Vladimir Nabokov: Ada or Ardor (I Love Book Club #4, starts 26 September)

A three-week schedule seems like the thing. We'll discuss:

• Part I (pages 1-253) from Monday 26 September
• Part II (pages 255-349) from Monday 3 October
• Parts III, IV and V (351-461) from Monday 10 October

Who's in?

Let me see...

OK, I'm in

I'd like to read the book
but I don't think I can make the time, at this point, slow reader that I am
it is improbable that I could read this book in 3 weeks
also, the last time I attempted to contribute extensively to the ILB online book club, many of my contributions were heavily disparaged
thus, I'm not sure it would be an especially productive idea
for me to do it, even if I could.

I have to try again but otherwise this is one of the worst novels ever written by a major writer.

A bold post that only serves to intrigue me further. I'm in.

I'm in!

the last time I attempted to contribute extensively to the ILB online book club, many of my contributions were heavily disparaged

For what it's worth, pinefox, I found your contributions fascinating and thoughtful

i wish only to intrigue when i say that as far as i could tell all three times i tried it this book is spectacularly bad. looking forward to this thread tho.

Can anyone do this? I think I'd like to. I love Nabokov but Alfred isn't making this sound too appealing. That said, I think I'm in!

x-post Oh wait, really? I have trouble finishing bad books. Maybe this isn't the best one for me to attempt as a first time participant. If I don't like something I can't make myself finish it, I just abandon it instead. :/

I'm hopeful this book
Is not as bad as its reputation but hey, I went and saw The Capeman on Broadway so what do I know?

Also hoping that the pinefox reconsiders

In any case, I am looking forward to the notes by Vivian Darkbloom.

The good thing is no one else has been able to parody Nabokov as well as Nabokov did.

Based on skimming the first few chapters, he shouldn't have been throwing stones at Joyce for writing Finnegans Wake

Speaking of which: the pinefox, have you read The House of Ulysses, by Julián Ríos?

yeah what the fuck is up with this book honestly

this was the first nabokov i ever read and i expressed embarrassing opinions about nabokov for like a year afterward

would you like me to quote them

we all have our early lapses

that'sh ash bad as lishtening to the beatlesh without earmuffsh

Wait were you guys college drinking buddies?

post-college drinking buddies

alfred was post- and i was pre-

now he's still post and god knows what i am

didn't know you guys were bros

i'd participate in this if we could decide on a book everyone hasn't already decided sucks lol

i had it rapturously recommended to me! someone here must rep for it.

i actually had already noticed that u guys were bros! or at least i was highly suspicious

why dont we just read p'nin

I'd love to, especially as I've been wanting to get back into N, but I just don't think I can make the time for Ada at the moment, esp as it's one I've tried and failed to get into several times now, albeit many years ago.

Well Ada was chosen democratically, plus I've already bought the mofo, but I'm a bit troubled by these pre-reviews, I cannot lie.

Ismael, I think it's one that divides opinion. I think it's generally regarded as one of his most difficult, but there are plenty of people who've found it rewarding because of/despite that.

Ada/Ardor is the missus' favourite Nabokov, and Michael Wood makes a good case for it iirc, but I did find it a bit... over-ripe.

I have friends irl who rep for this endlessly so I'm interested but dunno if I'll have the time

the ilx book club obv isn't just about 'good' bks (cf 'the goon squad' lol) so think we should 'suffer' the nab - and who knows, it might be instructive. just keep telling yrself it cld be china bloody melville.

some divided opinion here, i agree with me fwiw:
Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?
Might participate (though I'll be away from internet for much of it) - one hand, Ada can feel a bit of a chore; otoh, there's a lot to knock around in there, could be good talk.

ok let's do this - book club should help me get through it this time, and if I ever flag...

'It cld be china bloody melville'

this book is rad gohl

Ada/Ardor is the missus' favourite Nabokov, and Michael Wood makes a good case for it iirc, but I did find it a bit... over-ripe.
--Stevie T

Adonline right? the forenotes are at or near the top of each chapter's individual page of annotations, so um click on the chapter then click on 'view annotations'. It's sort of a mess that site.

Thanks, I'll try that, although I'll probably try to forge ahead by myself a little before I go over there

hmm I will consider this, always wanted to read it

i'm in, though i've already read it. it's really not THAT bad y'all. though i do think our time would be better spent with pnin or lo or p.f. or even any of the russians.

I'm guessing most here are pretty familiar with lo or pf. Pnin is ... slight?

I like Pnin and want to read more of the Russians. Those three mentioned are all relatively easy to read on your own the first time, even Pale Fire, and don't require external forces to propel you through the way this one seems to.

We read Pnin and Look at the Harlequins! in one of my college lit classes and I enjoyed them both. Not denying their slightness, though.

The quality of Pnin's slightness seems to me to be of the same quality of slightness as the bowl his errant son gave him. Fragile but not without a similar beauty, which I think is one of the obsessions of his work - the memorial and narrative mechanics of beauty. The apparent amiability of it, and perhaps a more naturalistic flavour than other pieces, might make it seem less important, more of a gentle comedy, but I think most Nabokovian elements are there that are in his other works. It's almost as fond in its detailing of Americana as Lolita as well, which is definitely part of the N's later works - that slightly autistic in detail foreign appreciation of the alien.

