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4.0 AVERAGE
She was soon ready, and they kissed tenderly in their hall way, between lift and stairs, before separating for a few minutes. “Tower”, she murmured in reply to his questioning glance, just as she used to do on those honeyed mornings in the past, when checking up on happiness. “And you?”
“A regular ziggurat”
A book that opens with a pedigree of aristocratic sounding Russian names could easily give the impression that a classic family epic will be the reader’s part. That misleading family tree is only the beginning of the games Nabokov will play with the reader. Nabokov lures the reader into to a captivating, magical dream world, abysmal and treacherous, as well as full of illusions and spiced with jokey nods and parodic takes on honorable world literature. Ada is set on Antiterra, a distorted world where Americans speak Russian and Time does not synchronize with Earth time. Van and Ada Veen – who are, according to the family tree, cousins - are bright and pretty teenagers when they throw themselves into a passionate idyll during a long languorous summer spent on the paradisiacal family estate Ardis. Soon they discover the truth that has been scrupulously buried to them: in reality they are brother and sister. Their unusual bond chances on numerous obstacles and leads to the tragic demise of their "uterine" half-sister Lucette, who is also in love with Van. Through the memoirs of the now aged Van, interlaced with Ada's comments, the baffled reader learns how their incestuous love weathers out long years of separation, infidelity, frequent brothel visits and Ada's marriage to another. Sinking into the surreal world of Ada - Nabokov’s longest - takes time, but the persistent reader is rewarded with a multi-layered, exuberant and high-flown novel. Anyone wishing further digging into and exploring all the literary and cultural references of the novel can spend many delicious hours on Adaonline, where Brian Boyd, Nabokov’s biographer, offers an elaborately annotated version of Ada.
‘Toren’, lispelde ze als antwoord op zijn vragende blik, precies zoals wanneer ze op die honingochtenden in het verleden elkaars geluk de maat namen. ‘En jij?’ ‘Een ware ziggurat’.
Een boek dat opent met een stamboom vol aristocratische Russische namen wekt de indruk dat een klassiek familie-epos je deel zal zijn. Die misleidende stamboom is tekenend voor de spelletjes die [a: Nabokov|5152|Vladimir Nabokov|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1651442178p2/5152.jpg] met de lezer zal spelen: hij voert je mee naar een bevreemdende, magische droomwereld, vol illusies en gekruid met knipoogjes naar en parodieën op monumenten uit de wereldliteratuur. Ada speelt zich af op Antiterra, een vervormde wereld waar Amerikanen Russisch spreken en de Tijd niet synchroon met de aardse tijd verloopt. Van en Ada Veen – volgens de stamboom neef en nicht – zijn prille tieners als ze zich tijdens een langoureuze zomer op het paradijselijke familielandgoed Ardis in een passionele idylle storten. Al snel ontdekken ze de angstvallig verzwegen waarheid: in werkelijkheid zijn ze broer en zus. Hun ongewone band stuit op talrijke hinderpalen en leidt tot de tragische ondergang van hun ‘uteriene’ halfzus Lucette, die ook verliefd is op Van. In de memoires van de nu stokoude Van, gelardeerd met commentaar van Ada, lees je hoe hun incestueuze liefde jarenlange scheidingen, ontrouw, frequente bordeelbezoeken en het huwelijk van Ada doorstaat. Je in de surreële wereld van Ada verdiepen vergt tijd, maar wie volhoudt wacht een veelgelaagd en buitenissig boek dat garant staat voor urenlang leesplezier. Wie van literair speurwerk houdt, en zich verder in de vele betekenissen en, literaire en culturele verwijzingen van het boek wil ingraven, kan terecht op , waar je een van a tot z geannoteerde versie van Ada vindt.
