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    Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
    Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
    Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
    Audiobook20 hours

    Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

    Written by Vladimir Nabokov

    Narrated by Arthur Morey

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Published two weeks after Vladimir Nabokov’s seventieth birthday, Ada, or Ardor is one of his greatest masterpieces, the glorious culmination of his career as a novelist. It tells a love story troubled by incest, but it is also at once a fairy tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of the novel, and erotic catalogue. Ada, or Ardor is no less than the supreme work of an imagination at white heat.

    This is the first American edition to include the extensive and ingeniously sardonic appendix by the author, written under the anagrammatic pseudonym Vivian Darkbloom.

    One of the twentieth century’s master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899. He studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, where he launched a brilliant literary career. In 1940 he moved to the United States, and achieved renown as a novelist, poet, critic, and translator. He taught literature at Wellesley, Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard. In 1961 he moved to Montreux, Switzerland, where he died in 1977.

    “Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically.” —John Updike

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateSep 20, 2011
    ISBN9781441873446
    Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
    Author

    Vladimir Nabokov

    Vladimir Nabokov (San Petersburgo, 1899-Montreux, 1977), uno de los más extraordinarios escritores del siglo XX, nació en el seno de una acomodada familia aristocrática. En 1919, a consecuencia de la Revolución Rusa, abandonó su país para siempre. Tras estudiar en Cambridge, se instaló en Berlín, donde empezó a publicar sus novelas en ruso con el seudónimo de V. Sirin. En 1937 se trasladó a París, y en 1940 a los Estados Unidos, donde fue profesor de literatura en varias universidades. En 1960, gracias al gran éxito comercial de Lolita, pudo abandonar la docencia, y poco después se trasladó a Montreux, donde residió, junto con su esposa Véra, hasta su muerte. En Anagrama se le ha dedicado una «Biblioteca Nabokov» que recoge una amplísima muestra de su talento narrativo. En «Compactos» se han publicado los siguientes títulos: Mashenka, Rey, Dama, Valet, La defensa, El ojo, Risa en la oscuridad, Desesperación, El hechicero, La verdadera vida de Sebastian Knight, Lolita, Pnin, Pálido fuego, Habla, memoria, Ada o el ardor, Invitado a una decapitación y Barra siniestra; La dádiva, Cosas transparentes, Una belleza rusa, El original de Laura y Gloria pueden encontrarse en «Panorama de narrativas», mientras que sus Cuentos completos están incluidos en la colección «Compendium». Opiniones contundentes, por su parte, ha aparecido en «Argumentos».

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    Reviews for Ada, or Ardor