Most of Nabokov's work is slight beside, say, Thomas Mann (and, boy, would he bristle at the comparison); but his prose and structural ingenuity make the silly style vs substance debate look even sillier.

Aye well my judgment of its slightness more than influenced by the fact I recall little to nothing from my reading of it two years ago - probably more of a comment on my memory than the book tbh. I should reread. More. In general.

No, no, please don't think I was judging you! Slightness is a quality which fascinates me because I've used it as a defense and pejorative (a similar discussion is taking place in the Drive thread).

pnin is my favorite sometimes, otm re "memorial and narrative mechanics of beauty"

"vn's litpinions aren't random though; they're just kinda narrowminded. he dislikes Ideas because he finds them pushy and misshapen (and because he was expelled from eden by a political movement that loved utilitarian writers like chernyshevsky so much it mandated them) and thinks the writer ought to be creating a Convincing Otherworld that Makes The Spine Sob. he's good at seeing through snobbishness around stuff like dr. jekyll and mr. hyde, stuff that's eerie and unplaceably affecting, and he's (quietly) well aware that such stuff, like his own work, gets its power from tinkering with and constructing new permutations of actual conditions under which actual people live their lives -- he's not really a hermit. but he's less good at understanding that since real people really engage earnestly with Ideas all the time, books that do the same thing aren't only a necessary part of the big general ongoing mimesis/exegesis project literature is doing on experience but actually capable of being as affecting, even if not as elegant, as the stuff that uses its characters' ideas mostly as jokes, or lures to doom. even if it doesn't make vn's personal spine sob."

I can imagine Dostoevsky making this argument if he and VN ever met, but then Nabokov would probably make some well-crafted snide comment and Dostoevsky would just stand there and look sad.

Just like in the board description!

i'm a bit 'c'mon' at the world-building, but then he'll roll out some lovely, funny paragraph of invention

She saw giant flying sharks with lateral eyes taking barely one night to carry pilgrims through black ether across an entire continent from dark to shining sea

I liked this.

Yes, I liked that one too.

Six chapters in, good lord, i will be surprised if i finish. "The novel opens like a sack full of exotic frogs, alive with movement and color, each little flash of life slippery and ready to bound off for somewhere unknown", says boyd, i think it opens more like an old drawer jumbled full of random discarded objects, obscure of purpose, unwanted and forgotten.

The allusions seem to be becoming less dense and opaque now the main relationship and setting have been established (no small thanks to boyd's notes tbh) but the level of irrelevant descriptive detail is still overwhelming. This from Van's first visit to Ardis Hall:

On the first floor, a yellow drawing room hung with damask and furnished in what the French once called the Empire style opened into the garden and now, in the late afternoon, was invaded across the threshold by the large leaf shadows of a paulownia tree (named, by an indifferent linguist, explained Ada, after the patronymic, mistaken for a second name or surname of a harmless lady, Anna Pavlovna Romanov, daughter of Pavel, nicknamed Paul-minus-Peter, why she did not know, a cousin of the non-linguist’s master, the botanical Zemski, I’m going to scream, thought Van).

He is not alone. A (very) short while later in the tour he is "intolerably bored". These particular bits of seeming self-reference go uncommented by Boyd.

(well not quite, first bit is commented on as an example of her conversational style, but not as a holographic fragment of the entire novel)

"The novel opens like a sack full of exotic frogs, alive with movement and color, each little flash of life slippery and ready to bound off for somewhere unknown"

did his editor leave this in to flatter Boyd's hard-on for Nabokov?

that's the opening sentence for the worst slash fic ever

we asked gertrude stein if our novels were good and she said they were fine and good and opened like sackfuls of exotic frogs

Think that's on the website, so didn't go through any editor. May be in the print version too, or the print-on-demand version, so maybe not much of an editor either.

haha, dlh. and then Demon Veen punched me in the nose. ada, or nada nada nada

i am not reading this, but i used to really like N. and tried to read 'ada' a long time ago, and found it interminable (not that i got anywhere close to its termination). so this thread looks like a nice vindication to me.

If you can't put a butterfly in a jar
If violence mars your final hour
If you make others feel like jam
Poured on a piece of charbroiled lamb

I have gave up. I think this is the morally stronger decision. One of the final straws was the chapter elaborately detailing the various codes used in letters between the irritating lovers, as though we might be expected to have to decipher some of them, only to be told at the end of the chapter that all such correspondence was destroyed.

"Both sought excitment in books as the best readers always do; both found in many renowned works pretentiousness, tedium, and facile misinformation." (A cheap shot perhaps, but hard to imagine that not being written with a winking recognition of the book's possible reception.)

Funnily enough, Embassytown by China Mieville has just come through from the library, so I'll have a chance to test Ward Fowler's asseveration upthread. So far Ada's coming out on top, but Embassytown isn't as bad as The City and The City so it's all to play for.

i found a copy of this second-hand, and almost bought it so i could join in, but then i realised it was priced at £7.50, which seemed too much

mainly because i know i have a copy somewhere that i bought for 20p ten years ago, and i'm damned if i'll let that investment slide

h8 books

do not read if you hate van.

how can anyone hate van when he does such perfectly formed poos?

my copy of Ada is also second-hand, and certain passages have been underlined with various different highlighter pens. this is the first, in pink:

...because a gap of up to a hundred years one way or another existed between the two earths; a gap marked by a bizarre confusion of directional signs at the crossroads of passing time with not all the no-longers of one world corresponding to the not-yets of the other.