“A regular ziggurat”
A book that opens with a pedigree of aristocratic sounding Russian names could easily give the impression that a classic family epic will be the reader’s part. That misleading family tree is only the beginning of the games Nabokov will play with the reader. Nabokov lures the reader into to a captivating, magical dream world, abysmal and treacherous, as well as full of illusions and spiced with jokey nods and parodic takes on honorable world literature. Ada is set on Antiterra, a distorted world where Americans speak Russian and Time does not synchronize with Earth time. Van and Ada Veen – who are, according to the family tree, cousins - are bright and pretty teenagers when they throw themselves into a passionate idyll during a long languorous summer spent on the paradisiacal family estate Ardis. Soon they discover the truth that has been scrupulously buried to them: in reality they are brother and sister. Their unusual bond chances on numerous obstacles and leads to the tragic demise of their "uterine" half-sister Lucette, who is also in love with Van. Through the memoirs of the now aged Van, interlaced with Ada's comments, the baffled reader learns how their incestuous love weathers out long years of separation, infidelity, frequent brothel visits and Ada's marriage to another. Sinking into the surreal world of Ada - Nabokov’s longest - takes time, but the persistent reader is rewarded with a multi-layered, exuberant and high-flown novel. Anyone wishing further digging into and exploring all the literary and cultural references of the novel can spend many delicious hours on Adaonline, where Brian Boyd, Nabokov’s biographer, offers an elaborately annotated version of Ada.
‘Toren’, lispelde ze als antwoord op zijn vragende blik, precies zoals wanneer ze op die honingochtenden in het verleden elkaars geluk de maat namen. ‘En jij?’ ‘Een ware ziggurat’.
Een boek dat opent met een stamboom vol aristocratische Russische namen wekt de indruk dat een klassiek familie-epos je deel zal zijn. Die misleidende stamboom is tekenend voor de spelletjes die [a: Nabokov|5152|Vladimir Nabokov|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1651442178p2/5152.jpg] met de lezer zal spelen: hij voert je mee naar een bevreemdende, magische droomwereld, vol illusies en gekruid met knipoogjes naar en parodieën op monumenten uit de wereldliteratuur. Ada speelt zich af op Antiterra, een vervormde wereld waar Amerikanen Russisch spreken en de Tijd niet synchroon met de aardse tijd verloopt. Van en Ada Veen – volgens de stamboom neef en nicht – zijn prille tieners als ze zich tijdens een langoureuze zomer op het paradijselijke familielandgoed Ardis in een passionele idylle storten. Al snel ontdekken ze de angstvallig verzwegen waarheid: in werkelijkheid zijn ze broer en zus. Hun ongewone band stuit op talrijke hinderpalen en leidt tot de tragische ondergang van hun ‘uteriene’ halfzus Lucette, die ook verliefd is op Van. In de memoires van de nu stokoude Van, gelardeerd met commentaar van Ada, lees je hoe hun incestueuze liefde jarenlange scheidingen, ontrouw, frequente bordeelbezoeken en het huwelijk van Ada doorstaat. Je in de surreële wereld van Ada verdiepen vergt tijd, maar wie volhoudt wacht een veelgelaagd en buitenissig boek dat garant staat voor urenlang leesplezier. Wie van literair speurwerk houdt, en zich verder in de vele betekenissen en, literaire en culturele verwijzingen van het boek wil ingraven, kan terecht op , waar je een van a tot z geannoteerde versie van Ada vindt.
One of the objects that immediately comes to mind when I think back to my childhood is a red rowboat exactly like the one in my avatar. That’s no coincidence of course as the avatar started out as an attempt at a symbolic ‘self-portrait’ based on personal memories. If there is coincidence here, it lies in the fact that a red row-boat called Souvenance is a recurrent memory for Van Veen, the narrator of Ada, or Ardor. I counted at least four mentions of that red rowboat with its mobile inlay of reflective ripples, and each time, I was transported out of Nabokov’s story and into my own, and then I would find that entire pages of Ada, or Ardor were a complete blank because I was remembering a different narrative..
Paying attention was a problem throughout my reading, and for reasons other than memory triggers. In the beginning, I failed to fully engage with the characters. Ada herself irritated me quite a bit (early Ada is an impossibly pedantic twelve-year old), and whenever the narrative focused on her, I wandered off. But then, as if Nabokov knew I’d had enough of Ada, she disappeared from the narrative for a long stretch. In the last image we get of early Ada, she is standing against a tree, her shoulder blades pressed against the trunk, reminding us of a caterpillar clinging to the bark. The later Ada, very often heard through letters, is a much more interesting character, as if she’d undergone some kind of metamorphosis since we’d last seen her. I realised that the picture we had of her in the early sections was the narrator’s version, necessarily coloured by his obsessive love for her, whereas the Ada of the letters was a character speaking in her own voice for the first time.
