A NOTE BEFORE READING: This is not like any of my other book reviews. The book is “Ada, or Ardor, a Family Chronicle” by Vladimir Nabokov, author of “Lolita”. As “Lolita” dealt with pedophilia, so “Ada” deals with incest, and the tale is the recount of one Ivan “Van” Veen and his relationship with his half-sister Ada. They share a common father and twin mothers (or possibly they are both the children of the same woman; there is conflicting evidence), so they are biologically siblings. All of this takes place on an Earth known as Demonia, or Antiterra, which, some time in the recent past, accidentally became aware of “Terra” – implied to be our world, one universe over – during an incident known as the Lettrocalamity. “The L disaster,” as it is known, was apparently so awful that electricity is totally banned and the poorly understood world of Terra is mystified. Annoyingly, this is never discussed in full.
“Ada” is billed on the back cover as Nabokov’s crowning achievement. I actually started writing this review the same month I started reading the book: August 2007. What follows is actually the pared-down edition of a book review that was, at one time, 3,500 words long.
Van Veen meets his “cousin” Adelaida in the summer of 1884. Ada lives at the estate of Artis with her mother Marina, her father Dan, and her half sister Lucette. Marina married Dan when his cousin (Demon Veen, Van’s father) knocked her up.
Ardis is located (I think) in what appears to be Antiterra’s version of New Hampshire. Van is an irritating young man of the world and Ada raises butterflies. Marina, Dan, and Lucette are secondary characters, and only Marina (an actress who lives a theatrical life) has any kind of personality.
Worth mentioning are the locations of Van’s parents. Demon spends most of the book lording himself over people across the globe, and Aqua – Marina’s twin sister, who may or may not be Van’s mother and who seems to be the only truly likable character in the book – goes through a series of mental institutions and ultimately kills herself.
Much of the book is set in that summer of 1884, and, after a brief hop, continues in 1888. The time in between is ignored, save for a stint Van spends performing a hand walking show under the name Vascodagama, which I’m sure is a pun on something. In 1888, he returns to Ardis and reunites with Ada, and they continue to be unbearable together.
Van finds that Ada has two other lovers, and he sets out to kill them. He ends up getting shot in a totally unrelated duel and, while convalescing, they both die of unrelated causes. Van, unfortunately for me, lives to be ninety-something, despite the fact that he deserves to be taken out and shot for the good of the people around him.
It’s hard to say what, exactly, makes Van and Ada so irritating. The feeling is vague but immediate: from their first scene (in which they are alone in an attic, poring through the old effects of their parents) they are unrealistically smart and unbearably smug. Ada says at one point in the book that her tested IQ is over 200, and I believe it. But there’s a catch, which I’ll get to when I evaluate Nabokov’s writing style, which I’ll get to right after we get past the Lightning Round.
Ultimately, who are these people? Even before the incestuous culmination of the present generation, the Veen family tree features much inbreeding. The trait they were breeding for is, apparently, assholism.
Save Aqua, all of the characters in this book have, to some degree, the key traits of intelligence, hypocrisy, and insufferability. To be sure, this is a story of a brother and a sister who are lovers, but it never actually portrays them as people. Cue theme from “Midnight Cowboy”.
Ada and Van contain many human qualities, and yet they don’t actually seem human. They lie, love, laugh, learn – but all with a sort of mechanized detachment that at times is genuinely disturbing. Evaluated with utmost sterility: if a brother and sister decide to have sex – an act forbidden across an entire spectrum of written and unwritten rules – there at least ought to be some kind of forethought involved. That never happens here: the summer Ada and Van meet consists chiefly of simmering lust. Sadly, this is really in keeping with their personalities as robots with filthy minds.
That alone would have made this a bad book. To make it a bad book with a good pedigree, Vladimir Nabokov threw every single word he knew into it, and when he ran out of those he made up more. I have no doubt that he was a brilliant man, but the key takeaway lesson I was given in
exchange for six months of my life is that there is “real” intelligence and there is “functional” intelligence. “Real” intelligence is how smart you are, and Nabokov was surely very smart. “Functional” intelligence is how effectively you can communicate your ideas, and Nabokov is an epic, spectacular failure.
Nabokov’s writing style is not only merciless, but also fantastically counterintuitive. I fail to see why he had to switch randomly between English, French and Russian. If you haven’t had the pleasure of experiencing this yourself, it’s like driving down the road and switching gears randomly between fifth, second, and reverse. It’s hard to say what the average reader is supposed to make of frequent random passages in Russian, which are sometimes translated in the appendix… and sometimes aren’t. And if Nabokov’s other languages are land mines in this book, his English is a machine gunner.
Apparently, writing to the demographic that still uses the “æ” symbol in regular correspondence, Nabokov must have raided Webster’s tomb to get some of the words he gifts unto Van and Ada. In addition to this, the esoteric technology of Antiterra – which, remember, does not use electricity – has its own cryptic anthology of names. Movies are filmed in heliocolor, calls are placed on dorophones, and messages are sent via aerocable.
“Ada, or Ardor” is obstructively dense now. I suspect it will be virtually unreadable in a century. However, I assure any readers from the future that this is for the best.
The day I finished the book, I saw it coming, and I began to get Upcoming Parole Fever, manifested in this case by me throwing the text against a wall a couple of times as I neared the end.
The parts were getting shorter. I hit Part Four, which was the innermost Hell. It was a monologue, given by Van in his infinitely smug style, about the nature of the passage of time. This served to remind me of the sheer amount of my life I had given to this book. I began ripping matches out of their books and sticking them in between the pages of mine.
And yet…
Part Five, the last, was almost kind. I have a duty as a reviewer not to give away the ending to you, but you should know that it’s not really an ending. It’s simply a reevaluation of what came before, of Van and Ada’s lives, and their life lived together.
It was so touching I actually considered not burning the book but, hell, I’d already stuck the matches in.
In the end, what had come to grind on my sensibilities the most were not the irritating personality defects I had observed in all the characters, it was Nabokov’s way of shoving them in my face. The infinite weaknesses of all the characters, filtered through the cynical dynamo of Van Veen’s mind, had become toxic. It was as if I’d spent the last six months of my life listening to these people bicker in the back of the car. I found I didn’t care anymore that Van and Ada were actively practicing incest, or that Marina was pathetic, or that Demon was a douchebag, or that the only thing Van seemed to remember about any of the characters were their flaws.
I walked outside with “Ada” and another matchbook, this one full.
There has got to be a deep philosophical question in the ethics of mutual sibling sexual attraction. Nabokov missed it. There has got to be a deep, interesting story about the “L” incident that has made Antiterra so wary of electricity. Nabokov didn’t write it. This is a book of lies and condescension and hypocrisy, and when I found a nice, snowy mound out of the wind, I set it on fire.
When the embedded matches only scorched the edges of the pages, I stuck the full book in and set that on fire. After I shook out the dead matches, I found a fresh one and tried one last time to do some damage, but it didn’t take.
I took the book back to my room and kept going, denting and rending. Finally, at the stroke of midnight, the front cover tore off, and I decided, after consideration, that that was enough.
I reattached the cover with the minimal amount of duct tape required to keep it on. It covered part of the spine, which now said simply said “ADA, OR”.
I took up a permanent marker and, gently aping the squat font, added one more word, thus officially retitling my copy “ADA, OR TORPOR”.