Reviews - Ada sau ardoarea. O cronica de familie

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227 reviews for:

Ada sau ardoarea. O cronica de familie

Vladimir Nabokov

4.01 AVERAGE

mrears0_0's review against another edition

4.25

emotional hopeful reflective slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: No

iamother's review against another edition

4.5

adventurous emotional sad slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Content Warnings

bamairi's review against another edition

5.0

challenging dark emotional funny slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

tnanz's review against another edition

5.0

So good! So weird! Very wrong, but then it's Nabokov, so of course it feels perfectly wrong. I was trying to explain Nabokov's author type to a friend, and I decided that he loves to take things that everyone agrees are totally wrong, and find a humanizing counterexample for it, and then use that counterexample to kind of prove the original point that it is wrong. So in Lolita, spoiler alert maybe although I feel like it's kind of cultural knowledge, he takes pedophilia and pulls you so hard into the story with this tremendous narrator that you can't stop reading it. Even though it's so wrong and twisted and you feel terribly dirty for even thinking about reading it. And by the end, he turns back around and has the narrator reach this point where even he realizes (kind of) the error of his ways. Same deal here! Except with incest. And throughout the book you end up rooting for these two people who are madly in love with each other, and you desperately want them to be together, but they are brother and sister! So wrong! Still, it's Nabokov, so it's impeccable writing. And there is this whole weird parallel earth thing going on, and kind of a philosophical treatise on time and space, and those were very enjoyable aspects of the story. I feel like my mind has been sent through the wringer, but in a positive way. Maybe.

Also, great flashes of other Nabokov novels in here! References to Pale Fire when the main characters translate some John Shade and many many references to Lolita and Dolores.

olichoreno's review against another edition

4.0

Nabokov is characterized by transgressing the conservative statutes of his time, but unlike Sade, who writes with the furious left, Nabokov justifies each transgression with a lyrical romanticism, an empathy caress with which it is difficult not to fall in love

sarah_dietrich's review against another edition

1.0

It's hard to review a book that is this complex. It's even harder because I assumed that I would love it, and I did not.
- The wordplay and the purple prose are beautiful, but they grow tiresome. I prefer the books where Nabokov uses these more sparingly, such as Pale Fire. Pale Fire feels finely balanced, masterful. This does not.
- The book is full of tricks, references, literary allusions and mockery. I spotted lots of them, I'm sure I missed even more.
- We spend the novel inside Van Veen's head, which is an unpleasant place to be. He treats women terribly, and is quite pleased about it.
- Yes there's a lot of incest, and that's not even the worst part. We read, in detail, about an 11 year old girl who is desperate to have sex with her 14 year old cousin (who is secretly her brother). I don't know why Nabokov included such detailed descriptions of children wanting sex and having sex, but he did. Lots of it. This has a very different tone to Lolita.

I can't see myself reading this again. Maybe I missed whatever it is that makes this book magic? Maybe it's all a big joke on the reader, and Nabokov knew we would spend decades trying to decode this bloated, misogynistic riddle? I don't know, and I'm fine with not knowing.