There were many things about this book I found interesting though the reading of it wore me out. I didn't ever want to stop reading it, but I did want to move faster through the book, something I couldn’t do because Nabokov demands attention all the time like a spoilt child. You can’t skim read; if you even try, he punishes you by making you feel completely lost so that you have to go back and reread what you’ve missed. Is it any wonder that it took me six weeks to get through it - no, that can’t be right, let me check my automnally tocking calendar. Ok, it took me exactly three Oknovber weeks but they felt like six. That’s another coincidence: our varying perceptions of Time and the unreliability of memory are some of the themes in the book, and my having to go back in order to go forward is also fitting because the central twist seems to be ‘reversal’ - back to front, inside out, upside down.
An apt illustration of the reversal theme is Van's brief stint as a circus performer. Using the stage name, ‘Mascodagama', he performs stunts while walking on his hands. Nabokov underlines the significance of this episode in case we've missed it: It was the standing of a metaphor on its head not for the sake of the trick’s difficulty, but in order to perceive an ascending waterfall or a sunrise in reverse: a triumph over the ardis of time.
The word ‘ardis’ has huge significance in the novel too. We are told that it means the point of an arrow in Greek, and Nabokov chooses the word as the name of the most significant location in the novel, Ardis Hall, to which the arrow of Time in the narrative points constantly. The arbors of Ardis are an idyllic Garden of Eden in which ardorous Ada and Van are a new Adam and Eve (and a reversal again with Ada as Ada-m and Van Veen as Eve), the first children, and straight out ofFinnegans Wake Baudelaire’s poem, 'L'invitation au voyage'.
Songe à la douceur
D'aller là-bas vivre ensemble!
Aimer à loisir,
Aimer et mourir
Au pays qui te ressemble…
Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté,
Luxe, calme et volupté.
My child, my sister,
Think of the tenderness
Of living together, down there
Loving each other
Loving and dying
In a land that resembles you..
There, all is but order and beauty,
Sumptuous stillness and sensuous pleasure.
(my translation)
Nabokov doesn’t quote Baudelaire but he recalls his poem in a parody version:
Mon enfant, ma soeur
Songe à l’epaisseur,
Du grand chêne à Tagne;
Songe à la montagne,
Songe à la douceur—
(He gives a translation of that verse in the notes at the back of the book: my child, my sister, think of the thickness of the big oak at Tagne, think of the mountain, think of the tenderness)
This veiled reference to Baudelaire occurs in the narrative just when the real Charles Baudelaire has been conflated with the real René de Chateaubriand into a fictional entomologist called Charles Chateaubriand; Nabokov's parody is itself a conflation of the Baudelaire poem with one by Chateaubriand. Later in the narrative, lines from the Chateaubriand poem, Souvenir du pays de France are recalled making a link with the parodied Baudelaire poem.
Du château que baignait la Dore…
Oh ! qui me rendra mon Hélène,
Et ma montagne et le grand chêne?
These lines are parodied as:
My sister, do you still recall
The blue Ladore and Ardis Hall…
Oh! qui me rendra ma colline
Et le grand chêne and my colleen?
(Incidentally, there are numerous references throughout the book to Ireland; Irish phrases, Irish people and their physiognomy - Van’s maternal great grandmother was Irish).
To revert to the central theme of reversal, the novel takes place on a planet called Antiterra (or Demonia) where another planet known as Terra is mentioned sometimes but as if it were only an imagined place, the equivalent of our heaven; accounts of it are found mostly in literature or in the records kept by terrapists of patients suffering from hallucinations or altered states.
In Antiterra, the United States or Estotia, seems to be governed by Russians - a nice little joke on Nabokov’s part, and in Europe, France is governed by an English king as if France became a British dominion after the battle of Waterloo. Iraq is a giant national park, another Eden.
The action of the novel takes place between 1870 and the 1960s but the Antiterra of the 1870s is a much more advanced place than our world was at that time, though scientific progress has taken a different direction entirely, with, for example, dorophones instead of telephones, which, oddly and sometimes disastrously, are dependent on the plumbing system rather than on any network of cables.