Take that right there. I object to "bizarre", and to "no-longers" vs. "not-yets" (leave that to Barth), and to putting "all" in italics (leave that to Salinger).

"I loathe Van Veen." -- VN

Fizzles, I thought you liked Mieville; it's amusing to find that you apparently don't.

Well, no. Not from what I've read. It's a shame because I feel that he's doing all sorts of things I should like - genre experimentation, and trying to describe realms that don't fit easily into our sensory model of reality. I came to the conclusion that he's not a very good writer.

Some of the things that are difficult about Ada are also difficult in Embassytown - too much obscure detail. Both are creating prismatically alternate worlds - that is to say they're worlds that exist at a tangent to this one rather than being truly 'alternate' or futuristic. And neither wants to explain the detail that they've built these worlds with so you this continual unexplained and alienating detail. That's not necessarily a problem, I think, A Clockwork Orange did some similar extraordinarily well. But generally it's something extremely difficult to do. When it doesn't work it feels like your wading through all this morass of detail without any reward, or further understanding. In fact the works become boring. Nabokov is good at it, Mieville is often dreadfully facile (aliens wear 'augments' and 'tec' - what's the point of that? needless jargonising amidst the dull, plodding prose).

There are some opposite problems. Nothing absolutely nothing has happened in about a third of Embassytown so far. In Ada it can feel like nothing much is happening, but quite a lot is, at different levels, and not necessarily in traditional narrative senses. But in fact the effect is often the same, weighed down in detail, and not going anywhere fast.

Ada doesn't work in a big way. Embassytown in a dull way. So I prefer Ada.

your wading you're wading

put on my wading shoes
and I boarded the pwane

needless jargonising

but ... but ... science fiction!

i actually enjoyed the sections of embassytown in which nothing happened 2-3x more than i did those parts in which things happened; those parts i could have done without.

but ... but ... science fiction!

I know, I know. It's such a good part of what I like about speculative fiction - having fun with future invention on a level of language and terminology. Also part of the essential defamiliarisation process. And yet, somehow the way Mieville does it seems, well, a bit rubbish. Not having enough fun, or having too much. I was trying to work it out, and I felt the way he mixed personal observation and memory with the unfamiliar was perhaps its failing. Haven't got it on me, but it's something like 'I watched the bio-therms quiver in their production of the v-watt emanations and remembered how once a miab fubbled through the rift in the quantic chthon-temp axis' = emotional content 0 because I don't have a fucking clue what you're on about. You can't fill out the character with this. As pure third-person description, it might work, have a poetic feel to it. I rejigged some of the sentences with the personal element, and they did seem to read a lot better. He was crap at characters in The City and The City tho, so not sure it's a strong suit.

To try and keep this on Ada, I admit the slight science-fiction elements, as in Bend Sinister when I read, slightly surprised me. I know that it can be construed differently to science fiction - he's always created worlds constructed out of unusual things, out of sounds and colours (V and violet) and chess moves and light, but the use of the word Terra and some of the steampunkish technological innovations seem like a Nabokovian engagement with science fiction. I was wondering if Nabokov students/fans knew any more about this - his attitudes towards or any references to SF w/r/t Ada?

"I loathe science fiction with its gals and goons, suspense and suspensories"

This is quite interesting: http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/swanson5art.htm

Perfect, Stevie, thank you!

I've been getting back into this. After reading China Mieville, it should be understood. I'ma write up my notes from today:

Couple of older bits - "old masters and young mistresses". Dislike this sort of double-handed bollocks. Purely an æsthetic thing.

Really liked Aqua's descent into madness and death. Thought the whole thing about dripping water imitating recently heard conversations and the loss of meaning from the external world was touching, realistic and sympathetic. The question for me comes with the style - a general problem for me with Ada. So there's a lot of monozygotic playfulness, cleaving sounds adjacently to emphasise what I presume to be Ada's style. But it's dreadful to read, I think.

The beginning of when Van goes to Ladore/Ardis and he arrives at the station expecting in his imagination a horse, but there's nothing, so a chance trap in the crease of time gives him a lift to his destination. Then when he gets there 'his horse' is taken off him. This sort of game is regular in VN but here it's pretty confusing. So the suggestion is that all of this is a clear literary indication that it's all taking place within the imagination of Ada and Van? Time will be creased. In something like The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, this sort of thing is clearly enough part of the structure for it not to be a problem. Here it's so confusing it's meaningless.

Later, Minerva asks, as Van and Ada go up the stairs, what I think is an excellent question. Why do stairs creak so desperately when children go up them? From my own experience, I'm assuming the answer is because they know how important children's steps are, and how indifferent they can be to adults' steps. Children's steps are important because they are frequently secret, sneaking past parents. Stairs care less about adults - their steps tend to be ratified. I assume this is what allows Minerva's following prophetic questions and fear about what they may be up to.

