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

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.

The Large Glass aka The Bride...? Yeah, except that I like that, but not necessarily the umpteenth riff on it, the joke got old at some point. Somebody said in that Calvin Tomkins bio, maybe Tomkins himself, that when Duchamp did it first, he did it last.

Come to think of it, wasn't one of the things the late Richard Hamilton was famous for was restoring The Large Glass?

Somehow this thread and the Lou Reed Collabo threads have merged and the phrase "electricity comes from other planets" has taken on a new meaning.

Cryptic crossword doesn't work; the fun of the right cryptic is in balanced contest between setter and solver; 'fair'. The video game analogy is nearer, but it seems to me more like being trapped in a longstanding family parlour game, where, rudely, you are ignored. Watching someone else's way of passing the time. (and yeah we know vn knows this & comments on it, & the book scratches at its solipsism, but is the game worth that candle? I lean no)

Well said.

Alfred and the pinefox, Wood describes this book as a late work as opposed to a mature work, meaning that there is still plenty of ambition but the skill isn't there any more to back it up

http://img.timeinc.net/time/magazine/archive/covers/1969/1101690523_400.jpg

http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ljyy368Iky1qdcdf4o1_400.jpg

http://www.fathom.com/course/10701032/104_ada.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.

"the closest the second half of the twentieth century has come to matching Ulysses" according to Brian Boyd.

(Don't quote that to disprove you Alfred, more out of fascination with boyd's Nabokov idolatry. He must know that his blindness to vn's faults makes him seem like a vn creation. maybe that's his point? OH THIS HALL OF MIRRORS)

"Brian Boyd" is an anagram for "Ian d'Boy"

On the whole, however, the novelist is pleased by the reception of "Ada," a story involving incest, among other things, which was published last year. "Except for a number of helpless little hacks who were unable to jog beyond the first chapters, American reviewers have been remarkably perceptive in regard to my most cosmopolitan and poetic novel.

"As to the British press, the observation of a few discerning critics were also most welcome; the buffoons turned out to be less clever than usual, whilst my regular guide, Mr. Philip Toynbee, seemed even more distressed by "Ada" than he had been by "Pale Fire."

NYT

15x15 = 225? Looks like maybe he WAS trying to make a crossword.

Anyway, maybe Part II will be better but at this point it's making every other overstuffed and overlong pretentious novel look good, the same way Pomplamoose make every other twee act look good.

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

Wood does indeed raise his mighty thumb in favor of Ada, iirc - most of my library is in storage, so I can't completely qualify that. His book on N. is amazing, but the fact that Ada gets all applause and The Gift is only afforded, like, three mentions (if that) has always irked me.

Can only find one mention of that last: "I have concentrated on Nabokov's works in English, but the Russian works, especially The Defence and The Gift, have also been much on my mind." Don't know if we chose to write about Ada because it was a personal favorite or because of its importance as door-stopping career-capper.

Thinking maybe strongo was right and I should read something else I never got to, maybe one of the short stories like "The Vane Sisters."

Many of his short stories sculpt with greater detail and menace the nameless terror in which his novels thrive but sometimes comes off rather chic. "The Vane Sisters" is a good example; my students always get off on "Signs and Symbols."

Those two have their own chapter in the Michael Wood book, Alfred. Well, almost, they share it with Bend Sinister.

Where is the love for Invitation to a Beheading?

Those two have their own chapter in the Michael Wood book, Alfred. Well, almost, they share it with Bend Sinister.

I liked how Wood, iirc, pretty much tosses out any actual discussion of Bend Sinister's contents to focus entirely upon the last fifth - the climax involving the bureaucratic "mishandling" of the son's detention.

Of course, I'm going entirely by memory.

Well, this a Nabokov thread, so...

Wood keen to emphasise the painful humanity of Bend Sinister iirc, rather than N's tricks so-called.

Invitation to a Beheading was one of the first I read. I loved it tho at the time I was reading it in a context of Beckett and Camus (being a walking cliche of a moody teenager). That is to say existential and sensational solitude or isolation. I'd be interested to read it again having read more N.

Ada almost insufferable to read, and yet and yet, there's a certain impressiveness to the structures - esp the topography.

A lot of his writing makes butterflies out of the grub-like mundane (missing trains, misunderstanding, car drives, spilt milk), this does the opposite - takes a parody of Russian romance and smashes it with a sledgehammer, deliberately overburdens it to kill it.

That is very well said by Fizzles. Not that I've read any of the books he mentions save MW's.