The book is full of anagrams and puns and word games - the characters even play scrabble at one point - so it is tempting to sniff out the word odour in ‘dorophone’ (Nabokov’s anagrammatic inventions don’t always have to correspond letter for letter). He is particularly playful when it comes to character’s names, especially minor characters: a coachman whose predecessor left after an incident when he farted in his mistresses’ presence, is called Fartokoff. Another character who smokes is called Tobakov. But Van himself admits to being an incorrigible joker so we soon learn to expect jokes in unexpected places. The opening lines make fun of the English translation of the famous opening lines of Anna Karenina by turning them inside out: All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike. This is only the beginning of a long list of references to famous writers, some of which are simple puns on writers' names or titles of books (as Van says, he would die with a pun on his lips), while others are mischievous satire (see the updates). But Nabokov refers to his own books in a tongue-in-cheek way too: the poet John Shade from [b:Pale Fire|7805|Pale Fire|Vladimir Nabokov|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388155863s/7805.jpg|1222661] is mentioned several times and Ada’s sister Lucette, a kind of permanent twelve-year old, references the character Dolores from [b:Lolita|7604|Lolita|Vladimir Nabokov|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1377756377s/7604.jpg|1268631]: “I’m like Dolores —when she says she’s ‘only a picture painted on air.’”
“Never could finish that novel—much too pretentious.” answers Van!
The narrative is mostly in the third person and is told simultaneously in several time periods: a ‘present’, this ultimate twilight when the narrative is being written by elderly Van from his bed-chair; and various time periods in his past life, slipping from one to the other with the use of asides sometimes in the first person, as the Van and Ada of the ‘present’ discuss the narrative of the past in which they are both referred to in the third person.
'Oh let's not return yet,' she (Ada) cried, 'oh, wait.'
'But I want to make sure of our whereabouts and when-bouts,' said Van, 'It is a philosophical need.'
Van is constantly concerned with fixing the coordinates of Space and catching sight of the lining of Time, and with how duration expands and contracts depending on whether it's in the past or in the present.. The second last section is written in the style of an essay on the relationship of Time and Space, thoughts which Van rehearses in his head in the ‘now’ of a journey which has him driving forwards in Space but backwards in time towards Ada as he remembers her. But it can also be seen as him moving backwards in Space to a place he’s lived in before, but forward in time towards a new Ada transformed by Time.
This book is one giant ardis - you can turn it inside out and back to front and upside down and it will still point to Time.
……………………………………………….
Something for Proust fans:
Something for everyone:
Paying attention was a problem throughout my reading, and for reasons other than memory triggers. In the beginning, I failed to fully engage with the characters. Ada herself irritated me quite a bit (early Ada is an impossibly pedantic twelve-year old), and whenever the narrative focused on her, I wandered off. But then, as if Nabokov knew I’d had enough of Ada, she disappeared from the narrative for a long stretch. In the last image we get of early Ada, she is standing against a tree, her shoulder blades pressed against the trunk, reminding us of a caterpillar clinging to the bark. The later Ada, very often heard through letters, is a much more interesting character, as if she’d undergone some kind of metamorphosis since we’d last seen her. I realised that the picture we had of her in the early sections was the narrator’s version, necessarily coloured by his obsessive love for her, whereas the Ada of the letters was a character speaking in her own voice for the first time.
There were many things about this book I found interesting though the reading of it wore me out. I didn't ever want to stop reading it, but I did want to move faster through the book, something I couldn’t do because Nabokov demands attention all the time like a spoilt child. You can’t skim read; if you even try, he punishes you by making you feel completely lost so that you have to go back and reread what you’ve missed. Is it any wonder that it took me six weeks to get through it - no, that can’t be right, let me check my automnally tocking calendar. Ok, it took me exactly three Oknovber weeks but they felt like six. That’s another coincidence: our varying perceptions of Time and the unreliability of memory are some of the themes in the book, and my having to go back in order to go forward is also fitting because the central twist seems to be ‘reversal’ - back to front, inside out, upside down.
An apt illustration of the reversal theme is Van's brief stint as a circus performer. Using the stage name, ‘Mascodagama', he performs stunts while walking on his hands. Nabokov underlines the significance of this episode in case we've missed it: It was the standing of a metaphor on its head not for the sake of the trick’s difficulty, but in order to perceive an ascending waterfall or a sunrise in reverse: a triumph over the ardis of time.
The word ‘ardis’ has huge significance in the novel too. We are told that it means the point of an arrow in Greek, and Nabokov chooses the word as the name of the most significant location in the novel, Ardis Hall, to which the arrow of Time in the narrative points constantly. The arbors of Ardis are an idyllic Garden of Eden in which ardorous Ada and Van are a new Adam and Eve (and a reversal again with Ada as Ada-m and Van Veen as Eve), the first children, and straight out of
Spoiler
Mon enfant, ma soeur,Songe à la douceur
D'aller là-bas vivre ensemble!