I suspect that the use of the word 'googled' on p86 of my edition has been noted before, in fact i seem to remember having seen it mentioned, but it still gave a little smirk of pleasure in a (not at all) SF book,

I'd read for a bit, then needed a wander round the library to have break, browse the shelves. I came across the Chronology division, although only because I'd been trying to find the Chronogram section, and I picked up a book by Stephen Jay Gould - Questioning the Millennium. He talks in his introduction of "the interaction of undeniable reality and the flexibility of human interpretation. Some things in nature just are - even though we can parse and interpret such real items in wildly various ways. A lion is a lion is a lion - and lions are more closely tied by genealogy to tigers than earthworms."

I felt this was fundamentally disagreeing with VN's æsethetic approach in Ada. A lion is never just a lion, but what sounds like a lion, what heraldic leonic aspects it can have - to quote from Ada 'Not yet knowing that reality and natural science are synonymous in the terms of this, and only this, dream.'. Ada exists in a world where N's dreams of nature, which are fundamentally taxonomic ('if you don't know the name of that tree you will never be a writer'), are the only reality.

Sentences like 'Remembrance, like Rembrandt, is dark but festive' is a clear indication of the mnemonic style VN has. This is like Richard of York Gave Battle In Vane [sic]. The associative mnemonic aspect of Ada is in overdrive. It's also why for me this novel is one of the least successful of his I've read. It's too much. Who f'ing cares about your enormous mythological mnemos. In your lectures on literature you've spoken about the need to draw out family trees and geographical images of classic books. But that shouldn't be a requirement of a book not yet considered classic. Nevertheless it is in Ada.

I liked the phrase 'If people remembered the same they would be different people'. This seems important to VN.

Oh and I see I've lifted a line from Peter Porter, which I read in the LRB about 'The abstract hell of memory', which I felt was reflected interestingly in Ada. I've left an instruction to myself to find the bit that it relates to, but I can't be arsed right now. Will do tomorrow.

that bit about the "crease in time" confused me too.

Who f'ing cares about your enormous mythological mnemos

Indeed. I picked it up tonight, two full weeks after my gallop through pt I, to find that I had little memory of who was what and why they knew who. Thus liberated, to my surprise I found myself enjoying it hugely. Allowing the stream to flow lyrically, the odd snippet snagging here and there, is the way to go here I feel. It works now almost as a series of barely-connected short stories - a shaggy-dog tale of the rise and fall of a global chain of brothels, staffed by lower orders and nobility alike, was particularly pleasing - in the knowledge that no memory of what has happened or will happen a part or a paragraph hence is required.

Which is to say the enormous myth can get to; the moment has something, and didn't really need the lunatic framework.

God, I wrote that when a bit pissed. Yep, agree with you IK about reading it lyrically and not worrying too much about the structure. Except I find it difficult not to worry about the hints at underlying structure. That's for several reasons I think. One is that in one of my favourite novels by him - The Real Life of Sebastian Knight following the occurrences of the colour violet informs the main narrative in a way different if they haven't been followed - even seems to offer up a possible alternative conclusion. This is tied in for me with what VN clearly expects of his readers - careful awareness of family trees, associations of each character, places, times of year, etc etc. I think the levels of this expectation become unreasonable in Ada, but I think if you did have the patience or the will to do this, you'd probably find extra rewards in the book. Whether this is just going back and collecting the hidden diamonds in a computer game or whether it's crucial to levelling up is something I'm not at all sure about. Also, at some level (god knows which or where that level is) Ada seems to be about mnemoses (by which I mean memory associating on the basis of colours and sounds) colliding, and the narrative games you can play, and the narrative confusion you cause, when they do.

Just want to unpick that comment about the stairs - Why do stairs crease so desperately when two children go up them? It's a great line, that immediately throws the reader back into their own experience of trying to sneak upstairs, and through sympathetic identification opens up thoughts of the secret worlds that children carry within them. Minerva's next question seems like a non-sequitur - "After all, we were twin sisters; everybody knows that", but shows she has divined, (or Van/Ada believes she has divined, if you want to play that game) their secret world.

The crease in time thing - and Van's dream of being met by a horse, then relinquishing his dreamt horse at the house - usually seem signs in VN that a separate narrative is taking place (a bit like the separate one of the violets in TRLoSK), this narrative, or the symbols of this hidden world will usually undermine and tease the reader who is trying to follow the more traditional realist and linear. It lends VN's novels a good deal of their mandarin irony, I think. Here I found it just confusing. Hence also, presumably, Van and Ada's initial tumble on the night of the Burning Barn, which is strongly hinted the next day not to have taken place, and the shadow of the possibility (not allowed by Van/Ada the narrator) that it was a tumble with the serving girl is put suggested. Again, I think this sort of thing works better when they are more clearly signalled as perversions the narrative voice introduces - it's far clearer when Kinbote or Pnin is doing such a thing, either within the narrative or as a narrative voice. One of the reasons I like Pnin so much is that his misunderstandings are seen to be consequent upon kindness or dignity or confusion, rather than mendacity or idiocy.