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    • 2/5
      Twenty pages into this book, I thought: "What the hell is this? This is unreadable". Consulting some reviews I learned the story is situated on Anti-Terra, a fictitious planet like Earth, where an American-Russian aristocracy still thrives; the story itself is about the romance/relationship between Ada and Van, who think they are niece and cousin, but in reality are sister and brother. Allright, that's already something. Happily from page 20 onwards, the story develops more or less chronologically, albeit with regular comments of Ada and Van, in their eighties. Nevertheless, I gave up after page 120.It seems Nabokov wanted to prove he can do better than Joyce, Proust, Borges and others in creating a complicated story, multiple-layered sentences, explicit or hidden references etc. And I must say, every now and then Nabokov produces sentences like fireworks: beautiful, amazing and breathtaking. But, very often, he has forgotten he has a reader to count with, and the sentences are way to difficult. Ofcourse, perhaps I'm not intelligent enough to understand his universe; that's very well possible; but since I've read Joyce, Proust and Borges ànd enjoyed them, I'm very disappointed in Nabokov.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Nabokov plays with language in forms that are astounding. I'm always led by the hand in Nabakov which makes a book as long as this difficult to follow because you spend so much time wandering and wondering down pathways that are perpendicular to the plot. Just soak it up and enjoy!
    • 5/5
      OK, so it's not Lolita, but this guy can still write circles around almost every single professional author on the planet...for the last 200 years...and he's writing in this 3rd language. He was raised first speaking and writing Russian and then French, or was it French then Russian. I forget, you know Russian nobility.
    • 2/5
      Twenty pages into this book, I thought: "What the hell is this? This is unreadable". Consulting some reviews I learned the story is situated on Anti-Terra, a fictitious planet like Earth, where an American-Russian aristocracy still thrives; the story itself is about the romance/relationship between Ada and Van, who think they are niece and cousin, but in reality are sister and brother. Allright, that's already something. Happily from page 20 onwards, the story develops more or less chronologically, albeit with regular comments of Ada and Van, in their eighties. Nevertheless, I gave up after page 120.It seems Nabokov wanted to prove he can do better than Joyce, Proust, Borges and others in creating a complicated story, multiple-layered sentences, explicit or hidden references etc. And I must say, every now and then Nabokov produces sentences like fireworks: beautiful, amazing and breathtaking. But, very often, he has forgotten he has a reader to count with, and the sentences are way to difficult. Ofcourse, perhaps I'm not intelligent enough to understand his universe; that's very well possible; but since I've read Joyce, Proust and Borges ?nd enjoyed them, I'm very disappointed in Nabokov.
    • 4/5
      Not an easy read. One is forced to let go of everything one is used to when it comes to the usual forms of narrative and time -- and even character. One character becomes several, and there is no such thing as time [in love]. Sexy and resoundingly wonderful!!
    • 3/5
      I spent the better part of a month wading through Vladimir Nabokov's novel "Ada, or Ardor." I generally found this a struggle to get through (though it got somewhat easier by the end) and a bit disappointing. I couldn't help comparing this to "Lolita," which was brilliant in the ways it attempted to make the reader sympathize with a totally repugnant character and this novel just manage to get there.This book is about man named Van, who has a lifelong incestuous affair with his sister Ada (whom he initially believes is his cousin, which doesn't make it much better.) I found the bulk of the novel -- which sets up the relationship between the two characters to be a bit boring. It got better when the story got moving (except for that weird time section, which was way over my head.) Overall, I just found this to be disappointing.
    • 5/5
      This is one of the most beautiful, complicated, strange, difficult books I’ve read. I think it’s the best Nabokov I’ve ever read. I finished it alone on the 4 headed to Brooklyn on a late Saturday night, and I cried all the way home. I’m scared I’ll never find another lover like Ada.
    • 4/5
      Beautifully written about a disturbing relationship within a family.
    • 3/5
      Martin Amis called it a work by a genius that fell short on talent. Others call it Nabokov's masterpiece. I had put off reading Ada for quite a while, although I consider Nabokov one of the 20th century's finest authors. The prose here almost ventures into self-parody, with its abundant puns and anagrams (sometimes in French and Russian), references to other major works of literature, and playing with different novelistic styles. The problem is that all this "garden of earthly pleasures" gets to be too much, and overwhelms the narrative. Of course, some might say that by the time this work was published many authors had dispensed with the importance of narrative. Ultimately, the thing feels soulless to me, despite its narrator's mission. Nabokov has said how much he disliked his narrator Ivan, who ultimately is one of those unreliable ones. Without giving something away, there is a key event in the latter part of the book in which Ivan could not possibly have known the details, so one wonders how seriously Nabokov wants us to take the whole thing. Incest aside, there just isn't much to like here.
