Ada, or Ardor
A Family Chronicle
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Ada, or Ardor
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Narrated by:
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Arthur Morey
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By:
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Vladimir Nabokov
About this listen
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.
©1969 Vladimir Nabokov (P)2011 Brilliance Audio, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
Critic reviews
What did you like best about Ada, or Ardor? What did you like least?
It`s a brilliantly imagined fictitious world with its own history, culture and inventions. The characters are not especially sympathetic but the reader is drawn into their strange universe and views their fascinating lives up close.What was one of the most memorable moments of Ada, or Ardor?
There is a scene by the swimming pool at the beginning of the second fateful summer when the protagonist, Van, is witness to his beloved`s tangled relationships with three different men yet fails to penetrate the truth of her infidelity despite his forensic interrogation.Did Arthur Morey do a good job differentiating each of the characters? How?
He did quite well, subtly modulating his tones to adapt to male and female characters.Was Ada, or Ardor worth the listening time?
Yes, it is a long novel but the narrative accelerates throughout the book.Any additional comments?
Personally, I found it harder to appreciate Nabokov`s verbal dexterity aurally; I think one needs to see the words on the page to understand some of his puns and wordplay.An incestuous affair not for all the family
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I fell into the latter.
I felt the book was more a showcase of literary techniques to show superiority and command of language and a continual attempt to shock than a story to be savoured and enjoyed.
I have no issues with subtle use of language but felt the switching between languages just distracted from the story - which if I'm honest I'm not really sure I could describe. I believe in text form it is a challenging read and for some that makes the best kind of book
I did make it to the bItter end -the performance was good which helped a lot but it just wasn't for me.
Just not for me
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Some readers may find the book difficult for literary or reasons of personal mores. I have nothing to say to the latter, but those in the first group might find the book easy to enjoy and appreciate if they picked up the main themes it is intended to display using sensuous and comic imagery. Obviously, it is a philosophical (sic) look at our notions of time and space. However much we may dislike it, we have no choice to perceive them subjectively; but an absolute notion of them is inherited by the religious tradition while the relative notion of them is presented as scientific, hence objective. Clearly, this is being very economical with the truth. Scientific space-time notions are not served as 'truths' to the waiting public, they are just conceptual models or tools used to explain things. Fine! But it is we who created those models, so it's bit odd to call deductions and observations based on our own creations objective. This is Nabokov's quarrel with relativity theory.
Events and imagery in the book are the stepping stones to used to sustain this argument with many a nabokovian flourish, and the whole thing is bound together by the enduring silk threads of love between Ada and Van. Never mind the hint of incest! As always, one cannot help either bursting into torrents of merriment or into softer chuckles as one reads on, and I think in spite of its seriousness of themes, it is among the funniest of books by Nabokov I've read.
Now to a few thorns on the roses; of course, it is the author's priviledge to mix in words and phrases from several languages. But Russian is bit too much, I just missed most of what is intended in that difficult tongue, and a bit I understood is what I could deduce from the context with groans. Unseemly footnotes may have helped, but they break one's reading rhythm abominably.
I recommend "Ada" very highly as a literary work that has given me unalloyed pleasure at each and every reading. Perhaps, Audible might soon offer us a better audio rendring of this marvellous book.
A work of wonderous and haunting beauty.
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Masterpiece
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Beautiful prose fiction
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