That Peter Porter quote about the 'abstract hell of memory' reminded me of 'Her disintegration went down a shaft of phases, every one more racking than the last; for the human brain can become the best torture house of all those that it has invented, established and used in millions of years, in millions of lands, on millions of howling creatures'

Quick word about 'monozygotic style' too - I meant all that 'two tulip trees' 'scratch and scratch sumptuously (canteen cant)' stuff that goes on in what I take to be Ada's narrative voice, splitting sounds over and over again. It may be the consequence of an experiment in style and meaning by Nabokov, but I find it an extraordinarily tiresome one. Van or Nabokov or the 'traditional' style is much more accessible (possibly jokingly so?). This sort of thing - 'In a slant of scholarly sunlight a botanical atlas upon a reading desk lay open on a colored plate of orchids'. scholarly sunlight/botanical atlas/reading desk/coloured plate + upon/open.

All in all, I prefer VN when there's a lot less of this stuff, and more of his uncanny lyrical ability to make beauty, literary beauty, a part of our understanding of the world. In Ada it's like all the stuff he can go on about in his intros - the hermeneutic games, the scoffing at 'the wrong' interpretation, the scorning of traditional realist novel mechanisms, has all been put into the main book, rather than being something you can take or leave in an introduction or afterword. To echo something Alfred said upthread - he's better when he's slighter.

great post. will try to write more later, but I will say I like the book more having come out the other side - it's a complicated and lovely construction to look back on, enjoy the time-slide – years speeding up as they get older.

But I would not read it again, and would not recommend it to others.

On Van & Ada not actually taking a tumble, I think there's a bit of this stuff right? I am dreadful at reading for this kind of thing (and don't really get off on that side of vn), but Van, viewed externally, is a bit rubbish, & makes excuses for or lies about his fuck-ups - he basically loses a duel, maybe loses that fight with Percy (Percy unruffled, Van flustered when they appear back at the party), visits prostitutes a lot, a minor academic. Biggest life achievement is walking on his hands. also, is there any real evidence that he and Ada are full, not half bro and sis?

I've finished too. I liked it more than I thought I would, in the end. The story was a simple enough romp (at least at the level I'm reading) and there were several amusing yarns that I liked. The last couple of parts were actually quite affecting.

The problem is that I never got to caring about the characters at all - it's had that in common with every farce or satire I've ever tried, which is what it reminds me of most I think. Maybe I didn't do it justice, I don't know, I did read awfully quickly. I don't think so though.

Partly it's the world created I think - too many references I don't really care about. I have the same issue with something like Ulysses that leans heavily on classics, whereas fill it with pop music and working-class life and I'll be buried in it.

what are you guys reading next?

Well personally I've moved onto Philip Roth's first book Goodbye, Columbus. But if you're wondering what's I Love Book Club reading next, join the frenzy at:

ILX Book Club Nominations (Rolling thread)

Yes, I'm still reading this. Moving funereally through it at a pinefauxian pace. Not actually reading it that slowly, just only picking it up at intervals.

Most recent notes.

It would not be sufficient to say that in his love-making with Ada he discovered the pang, the ogon', the agony of supreme "reality". Reality, better say, lost the quotes it wore like claws - in a world where independent and original minds must cling to things or pull things apart in order to ward off madness or death (which is the master madness).

Not sure how much to take this sort of thing at face value. It's in Speak, Memory I think, that VN writes 'reality' is the only word that should have quote marks round it. So there's an authorial anchor of sorts there (I'm finding I need all the anchors I can get in this). Whether it's fastened to anything is a different matter.

The death/master madness equation is dubious to me personally, but if we want to gloss it with literary rather than personal reference, the obvious ref is Lear. (probably even an intended ref? VN not averse to S refs) It's extraordinarily complicated, clearly, but in that I'm not sure I'd equate death with a master madness in Lear either. I worried away at this for a bit but didn't get very far. Uncertainly dismissed it in the end as somewhat glib.

The first bit is easier, and is glossed a bit further down where the senses are described as traversing 'between membrane and brain, and which always was and is a form of memory, even at the moment of its perception.'

So through writing, Van is trying to reverse the process of membrane to memory, trying through an effort of invented memory to possess the sensual experience. (mediations are also heavily present in this section, a reference to 'a bed-ridden old man' and the (insert) instruction to the editor, VN complicating unmediated/mediated experience).

This bit reminded me of Walter Benjamin writing on Fichte I think it was, a Romantic philosopher anyway, about the endlessly receding point of experience, never unmediated, and the Romantic search for that pure point of perceptual or sensory contact. William James relevant here? Wasn't he VN's favourite sensory philosopher?

Point being, by endlessly possessing Ada (there has to be some point to their endless tedious rendezvous) Van is attempting to experience pure unmediated reality.

Another gloss on this:

(Demon) tried to realize (in the rare full sense of the word), tried to possess the reality of a fact by forcing it into a sensuous center.

Clearly the same thing (this rather baldly sexualised ref is presumably supposed to be funny, but because it's rather obvious, the effect is a curiously coy form of irony).

All this stuff seems to make Ada a rather weird literary version of voodoo witchcraft/sympathetic magic - by creating a doll in the form of your victim you gain possession or control over the person. In this case Van would seem to go one further, and gaining a sort of Faustian control over reality, with claws or not. (is the implication here btw that reality will scarify Van in the end - that in fact it never goes unfanged? I guess I'll see). Clearly this could be put in hi-falutin' artistic terms, but I'm sticking with my voodoo doll for the moment.