    • 5/5
      A book with lots of natural history—mostly botany and hemiptery, with a little of Nabokov’s expert lepidoptery. A fair amount of untranslated Russian and French is made more comprehensible because of Nabokov’s style, containing many catalogues, repetition with variation, and multilingual glosses. And like all of Nabokov, the Word is apotheosized: “Thank Log!” is a frequent expression of Van Veen, the protagonist and, as we gradually discover, the memoirist writing his own history in the third person.The book ends with its own blurb, and near the end is a dissertation upon time, in which Professor of Psychology Van Veen denies that the future has any part in the concept of time and which is an expression of Van’s lifelong denial of death. The book may be seen, as indeed may many novels—Austen’s romances come to mind—as a wish-fulfillment fantasy. It is an alternate-geography, alternate-history, alternate-planet story that takes place on Antiterra or Demonia. Terra, on the other hand, is a planet accessible only through the hallucinations of Van’s mentally-disturbed patients, but it is the world whose geography and history is that of our own world—the readers’ reality. Another way to look at the world map of the book, with Russia located in North America and Russian, French, and English all likely languages to be heard within any group of Americans, is that it reflects somehow the mental geography of Nabokov himself.Here is a rough summary of the plot:Fourteen-year-old Van Veen—Ivan Dementievich Veen, whose father is most often referred to as Demon Veen—visits Ardis, the country house of his aunt Marina. There he and his cousin, twelve-year-old Ada, begin an affair that lasts for more than eighty years. The two children soon discover diaries, letters, and other documents in the attic of Ardis from which they quickly and correctly infer—both have intelligence off the IQ chart, which contributes to their mutual attraction—that Marina is in fact the mother and Demon the father of both of them. Far from deterring their affair, the discovery becomes another secret link bonding them.Their tryst is interrupted when Van must return to school, and it is not resumed until four years later. Another blissful summer interlude ends when Van discovers Ada has been unfaithful. He goes off to murder her two lovers, but is prevented by a silly duel in which he is injured and by the death of both of the objects of his wrath, one by his wife’s poison precipitating the fatal effects of disease, the other in an Antiterran version of a protracted Crimean War. Van and Ada are reunited briefly after a hiatus of five years, but when Demon Veen discovers their affair, he convinces Van to stay away from Ada so that she may have something like a normal, happy life. Ada marries, and she and Van are separated for some years. This period of reunion and separation is complicated by the presence of Ada’s younger sister Lucette, who spied on their lovemaking when they were all children, who loves Van while she also has an intimate sexual relationship with Ada, and who kills herself by leaping from an ocean liner after her last unsuccessful attempt to seduce Van.The lovers are again briefly reunited in their thirties in Switzerland, an idyll that ends when Ada’s husband Andrey Vinelander has an attack of “psychopathic pseudobronchitis” which may or may not have turned into tuberculosis. In any case it does not kill Andrey, who returns to Arizona, taking Ada with him, and lives on for another seventeen years. A few months after his death Ada joins Van, again in Switzerland, and they live the remainder of their long lives together: he is ninety-seven as he writes the memoir called Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, which Ada annotates as he writes.When I wrote that the novel is a wish-fulfillment fantasy I meant that it embodies what I regard as a particularly Nabokovian notion about true love involving the denial of convention and the embracing of the forbidden, a complication that ensures its being impossible to sustain. This notion may be seen at its most extreme in Lolita’s paean to the perverse. For Ada and Van, everyone (except perhaps Lucette) is too dim to see that their love trumps any disgust, horror, or moral opprobrium attaching to incest.
    • 5/5
      This time Nabokov’s pet theme of true, lasting, first, yet socially-unacceptable love comes in the form of an incestuous relationship that lasts from the character’s adolescence until their nineties. The characters repeatedly reference Proust, which is fitting, as the book is obviously a paean to that author. It’s written in the form of a manuscript that has been edited by the two main characters—they have conversations in the margins about what should stay or go. This is the first time that I noticed the similarities between Nabokov and Gunter Grass in the way they handle the earthier aspects of their characters’ lives, but if you like this I'd recommend Grass' The Tin Drum.
    • 4/5
      "soft and difficult"
    • 5/5
      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 são irmãos na mesma época em que se apaixonam.
      Ada é um livro cruel. Seus personagens são belos, ricos, inteligentíssimos, e destroem o que mais amam. Também é, como todos os livros de Nabokov, sobre suas maiores obsessões.