Aimer à loisir,
Aimer et mourir
Au pays qui te ressemble…
Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté,
Luxe, calme et volupté.
My child, my sister,
Think of the tenderness
Of living together, down there
Loving each other
Loving and dying
In a land that resembles you..
There, all is but order and beauty,
Sumptuous stillness and sensuous pleasure.
(my translation)
Nabokov doesn’t quote Baudelaire but he recalls his poem in a parody version:
Mon enfant, ma soeur
Songe à l’epaisseur,
Du grand chêne à Tagne;
Songe à la montagne,
Songe à la douceur—
(He gives a translation of that verse in the notes at the back of the book: my child, my sister, think of the thickness of the big oak at Tagne, think of the mountain, think of the tenderness)
This veiled reference to Baudelaire occurs in the narrative just when the real Charles Baudelaire has been conflated with the real René de Chateaubriand into a fictional entomologist called Charles Chateaubriand; Nabokov's parody is itself a conflation of the Baudelaire poem with one by Chateaubriand. Later in the narrative, lines from the Chateaubriand poem, Souvenir du pays de France are recalled making a link with the parodied Baudelaire poem.
Spoiler
Ma soeur, te souvient-il encoreDu château que baignait la Dore…
Oh ! qui me rendra mon Hélène,
Et ma montagne et le grand chêne?
These lines are parodied as:
My sister, do you still recall
The blue Ladore and Ardis Hall…
Oh! qui me rendra ma colline
Et le grand chêne and my colleen?
(Incidentally, there are numerous references throughout the book to Ireland; Irish phrases, Irish people and their physiognomy - Van’s maternal great grandmother was Irish).
To revert to the central theme of reversal, the novel takes place on a planet called Antiterra (or Demonia) where another planet known as Terra is mentioned sometimes but as if it were only an imagined place, the equivalent of our heaven; accounts of it are found mostly in literature or in the records kept by terrapists of patients suffering from hallucinations or altered states.
Spoiler
Speaking of psychoanalysis, Freud is definitely given the cold shoulder - he’s referred to as Froid (cold)In Antiterra, the United States or Estotia, seems to be governed by Russians - a nice little joke on Nabokov’s part, and in Europe, France is governed by an English king as if France became a British dominion after the battle of Waterloo. Iraq is a giant national park, another Eden.
The action of the novel takes place between 1870 and the 1960s but the Antiterra of the 1870s is a much more advanced place than our world was at that time, though scientific progress has taken a different direction entirely, with, for example, dorophones instead of telephones, which, oddly and sometimes disastrously, are dependent on the plumbing system rather than on any network of cables.
The book is full of anagrams and puns and word games - the characters even play scrabble at one point - so it is tempting to sniff out the word odour in ‘dorophone’ (Nabokov’s anagrammatic inventions don’t always have to correspond letter for letter). He is particularly playful when it comes to character’s names, especially minor characters: a coachman whose predecessor left after an incident when he farted in his mistresses’ presence, is called Fartokoff. Another character who smokes is called Tobakov. But Van himself admits to being an incorrigible joker
Spoiler
Ich bin ein unverbesserlicher Witzbold“Never could finish that novel—much too pretentious.” answers Van!
The narrative is mostly in the third person and is told simultaneously in several time periods: a ‘present’, this ultimate twilight when the narrative is being written by elderly Van from his bed-chair; and various time periods in his past life, slipping from one to the other with the use of asides sometimes in the first person, as the Van and Ada of the ‘present’ discuss the narrative of the past in which they are both referred to in the third person.
Spoiler
To give an example of the complexity of the approach: at one point, after a long digression in the narrative of the past when the characters’ bicycles had been abandoned in a forest and they had wondered far from the spot where they left them, the Van of the ‘present’ discusses how to get the characters back to where they left the bicycles with the Ada of the ‘present’: 'We must now find our bicycles,' said Van, 'we are lost "in another part of the forest."''Oh let's not return yet,' she (Ada) cried, 'oh, wait.'
'But I want to make sure of our whereabouts and when-bouts,' said Van, 'It is a philosophical need.'
Van is constantly concerned with fixing the coordinates of Space and catching sight of the lining of Time, and with how duration expands and contracts depending on whether it's in the past or in the present.
Spoiler
The Ladore river at Ardis is a play on the french word for duration: 'la durée'.This book is one giant ardis - you can turn it inside out and back to front and upside down and it will still point to Time.