There is also a quote here, which suggests that Van is attempting some sort of philosophical alchemy -

The logical impossibility to relate the dubious reality of the present to the unquestionable one of remembrance

The adjective is crucial - Van's/NV's narrative cannot be questioned by anyone. It thwarts all attempts at interrogation. I think in VN's other books part of the irony is built out of the idea that 'unquestionable' recollection will contain unintended details, 'tells', whose pattern give some sort of idea to the reader of another story (the 'reality' of the fiction if you like). With Kinbote and the narrator of Sebastian Knight you're aware of a possibly true, possibly untrue story that interrogates the main narrative.

The problem with Ada is that it's difficult to work out what is Van game and what is NV tell, the said and the unsaid. The glancing mention a few chapters after the description of Ada wagging her forefinger at her temple of Demon's replication of this move and the comment that certain gestures can be preserved unwittingly through generations. Put baldly without the intervening pages, this looks like a Van-ism, but it's difficult to know the number of pages it moves from structural game to dramatic irony. As I say, I need anchors! So it's difficult to work out a narrative of doubt (maybe, probably, because I'm not bright enough to follow it, but that's a different matter) and without a narrative of doubt then the game is dull. The details with which the reader continually wrangles are not therefore interesting in and of themselves, other than what they can give in terms of stylistic opulence. (with the awkwardnesses in style continually suggesting some Perec-style game at play). This produces a sort of phatic monotony to everything.

What this uncertainty should not do is excuse Nabokov with a 'not proven' verdict. Even if I assume the priggish comments like being unable to condone the grossness of Marina's soul are Van's, I'm going to assume that Nabokov thought the reader would be interested in them, in their presence.

All this in itself feels like a kind of literary madness, something I've kept coming back to. There is no foothold, so that I wondered whether the search for Terra was the search for this absent textual reality. I went down a bit of a rabbit hole here - what am I saying, this is a fucking warren already - where I started equating the invasion of American slang into the text ('hair-do') as Terra invasions from Van's present, and how the whole book was an attempt to balance VN's Russian past with his subsequent American stint, and somehow understand the public reaction to Lolita (as much a hymn to domestic American language and register as anything else) in terms of the oft-scorned Russian romances he'd grown up with. [memo to self - Do not pass go, do not collect 200 roubles.]

The reason I'm persisting I think is because I'm interested in how a writer I've liked so much, albeit read some years ago now, can write something I'm finding unenjoyable, by and large, to read, and not at all illuminating either.

There's another bit where Demon taps a barometer. 'It had been tapped too often to react in any intelligible way and remained standing at quarter past three.' I feel like that barometer, the irony is a quarter past three of writing, with narratives barely distinguishable, the hands of interpretation standing at a gnat's cock width apart (to use a memorable Kevin Blackwell phrase when describing a missed goal attempt on tv.)

I'm not even going to apologise for the length and incoherence of this undergrad balls, no one's reading Ada, no one's reading this thread. I'm just going to keep on pottering through, murmuring to myself as I go.

Oh, there was a good bit! Where Marina is listening to the thunder and counting for the subsequent lightning, where 'one heartbeat was supposed to span one mile of black night'. There are lots of good bits really, but they do feel bitty. I like his descriptions of food too, something he does in well in Pnin also iirc.

At one point (i didn't make a note of it) he does write that someone 'has the headache', which seemed a genuine mistake, possibly.

And I still can't work out what all the 'onomatomania' is all about, other than some very hazy guesses.

I did try! I even tried to see whether their scrabble game could be decoded with their secret code, well one of them. I was tired of reading at that point tbf.

This bit reminded me of Walter Benjamin writing on Fichte I think it was, a Romantic philosopher anyway, about the endlessly receding point of experience, never unmediated, and the Romantic search for that pure point of perceptual or sensory contact. William James relevant here? Wasn't he VN's favourite sensory philosopher?

this is really good, i think, the 'endlessly receding point', and the stuff abt the indivisibility of memory and xp. i think in a big way the book is abt the transformative/escapist nature of 'feeling' the idea of being lost in the moment being at war w/ the control of intellect or as you say intellect/will attempting to coerce feeling into endlessness

So in light of the epic fail of having attempting to read this when the thread was first active combined by arecent newsworthy passing, seems like this is kind of VN's Metal Machine Music contractual obligation finger-giving, but without the ensuing of a beautiful noise and the accompanying second-level irony of actually being ahead of its time, on its own terms or even someone else's. Maybe if he had actually liked Finnegans Wake this would have better.