      SPOILER
      “Having cradled the nacred receiver she changed into black slacks and a lemon shirt (planned for tomorrow morning); looked in vain for a bit of plain notepaper without caravelle or crest; ripped out the flyleaf of Herb’s Journal, and tried to think up something amusing, harmless, and scintillating to say in a suicide note. But she had planned everything except that note, so she tore her blank life in two and disposed of the pieces in the W.C.; she poured herself a glass of dead water from a moored decanter, gulped down one by one four green pills, and, sucking the fifth, walked to the lift which took her one click up from her three-room suite straight to the red-carpeted promenade-deck bar.”
      “While dragging herself up she had to hang onto the rail. Her twisted progress was that of a cripple. Once on the open deck she felt the solid impact of the black night, and the mobility of the accidental home she was about to leave.
      Although Lucette had never died before—no, dived before, Violet—from such a height, in such a disorder of shadows and snaking reflections, she went with hardly a splash through the wave that humped to welcome her. That perfect end was spoiled by her instinctively surfacing in an immediate sweep — instead of surrendering under water to her drugged lassitude as she had planned to do on her last night ashore if it ever did come to this. The silly girl had not rehearsed the technique of suicide as, say, free-fall parachutists do every day in the element of another chapter.
      Owing to the tumultuous swell and her not being sure which way to peer through the spray and the darkness and her own tentaclinging hair—t,a,c,l—she could not make out the lights of the liner, an easily imagined many-eyed bulk mightily receding in heartless triumph. Now I’ve lost my next note.
      Got it.
      The sky was also heartless and dark, and her body, her head,and particularly those damned thirsty trousers, felt clogged with Oceanus Nox, n,o,x. At every slap and splash of cold wild salt, she heaved with anise-flavored nausea and there was an increasing number, okay, or numbness, in her neck and arms. As she began losing track of herself, she thought it proper to inform a series of receding Lucettes—telling them to pass it on and on in a trick-crystal regression—that what death amounted to was only a more complete assortment of the infinite fractions of solitude.
      She did not see her whole life flash before her as we all were afraid she might have done; the red rubber of a favorite doll remained safely decomposed among the myosotes of an un-analyzable brook; but she did see a few odds and ends as she swam like a dilettante Tobakoff in a circle of brief panic and merciful torpor. She saw a pair of new vairfurred bedroom slippers, which Brigitte had forgotten to pack; she saw Van wiping his mouth before answering, and then, still withholding the answer, throwing his napkin on the table as they both got up; and she saw a girl with long black hair quickly bend in passing to clap her hands over a dackel in a half-tom wreath.
      A brilliantly illumined motorboat was launched from the not-too-distant ship with Van and the swimming coach and the oilskin-hooded Toby among the would-be saviors; but by that time a lot of sea had rolled by and Lucette was too tired to wait. Then the night was filled with the rattle of an old but still strong helicopter. Its diligent beam could spot only the dark head of Van, who, having been propelled out of the boat when it shied from its own sudden shadow, kept bobbing and bawling the drowned girl’s name in the black, foam-veined, complicated waters.”
    • 3/5
      At first I thought I didn't "get" this book. Pale Fire and Lolita are each built around a central joke; get that joke, and the books are funny, even if occasionally individually little jokes within them go over your head. I couldn't find any such unifying comic theme to Ada. Based on how I've read that it's actually the result of Nabokov taking two different novels he was in the beginning stages of writing and deciding to jam them together into one, I think the problem isn't that I don't get it and that the novel simply just isn't coherent enough to "work" (in the sense of be consistently funny).Another aspect of my not "getting" this book is that our narrator here is a pretty repulsive human being. Given that the narrators of the previous two Nabokov novels I read were obviously deliberately unsympathetic I'm inclined to give the author the benefit of the doubt about this and assume we aren't meant to like him, but... that is not a thing I would think if I didn't have prior experience with Nabokov. He's showered with praise by other characters; he mouthpieces numerous personal opinions of the author; the bulk of the story is devoted to a consensual love affair in which his role is a sympathetic one. I don't know what's going on there.Those who hated the section in Pale Fire where Kinbote starts ripping on Shade's wife's translation abilities should be warned that this novel contains a good eight to twelve varations on that gimmick.