……………………………………………….
Something for Proust fans:
Spoiler
The novel is being written by the elderly narrator on his death bed, and he talks of writing himself out of life into fiction as Proust did. The manuscript is being typed up and edited by a patient young woman not unlike Proust’s Celeste Albaret. The major part of the narrator’s recollections concern his childhood and youth and the places he spent time in during that period. There’s a huge focus on his obsessive love and his jealousy. There’s a period when he lives in a private seclusion with a lover almost as if she’s his prisoner. Then there’s the lover who dies in an accident. In the later sections we see characters altered by Time yet the narrator himself is somehow less altered than others. Plus there’s the fact that of all the authors referenced in the book, Proust’s name is by far the most often cited. See the updates for quotes which directly recall Proust's 'Recherche'. It's tempting to see the book as Nabokov’s salute to ‘A la Recherche du Temps Perdu’.Something for everyone:
Spoiler
Test: Are you perhaps more proficient in languages than you think? Here’s a little snippet from a treatise on contraception devices in a patois created by Nabokov called Kapuscan (!) : Sole sura metoda por decevor natura, est por un strong-guy de contino-contino-contino jusque le plesir brimz; et lors, a lulitima instanta, svitchera a l’altra gropa; ma perquoi una femme ardora andor ponderosa ne se retorna kvick enof, la transita e facilitata per positio torovago (Hint: 'torovago' is not the missionary position..)
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.
If I didn't knew better, it seems Nabokov wanted to prove he's 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. Of course, 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 rather disappointed this book didn't resonate with me. I have booked a second reading.
If I didn't knew better, it seems Nabokov wanted to prove he's 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. Of course, 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 rather disappointed this book didn't resonate with me. I have booked a second reading.
I can't do it.... I tried. I really tried but despite how beautifully Nabokov writes, I can not make it through this.
challenging
sad
slow-paced
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
dark
mysterious
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This novel made my skin creep in every single way.. sometimes I hate Nabokov in English - here I really don’t. Nabokov in all his glory forever flexing away and showing off. Haunting stuff.
Quante parentesi vuoi nel libro?
Nabokov: Si.
E va bene. Nabokov era un genio. Devo premetterlo perché altrimenti mi viene detto che non capisco quello che leggo (che è pure vero). Però per fortuna il libro l’ho preso in prestito dalla biblioteca (c’ho messo solo 34 anni a fare la tessera) quindi non c'ho nemmeno speso soldi (li sarei davvero morta per autocumbustione). È che sono troppo stupida per Nabokov ma mi sono comunque sforzata di andare avanti perché sapevo che se avessi smesso di leggerlo non lo avrei più ripreso (e quanto avrei voluto lanciarlo contro il muro...). Nel limite datomi dalla mia stupidità sono comunque riuscita a capire bene o male cosa volesse dirmi Nabokov con questo trip di lsd ma non mi è piaciuto come lo ha fatto. Se la lettura deve diventare uno sforzarsi e ogni volta che prendi in mano un libro devi fare un gran respiro qualcosa non va e la vita è troppo breve, il tempo libero a disposizione troppo poco e il mondo troppo pieno di libri da leggere per soffermarsi troppo su qualcosa che evidentemente non doveva funzionare.
Nabokov: Si.
E va bene. Nabokov era un genio. Devo premetterlo perché altrimenti mi viene detto che non capisco quello che leggo (che è pure vero). Però per fortuna il libro l’ho preso in prestito dalla biblioteca (c’ho messo solo 34 anni a fare la tessera) quindi non c'ho nemmeno speso soldi (li sarei davvero morta per autocumbustione). È che sono troppo stupida per Nabokov ma mi sono comunque sforzata di andare avanti perché sapevo che se avessi smesso di leggerlo non lo avrei più ripreso (e quanto avrei voluto lanciarlo contro il muro...). Nel limite datomi dalla mia stupidità sono comunque riuscita a capire bene o male cosa volesse dirmi Nabokov con questo trip di lsd ma non mi è piaciuto come lo ha fatto. Se la lettura deve diventare uno sforzarsi e ogni volta che prendi in mano un libro devi fare un gran respiro qualcosa non va e la vita è troppo breve, il tempo libero a disposizione troppo poco e il mondo troppo pieno di libri da leggere per soffermarsi troppo su qualcosa che evidentemente non doveva funzionare.