Vladimir Nabokov: Ada or Ardor (I Love Book Club #4, starts 26 September)

Most of Nabokov's work is slight beside, say, Thomas Mann (and, boy, would he bristle at the comparison); but his prose and structural ingenuity make the silly style vs substance debate look even sillier.

― Anakin Ska Walker (AKA Skarth Vader) (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, September 21, 2011 11:17 AM (25 minutes ago)

Alfred, what sort of initiation/preparatory understanding do you consider useful when reading Nabokov?

on first exposure to nabokov it's easy to be convinced by his insistence that everyone else should write just like him, which is a problem because without a maybe literally singular kind of autistic attentive genius his style deflates into total grossness. i think it's a phase a lot of people go through maybe. i needed about a year of trying before realizing the door was not going to open.

Alfred, what sort of initiation/preparatory understanding do you consider useful when reading Nabokov?

A receptiveness to pleasure.

add something about how dumb freud was and that is a (written) nabokov interview answer

Ha. Throw in some chess and butterflies while you're at it

it's right though, the only context necessary for nabokov is a very general idea of what happened 1917-1960 (that's about when the clock stops).

After reading the first six chapters I will say that while I am enjoying some of the weirdness of it, the strange concepts, but the writing doesn't seem up to snuff: a bunch trilingual puns and some dime store alliteration does not a style make.

the thing abt this book is that nabs is basically trolling you

like, more than he usually is

Yeah, that's why I didn't want to get too worked up. DNFTT

well sometimes its fun to let him work you up! its also sort of nice because the unsolvable cryptic crossword nature and contempt for 'meaning' means that while any opinion you have abt this book will be stupid (c.f. posts itt) p much all opinions abt this book are stupid (again) so theres no pressure to 'understand' what hes 'trying to do' or any of that english class garbage

No, I agree - be seduced. otoh my initial impressions of Ada were that's it not very seductive, but am looking forward to allowing it another go.

haha those too hung up on 'meaning' will stall earlier in his oeuvre than this. my problem w/ this is that it's not seductive -- it's totally wrapped up in its own inert obsessions, and all the nabokov preoccupations (not just the chessbutterflyclock ones but the others: memory, loss, cruelty, translation, little girls) feel ticcish and hollow. it's such a close thing, though! since even when nabokov is excellent reading him's a little like being given an unusually affecting demonstration of someone's train set.

i'm just reading lolita instead

Ada comes close to being the best example of F.O. Matthiessen's definition of "decadent" writing: a grotesque imbalance between form and content (I'm paraphrasing).

ada is interesting though in that it's sort of the trinity test for all the stuff nabokov had been insisting for years about authors creating entirely hermetic worlds. none of his other books meet this ideal.

hell is other ppl's opinions

welcome to the book club, Lamp. <closes door>

James Redd, no, I don't know the book you mentioned, I am fairly ill-read, but thanks for the thought.

I oddly have almost no idea what the Ada book is actually like. The descriptions here make it sound like something special, distinctive and probably not very enjoyable.

pinefox, that book just came out recently in English and is not that well known.

Feel like if the overwroughtness overripeness overlongness were a miscast studio-destroying movie by a great European director who started in the silents about to end his career I could learn to love it, but as a novel, I dunno

Nabokov is the only novelist whose work I largely enjoy yet whose reception by the uninitiated makes me guarded. He inspires cults.

VN is sometimes my favorite author but i find myself responding the same way to some of his most fervent admirers. i remember reading one acolyte boast that he'd avoided reading mann after reading of nabokov's disdain for him. definitely a bad idea to turn nab's funny and bitchy and more or less completely random lit-opinions (hg wells and joseph conrad good, dostoevsky and camus and faulkner bad) into some kind of gospel.

People otm about adopting VN snobbery as their own. He said the writer has to know everything. There's some story about some kid coming to him saying he wanted to be a writer. V pointed out the window and said "Can you tell he what the name of that tree is?" When the kid couldn't he said "Then you, my friend will never be a writer." The guy to whom he later told this story then asked him if he knew how many home runs Hank Aaron hit and he was off be orders of magnitude.

If you know all the names of all the trees and bugs you stand a better chance of being able to create the good old-fashioned illusion of authorial infallibility. If you don't maybe you can be some other kind of writer.

