Ada, or Ardor

finished reading Ada, or Ardor in an utterly furious and uncompromising dash through the pages, though my lingering feeling is that of a man who tries to run through knee-high water. I see now why Nabokov considered it his best – it veritably drips with all the ambitions for which he stretches in his other works, and is a challenge on a par with Ulysses, a great favourite of his. With the possible exception of chess, just about every other major Nabokovian motif is represented in abundance – lepidoptera, authorial presence, Russia, time (here, its texture), obsession, cynical detachment and the adoration of barely pubescent girls (all protestations aside; I see it not as accusation, but then, am possibly biased). I increasingly fear for the scope of Nabokov’s imagination.

The joys of the book strike me as somewhat unidimensional. I soon realised I didn’t need the annotations I had found online (and they soon dried up, anyway, an incomplete project), since the references were mostly obvious, explained or dealt with events of the novel. The book is enjoyable only at a distance, only as an intellectual challenge. It is clear from very early on that neither Van nor Ada are likeable, or meant to be likeable. Lucette is sweet, but barely a character. Wish-fulfilment is much in evidence, to an almost nauseating degree. We are told Van and Ada’s story (and they live to their nineties) in great detail, with contorted sentences derived from Proust stretching accepted limits and occasionally patience, but ultimately there is nothing for the emotions, no substance to Van’s love, no reason to re-read but to understand more fully. Van’s endless sexual lust is a vacuum for emotion; therein lies the book’s major flaw.

But I cannot deny the book’s monumental achievement in the use of language. It is wrought in phenomenal intricacy, immensely challenging and thus immensely rewarding once wrestled into clarity – and I feel somewhat guilty for the speed at which I charged through it. This is the essence of Nabokov, the wish to be an artist, an artist noticed, perhaps, to the expense of his story, an artist whose writings are a vehicle for his stylistic traits, not his ideas.

It is a great book, a challenging book – a masterpiece of sophisticated, if not always elegant, writing. But it is not an especially enjoyable book: I hope the next I pick up will be better, though will relax with something light for tonight (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time).