    • 2/5
      Twenty pages into this book, I thought: "What the hell is this? This is unreadable". Consulting some reviews I learned the story is situated on Anti-Terra, a fictitious planet like Earth, where an American-Russian aristocracy still thrives; the story itself is about the romance/relationship between Ada and Van, who think they are niece and cousin, but in reality are sister and brother. Allright, that's already something. Happily from page 20 onwards, the story develops more or less chronologically, albeit with regular comments of Ada and Van, in their eighties. Nevertheless, I gave up after page 120.It seems Nabokov wanted to prove he can do better than Joyce, Proust, Borges and others in creating a complicated story, multiple-layered sentences, explicit or hidden references etc. And I must say, every now and then Nabokov produces sentences like fireworks: beautiful, amazing and breathtaking. But, very often, he has forgotten he has a reader to count with, and the sentences are way to difficult. Ofcourse, perhaps I'm not intelligent enough to understand his universe; that's very well possible; but since I've read Joyce, Proust and Borges ànd enjoyed them, I'm very disappointed in Nabokov.
    • 4/5
      Ada or Ardor is Nabokov’s biggest novel, and in many ways a summation of his linguistic dexterity as well as his literary themes, with all the pleasures and problems those things imply.His writing is a constant astonishment. His admirers are sometimes surprised to remember that it’s not to everyone’s tastes. Nabokov’s sentences are exact, yet often long and complicated; they are utterly stripped of cliché; they are very alert to such pleasures as assonance, alliteration, sesquipedalianism and cross-linguistic puns. At their best they provide a sensuous delight which matches the subject-matter; at other times they offer descriptions which seem so unfamiliar, because so new, that a reader feels almost rebuffed (Clive James, discussing Nabokov’s over-aversion to familiar phrasing, wrote brilliantly that ‘passages occur in which we can hardly see for the clarity’).In Ada or Ardor, most passages are poised somewhere between those two extremes, collapsing either into beauty or awkwardness depending on your mood, or the time of day. On sunset over a lake:The wide lovely lake lay in dreamy serenity, fretted with green undulations, ruffed with blue, patched with glades of lucid smoothness between the ackers…On playing Scrabble:The bloom streaking Ada’s arm, the pale blue of the veins in its hollow, the charred-wood odor of her hair shining brownly next to the lampshade’s parchment (a translucent lakescape with Japanese dragons), scored infinitely more points than those tensed fingers bunched on the pencil stub could ever add up in the past, present or future.On an erection:The tall clock struck an anonymous quarter, and Ada was presently watching, cheek on fist, the impressive, though oddly morose, stirrings, steady clockwise launch, and ponderous upswing of virile revival.One of his favourite tools is the long sentence, laden with subordinate clauses, which looks rambling but which is actually very precise in its descriptions, and frequently very perceptive in what it chooses to describe. The technique is rather Proustian, albeit employed in the service of a very different tone. Here he is on Ada’s habit of scratching her mosquito bites:The girl’s pale skin, so excitingly delicate to Van’s eye, so vulnerable to the beast’s needle, was, nevertheless, as strong as a stretch of Samarkand satin and withstood all self-flaying attempts whenever Ada, her dark eyes veiled as in the erotic trances Van had already begun to witness during their immoderate kissing, her lips parted, her large teeth lacquered with saliva, scraped with her five fingers the pink mounds caused by the rare insect’s bite – for it is a rather rare and interesting mosquito (described – not quite simultaneously – by two angry old men – the second was Braun, the Philadelphian dipterist, a much better