once you've got a handle on what's happening More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Nov 28, 2011

Kata rated it:

Finished with my first Nabokov novel. Beautiful entomologist Ada! Nabokov, if you know literature well, is famous for his novel, Lolita. His writing is a mix of Proust and Tolstoy combined. He elaborately weaves French with Russian blending the provocative emotions regarding lust and love in the waxing and waning youth of his characters. The subject of incest is controversial, but it lays delicately in the background demanding your focus on the era, the pathology of falling in love and the tumul More...

2 comments like

Nov 25, 2010

Kirk rated it:

I was disappointed with this work. 590 pages of masturbatory prose more gratifying for the author delighting in puns and alliteration than for the reader: "oceans of lotions and streams of creams." "Ada among the ardors and arbors of Ardis." Comical, yes, but by no means a justification for such a long work. I will say that Nabokov is just as, if not more, poetic than Garcia-Marquez in his descriptions of lovemaking and other biological functions. If you don't read carefu More...

0 comments like

Jul 27, 2011

Matthew rated it:

"The passing of time and all of its crimes is making me sad again," as Morrissey more succinctly put it. Ada is occasionally delightful, often annoying, and sometimes highly unlikeable, in desperate need of editorial control. For such a repetitive novel, it does leave a strangely powerful impression, leaving the reader to reflect on the nature of beauty, appearance, and desire, the fragile relationship between reality and fantasy and what lies between, and the consequences, intended an More...

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Aug 13, 2010

courtney rated it:

i LOVE vladimar nabakov. he's one of the reasons i look foward to aging because i think as i revisit his works i will inevitably gather something new to cherish in each line. ada or ardor is one of those books, and while it's been a few years since i read it, like a fine wine i shall watch it age and eagerly devour it again and again. forbidden love! a false reality! plus, nabakov's expert wordplay paints a picture of an imagined universe too beautiful to be real. allegedly, even the margi More...

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Jul 02, 2009

Laura rated it:

It took me four tries to get my footing with the first seven or eight chapters (plus using Ada Online for help with references, plus I took a short break to read Nabokov's translation of Eugene Onegin), but by the fourth read, the first section was intensely, overwhelmingly vivid and pure pleasure. The middle was depraved and horrifying. I don't know exactly what to make of the end (I skimmed most of the Texture of Time part, but I plan on re-reading), though it was a relief the way things wound More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

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