/xgau_cg

have been set this by a friend and am finding its pleasures to revolve almost entirely around the eliciting of contempt for Things, Factota, Collections. these characters collect, but they are almost completely disbarred from a world they know everything about and possess every article of. and thus is nabokov himself, with all his allusions and devices and ephemera, kept separate from the world; it almost feels like nabokov is sending himself up in order to challenge us to do literally anything else - ah but in defiance you'll read on, won't you?

that said i am only 64 pages in, so perhaps a point of transcendent nausea (or self-indicted, consented fusion with such a stolidly overcurdled mode) will occur before we're even into the meat of it

the worst bit (and therefore best?) is that my girlfriend is reading Middlemarch next to me and chuckling along and I know from having read the first 4 chapters that it's one of the greatest books ever written, and that it absolutely does access the world with searing, slyly sympathetic clarity, and that I should be reading it instead, but somehow the fact of her reading it and me here with this hobbyhorsing misogynist old letch prancing about with imperial gratuity is, in its own way, part of the fun, the game of it all. christ though i'm only justifying it through coming to terms with being perpetually maddened, so the cataclysm of abandonments throughout this very amusing thread (another, significant part of the fun!) is extremely understandable

ay sorry man it's hard work

Aw I was planning to attempt to re-read Ada, and got all excited when I saw a September start date. Then I realised I was only 13 years too late.

Nabokov nut that I am, Ada was always a struggle and I tend to think of it these days as an interesting, maximalist failure. I recall that someone called it a "cold pudding" of a book, which is rather good and which I misattributed to Martin Amis - on looking it up I realised it was appropriately enough Nabokov himself describing Finnegan's Wake. I agree with Wood that it's a "late" rather than a "mature" work.

(Years later) I do want to respond to some of the Brian Boyd chat. While his enormous hard-on for Nabokov is an amusing image (and for all I know might be literally true) I'd still contend that Boyd remains the most useful critic for understanding Nabokov, for getting the most out of the incredible richness of his designs (too rich, likely, in Ada) and for real aesthetic joy in his work.

The argument is that Boyd lacks "critical distance" or is somehow in thrall to Nabokov. But I think Boyd is doing something a little different from Wood and other critics. I have enormous time for Wood and The Magicians Doubts, but I think it's a partial view of Nabokov underwritten by some of Wood's theoretical commitments: namely the primacy of a moral view of suffering and pity, and the division between signature and style. The former is definitely an important strand in Nabokov: this is essentially the theme of Pnin - but it's not the only one and I think it leads Wood to over-emphasize what he can take to fit this theory in novels like Bend Sinister.

There exist far worse theoretical frameworks to use to look at Nabokov, and I really like where Wood goes with it. But I think Boyd shares some of my frustration with apriorism and theory in literary criticism. Boyd is almost an empiricist. He wants to delve deeper and deeper, with evidence, on what he can observe going on in the novels and how they work: aesthetically, structurally, and morally. He's not afraid to pull in outside evidence, including the author's later assertions. He is not interested in elevating the critic above the work, insisting on the death of the author, or any of the theoretical apparatus which - in my view - have a purpose in the economy of academic criticism but are deadening to anyone outside that world.

This empiricism is sometimes quite striking. In The magic of artistic discovery (this is excellent by the way, read this instead of Ada) Boyd entirely changes his interpretation of Pale Fire (from the "Shadean" position, where Shade is the author of the commentary, to one where there is genuine influence from Shade and others beyond the grave) based upon genuinely new findings in the text. And this was a "discovery" - the internal evidence hadn't been noticed before and is actually pretty compelling. Boyd also argues strongly that we know Kinbote kills himself at the end of PF, and this is the final piece of understanding the novel - there is much pointing to this in the text, but he is happy to admit Nabokov's insistence outside of it as well. In contrast, Wood dismisses this as "authorial trespassing". I'm inclined to that as an article of faith, rather than a way of understanding the novel.

It might not be surprising that this old scientist prefers this sort of criticism. Nor that Boyd has also written books on Karl Popper and evolutionary biology. Boyd's obsessive annotation of Ada (still ongoing!) is also testament to this.

I do not take very seriously objections that empiricism in itself involves a priori commitment, or is itself a form of theory, or psychological resistance to some supposed principle that some theorist has "demonstrated" and so is subsumed by theory. These sorts of totalising closed systems, where you insist your opponents aren't just wrong in this case or misguided but that even trying is somehow ontologically incoherent (or maybe just wicked!) tend to be much less intellectually durable than their proponents make them out to be: they certainly get thrown out every decade or so. In my experience the English department are lousy philosophers anyway who have a bit of a tendency to become hypnotised by rather trivial and often old-hat ideas: I don't think there's anything wrong with their dabbling in philosophy, sociology, politics etc per se, but I consider it dilettantism (ironic coming from me) and I just don't understand why they bother. My view is that if you can't find space somewhere for this kind of empiricist approach without ruling it invalid tout court some sort of dogmatism has crept in.

What this means is Boyd is a close reader. Now why would he choose to read Nabokov so closely? Because he is already sold on Nabokov's artistic genius. No other word will do. That is the impulse that came first, and nothing will undo it: his is a labour of love and rapture. Unlike most of us (I think) who come to Nabokov through the American novels - Lo and Pnin and Pale Fire - Boyd came to Nabokov through Ada: I believe it was the first Nabokov he read (!) and his doctoral thesis (published under The place of consciousness - bad title, Bri) was entirely on Ada. And let's face it, if you are all in on Ada, then the mature work will sell itself. As an aside, I think this is why Boyd is quite skimpy on the early Russian works (The Defence excepted) as they're the most distant from the late Nabokov (I disagree, I think there are gems there).