one than the Boston professor), and rare and rapturous was the sight of my beloved trying to quench the lust of her precious skin, leaving at first pearly, then ruby, stripes along her enchanting leg and briefly attaining a drugged beatitude into which, as into a vacuum, the ferocity of the itch would rush with renewed strength.Heady stuff. You see in that passage also this book’s propensity to slip from third-person to first-person narration: ‘Van’ and the narrator who says ‘my’ are one and the same – well, more or less. The authorship is confused and overlayed with multiple fictional ‘editors’; and the setting is likewise confused, being a kind of alternate-reality version of our own world, which is superficially similar but whose history and geography differ in certain ways. None of it matters all that much – all Nabokov really cares about, one feels, is that you get a shiver of aesthetic pleasure up your spine when you read his words in the order he uses them.Given that his writing is such a sensuous thing, it’s natural that it comes into its own when he shifts to the erotic mode. The long, dreamy, pastoral scenes of Ardis, the manor where Van falls in love with the titular Ada, are full of hot afternoons, idyllic playfulness, the lazy sexiness of remembered summers. Nabokov can be a very sexy writer – a disconcerting fact when, after a particularly affecting paragraph, you remind yourself that the girl in question is 12 years old, the boy 14, and that they are siblings. I don’t know if it is a testament to Nabokov’s writing that he still makes this seem somehow sexy, or if it something we should be worried about. Personally I think, given the rest of his work, it is not unfair to conclude that Nabokov’s obsession with young girls is something more alarming and disturbing than just a literary conceit.This isn’t the place to get into that, though. Ada or Ardor throws up some problems and challenges, but if you’re the kind of reader who likes revelling in Nabokov’s particular brand of liquid prose, this book is likely to be a whole ocean of pleasure.
    • 5/5
      I learned that Nabokov is a master. That he loves writing about taboo sexually-charged relationships. That he writes more beautifully in his "third-rate" english than most of the rest of us could ever hope for.
    • 3/5
      "Family chronicle" of relatives Ada and Van Veen, and their (very) dysfunctional family. Although I thought the writing in this book was absolutely wonderful (note to self: must read more books by Nabokov), I did get bogged down a bit towards the end. Like Lolita, this book does have some unsavory aspects to it, so I would probably tell anyone easily offended to pass on it.
    • 5/5
      The use of language by Nabokov in this book is amazing. This edition has good translations and notes to help you through the Franco Prussian word play that mixes with the English. The genius of this author's understanding of the power of word is fully displayed in this surreal dance.
    • 3/5
      Nabokov the linguist goes beserk here, revelling in a lifetime's dictionary-gleanings, dispensing quips like a croupier dealing cards. The literary parody is very funny, and the other-earth idea perfectly-conceived, but at the heart of this novel is a frigid disdain for the characters, a constipation of emotion. Nabokov the author seems bored.
    • 5/5
      It would seem to me blasphemous to review such a book. Ada deserves to be reread throughout a lifetime.
    • 3/5
      A strange and difficult novel from the linguistic master. So addling and baffling I know that I need to read it again (and perhaps again and again and again).
    • 1/5
      I was very disappointed in ADA. Nabokov is an awesome wordsmith, but his cleverness gets the better of him in this text. It's a self-indulgant paen to his witty writing style - at the cost of losing the point of the story. I was hoping to find an intricate study on the incestuous relationship between brother and sister...but it was seriously lacking.
    • 5/5
      OK, so it's not Lolita, but this guy can still write circles around almost every single professional author on the planet...for the last 200 years...and he's writing in this 3rd language. He was raised first speaking and writing Russian and then French, or was it French then Russian. I forget, you know Russian nobility.
    • 5/5
      This is my favourite Nabokov, maybe my favourite book. It is lyrical, visual, it tastes like forgotten summers and smells like dust motes hanging in the attic air, this is the great Alternate America novel.