Didn't they have natural history books or encyclopedias back then?

Ha. If only he had had Wikipedia, then Ada would have been twice as long.

Like his Eugene Onegin.

best part about that nabokov/kid story is that it isn't just "if you don't know the names of things you're not paying the proper kind of attention", it's also "if you don't know the names of the trees outside your childhood window how will you obsessively conjure their ghosts after you have been displaced by time and bolsheviks"

vn's litpinions aren't random though; they're just kinda narrowminded. he dislikes Ideas because he finds them pushy and misshapen (and because he was expelled from eden by a political movement that loved utilitarian writers like chernyshevsky so much it mandated them) and thinks the writer ought to be creating a Convincing Otherworld that Makes The Spine Sob. he's good at seeing through snobbishness around stuff like dr. jekyll and mr. hyde, stuff that's eerie and unplaceably affecting, and he's (quietly) well aware that such stuff, like his own work, gets its power from tinkering with and constructing new permutations of actual conditions under which actual people live their lives -- he's not really a hermit. but he's less good at understanding that since real people really engage earnestly with Ideas all the time, books that do the same thing aren't only a necessary part of the big general ongoing mimesis/exegesis project literature is doing on experience but actually capable of being as affecting, even if not as elegant, as the stuff that uses its characters' ideas mostly as jokes, or lures to doom. even if it doesn't make vn's personal spine sob.

I was impressed that he loved Cheever's "The Country Husband," which is of course the kind of crypto-fantasy he'd love but is also written by John Cheever.

i've always been surprised he couldn't get more into yoknapatawpha.

didn't he call him a "bushy-haired horror whose novels should have been boiled in succotash for more flavour"?

that's what mirror-universe nabokov said about pushkin.

Man this is a tough slog.

do you not like spending time w/ the enchanting van and ada?

Nope, not really.

yeah, not really in a Nabokov mood before going in, & finding it uniquely dreadful this time around. iirc some bad things befall these two tedious shits, so I've got that to look forward to.

from this thread one would think that VN was a worse writer than ... than ... Jennifer Egan!

In the case of this book, he might be

apparently VN and william f buckley were neighbors! http://www.readrussia.com/magazine/summer-2008/00026/

I wonder how many times somebody has referred to this book of Ada, or Ordure.

Looked at the Michael Wood book and he definitely admits that there are problems with this novel- at one point he basically says "Nabokov, please!"

"Nabokov, please!"

title for musical

I swallowed hard and read part I this morning. What on earth to say? I'm sure it was intended as an Augie March type of entertaining romp, but it really didn't do it for me. It's what you write when you're too worn out to create real people, imo, and too learnèd to write nothing.

In fairness I did read very quickly, so I may have missed out on a world of joy in the puns and alternate histories, but that really isn't my thing anyway.

It's remarkable that no one here seems actively to like this book which is regarded as a major work by a great writer.

How bad it must be!

Brian Boyd's notes have some interesting trivia. Random example: ADAH, who sometimes appears in crossword puzzles as "Wife of Esau," is apparently yet another aspect or avatar of the overloaded Ada. But, unlike some other novels that might require consulting reference materials, this book doesn't seem to be anymore enjoyable to read once you've acquired the extra info needed to get around certain obstacles.

It's remarkable that no one here seems actively to like this book which is regarded as a major work by a great writer.

well its not a very likable book! its supposed to be funny, but the joke is mostly on the reader and its supposed to be critical but its mostly critical of analysis so what can you really say?

i think part II in particular is really interesting and last time i read it i thought that part I might have 'more to say' about 'how we live now' than anything else hes written and i think cryptic crosswords are fun idk. its hard to say its 'flawed' really, part I is sort of like a videogame where no one has explained the rules and you can never win, but thats whats singular and awesome about the novel.

I already have way too much on my plate but I want to read this just so I can raise a defense

But cryptic crosswords are soluble once you are accustomed to the rules, whereas this thing isn't- it's an artist's blueprint of an infernal machine to hang on a museum wall but not to be constructed.

Can we do something like Angels And Demons instead next month?

james are you thinking of this?
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/be/Duchamp_LargeGlass.jpg/388px-Duchamp_LargeGlass.jpg

I haven't read Michael Wood's book in ages but I don't think any critic regards Ada as a major work, pinefox.