It's this rapture that Boyd seeks to communicate, and to explicate through his close reading. And in my opinion he is very successful at this. One will learn - and I mean learn in the sense of acquire new facts - a huge amount about Nabokov by reading Boyd. More importantly, Boyd is exquisitely attuned to Nabokov's aesthetic, why it works, and reading him has enriched my appreciation.

The objection is that Boyd becomes a fanboy because of this. But that's unfair. Boyd is entirely sensitive to when he thinks Nabokov's efforts don't work - as mentioned, he is quite dismissive of some of the earlier novels (I think he's wrong, and wrong about Ada). His appreciation really is grounded in a thoroughgoing aesthetics: hard-on or not, he doesn't idolise Nabokov as a man or out of fealty. The love for the words is real. Again, this is thoroughly unfashionable, but I think there needs to be space for it. We're so used to critical superciliousness that like pessimism we can mistake it for sophistication. Why should the critic always be trying to put themselves in a superior position to the author? Appreciation is perhaps a more realistic stance, and one that may be of more use to even the educated reader.

In that vein, there are some places where I think Boyd comes unstuck. One is that he does have some theory: his idea of the Fichtean thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectic. Now, interestingly his inspiration for that does come from Nabokov directly (from Speak, Memory I think). It works more as a frame for his ideas that an external imposition so I find it suggestive but probably not convincing. The other is, in this world of aesthetics and genius, it certainly seems fair to question his aesthetic judgement. Ada just doesn't work as a whole for many readers. There is a sense where the long-term, appreciative response to Ada has now "empirically" established: it's just not top-drawer Nabokov. But there's another in which this never going to invalidate Boyd's reaction to Ada - a personal, individual bit of phenomenology that's as empirical as any other bit of sense-data. We read Nabokov with our spine and it's tingle!

(Oof some bad typos in there. Bloody apostrophes). Anyway, on Ada - I haven't read it for well over a decade now, and my memory is pretty hazy. The main impression is of a bit of a slog and it never coming together. Then I start remember things I like in it, and it turns out I can remember a fair bit and on the micro-level there's a fair bit to like:

• The spooky water madness and death of Aqua
• The influence of visual art quite new to Nabokov, particularly Bosch and Bruegel - e.g. in Dan Veen's demise (I seem to remember he gets ridden like a beast of burden?)
• The ludicrously atavistic and closed off (incestuous!) Veen family romance. It's overbearing and claustrophobic and quite unpleasant, and is certainly memorable. I love "monozygotic" above - chapeau!
• The lust and mythologising of that, Ada's "towers" and "bridges" of "real things", my word
• Van and Ada's intellectual range and facility. Arguably totally over-written by Nabokov, but there's something seductive and romantic there, especially coupled with...
• How little the "superimperial" aristocratic couple actually achieve, their banality, and Van's general failure (nice summary above) is nicely melancholic
• The madcap science fiction elements, the banning of electricity, there's a lot of Lance in this book

• The length. My god man, you did so much in a couple of hundred pages in Lo, PF, Pnin .. is this really necessary?!
• It can be very, needlessly confusing
• It's not funny. Nabokov can be really, properly funny - Lolita's a dark comedy and a few times a year I genuinely remember and sometimes laugh out loud at the sick "know your own daughter" joke. Ada is not chucklesome.
• The incestuousness comes out too in the multilingual mash-ups, puns, puzzles. Unlike in the American novels, where if you don't get 100% you'll still get a heck of a lot out, these are real road-blocks to enjoyment and understanding
• Too many characters, too much lore. I heartily endorse ignoring it on a first read and letting it wash over as recommended above
• I think a big one for many readers is its lack of moral frame. We want Nabokov to have a clear normative view on these characters - because they are frankly (except Lucette) horrible. Despite "I hate Van Veen" I don't think Nabokov had a clear idea here, and (contra Wood and even Boyd) I don't think it's a morality tale about the mistreatment of Lucette.
• Nabokov's no philosopher, and the Texture of Time section isn't very profound (though I do like the device of synchronising it with Van's drive through the mountains).

Ada is not chucklesome.

To put it mildly. Enjoyed these posts, JM - the pros/cons are otm I think. Totally agree about the moral framework which I find kind of enjoyable, if very chilly. and though it's been a long while since I read The Magician's Doubts, i do seem to recall that his desire to find something moral in Nabokov's aesthetic was a mistake, though he is perfectly capable of synthesising sentiment in order to manage it aesthetically (a crude way of putting it, perhaps too crude to be true), for example the reprieve of Pnin's beautiful bowl, or rescuing Adam Krug from an entirely comprehensible insanity, or that for me beautiful ambiguity at the the end of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight where which Var in the France is meant is rendered ambiguous - one means a sentimentally beautiful coherence of narrative, colour, sound and feeling, almost fairytale like, the other that that entire world is fictive, imagined, quixotic, perhaps insane against the rather brutal straight lines of the 'real' world. But the deliberate ambiguity means both coexist - impossibly.

But that is not the *normative sentimentality* that is completely absent - again, to agree - in Ada.

Great post, thanks Fizzles. All this Ada talk has got me flicking through BB's annotations again - I'd forgotten he calls Ada: "by far the most allusive and demanding of his novels. And the funniest.". I beg to differ!