Word: ada
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...Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, Nabokov's latest novel, is already a bestseller. Nabokov's peculiar fascination ?and enduring power?escapes conventional measurement, but by any standard, the range and volume of his work in two languages is prodigious. It includes 15 novels (nine Russian, six English) and translations of other writers' work. His fiction differs from most novels in much the same way that a poem differs from a political treatise. One is an end in itself. The other, however intricate and elegant, is a means to an end. In a classic sneer...
Nabokov's truths, and Ada, will certainly unhouse many readers from the comfort of their passive reading habits...
...easy entry on the boy-meets-girl plot level, Nabokov indulges in a tale about Van Veen and his half sister Ada Veen. They fall in love at the respective ages of 14 and twelve and begin an energetic sex life in the nooks and dells of the family's rural estate. Over the years, their floating orgy suffers prolonged periods of inactivity. In their old age, however, Van and Ada reunite and mate?now in a highly figurative way?melding into an unbeing that Nabokov calls Vaniada. Licensed allusion hunters will find that Vanadis is an epithet for Freya...
Nabokov sums up these amorous doings in a mock dust-jacket blurb that closes Ada by describing only the book's most superficial aspects. Long before he gets around to that, though, a suspicion has set in that the surface love story is as different from the real Ada as a bicycle reflector is from a faceted ruby. More even than Lolita and Pale Fire, Ada is studded with assaults and asides directed at literary forms, figures and fashions. Along with its masquerade...
...Ada cannot rightfully be separated from its language, from the chaos of literary allusions, the geographical and genealogical data. But its glory rises from the fragrance of things that have been lost but cannot be forgotten. Central to its timelessness is the anachronistic world of Ada and Van's youth. Known as Antiterra, it is physically like a mixture of pastoral 19th century Russia and Canada and the modern...