Ada o Ardore

Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle is a fabulous and fanciful amorous dystopia. Right away, with his trial balloon: “All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike,” Vladimir Nabokov shows that his love story is a wicked and highly intellectual parody of every Leggi tutto

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 z Leggi tutto

Oh man, what can I say about this book? Just that I could probably reread Ada , and only Ada , for the rest of my life and still feel satisfied. For the most part, I read this book the way I usually read the first time around - that is, superficially, just trying to make general sense of what's going Leggi tutto

“Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm; not the recurrent beats of the rhythm but the gap between two such beats, the gray gap between black beats: the Tender Interval.” First off, I should say this is my least favourite Nabokov novel. It’s an insanely clever novel and probabl Leggi tutto

Suppose things had worked out better for Humbert Humbert. Suppose he'd gone to jail for a while but hadn't had a heart attack there, and suppose Lolita hadn't died while still a teenager, giving birth to a stillborn child. Suppose instead that they'd both survived, had various sordid adventures, and Leggi tutto

I have trouble writing positive reviews. It's precisely when I love a book that I most strongly feel how little justice my words can do to the experience of reading it, which is how I end up writing reviews like this . Nonetheless, Ada deserves a review. I'm not a very widely read person, and I rarely Leggi tutto

I came to a strange realization while reading this book: that practically every instance I can think of where an author used an unreliable narrator, it's always the same character: he's an intelligent, introspective guy with a slight cynical mean streak, a man with a fairly high opinion of himself ( Leggi tutto

I am continuing with my Nabokov project and this means that 'Ada..' is my 15th (approximately, I am reading them in the chronological order) novel by Nabokov. This is Nabokov - a sophisticated, witty, difficult and an exeptionally beautiful text heavily charged with unusual mataphors, non-existant w Leggi tutto