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Ada, or Ardor
- A Family Chronicle
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 20 hrs and 46 mins
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Publisher's summary
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.
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For the past twenty-five years, Margaret Atwood has written works of striking originality and imagination. In The Blind Assassin, she stretches the limits of her accomplishments as never before, creating a novel that is entertaining and profoundly serious. The novel opens with these simple, resonant words: "Ten days after the war ended, my sister drove a car off the bridge." They are spoken by Iris, whose terse account of her sister Laura's death in 1945 is followed by an inquest report proclaiming the death accidental.
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Good book, TERRIBLE audio!
- By Whitney on 04-27-09
By: Margaret Atwood
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Picnic at Hanging Rock
- By: Joan Lindsay
- Narrated by: Jacqueline McKenzie
- Length: 3 hrs and 1 min
- Abridged
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St Valentine’s Day, in the midst of the hot summer of 1900, a party of schoolgirls went on a picnic to Hanging Rock. Some were never to return…. An Australian classic, the disappearance of three girls and a schoolteacher at Hanging Rock has captivated and intrigued audiences for generations. Jacqueline McKenzie’s interpretation of the best-selling novel captures all of the beauty of the Rock and illustrates the eerie sense of the unknown for which the story is legendary.
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NOT UNabridged!
- By Doreen on 05-09-15
By: Joan Lindsay
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Beauty and Sadness
- By: Yasunari Kawabata
- Narrated by: Brian Nishii
- Length: 5 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Returning to Kyoto, where temple bells announce the New Year, a grave and penitent Oki is drawn to a haunting obsession from his past. Gently lyrical, yet fierce with the stark intensity of passion, Kawabata's last novel tells the story of the lasting consequences of a brief love affair.
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nostalgic literature from Japan
- By Emily on 10-29-10
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Beguiling the Beauty
- By: Sherry Thomas
- Narrated by: Jenny Sterlin
- Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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When the Duke of Lexington meets the mysterious Baroness von Seidlitz-Hardenberg on a transatlantic liner, he is fascinated. She’s exactly what he’s been searching for - a beautiful woman who interests and entices him. He falls hard and fast - and soon proposes marriage. And then she disappears without a trace.… For in reality, the "baroness" is Venetia Easterbrook - a proper young widow who had her own vengeful reasons for instigating an affair with the duke. But the plan has backfired. Venetia has fallen in love with the man she despised - and there’s no telling what might happen when she is finally unmasked….
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Worth multiple listens
- By anonymous on 09-10-19
By: Sherry Thomas
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The Shifting Fog [also published under the alternate title The House at Riverton]
- By: Kate Morton
- Narrated by: Caroline Lee
- Length: 18 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Summer 1924: On the eve of a glittering society party, by the lake of a grand English country house, a young poet takes his life. The only witnesses, sisters Hannah and Emmeline Hartford, will never speak to each other again. Winter 1999: Grace Bradley, 98, one-time housemaid of Riverton Manor, is visited by a young director making a film about the poet's suicide. Ghosts awaken and memories, long consigned to the dark reaches of Grace's mind, begin to sneak back through the cracks.
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Alternate title for "The House at Riverton"
- By Karen on 12-22-13
By: Kate Morton
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Madame Bovary
- By: Gustave Flaubert
- Narrated by: Davina Porter
- Length: 13 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Emma Bovary is not content to be the mere dutiful wife of a French country doctor. She yearns for excitement and a sense of romance that pulls at her so strongly she is powerless to resist, even though pursuing her dreams will exact a terrible price. Learn why Gustave Flaubert's compelling heroine has enchanted and puzzled readers for centuries.
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Now Here's a Story
- By P. Giorgio on 09-06-03
By: Gustave Flaubert
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His at Night
- By: Sherry Thomas
- Narrated by: Kate Reading
- Length: 11 hrs
- Unabridged
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Lord Vere is used to baiting irresistible traps. As a secret agent for the government, he's tracked down some of the most devious criminals in London, all the while maintaining his cover as one of society's most harmless - and idiotic - bachelors. But nothing can prepare him for the scandal of being ensnared by Elissande. Forced into a marriage of convenience, Elissande and Vere are each about to discover that they're not the only ones with a hidden agenda.
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The title is SO random!!
- By 🌿🌸Susynne🌸🌿 on 05-04-15
By: Sherry Thomas
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Orlando
- By: Virginia Woolf
- Narrated by: Clare Higgins
- Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Fantasy, love and an exuberant celebration of English life and literature, Orlando is a uniquely entertaining story. Originally conceived by Virginia Woolf as a playful tribute to the family of her friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West, Orlando's central character, a fictional embodiment of Sackville-West, changes sex from a man to a woman and lives throughout the centuries, whilst meeting historical figures of English literature.
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Magical
- By Mayca on 05-31-05
By: Virginia Woolf
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Madame Bovary
- By: Gustave Flaubert, Lydia Davis - translator
- Narrated by: Kate Reading
- Length: 13 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Emma Bovary is the original desperate housewife. Beautiful but bored, she is married to the provincial doctor Charles Bovary yet harbors dreams of an elegant and passionate life. Escaping into sentimental novels, she finds her fantasies dashed by the tedium of her days. Motherhood proves to be a burden; religion is only a brief distraction. In an effort to make her life everything she believes it should be, she spends lavishly on clothes and on her home and embarks on two disappointing affairs.
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Ironic, humorous, and restrained
- By Esther on 05-13-13
By: Gustave Flaubert, and others
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Speak, Mnemosyne!
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A 999 line poem in heroic couplets, divided into 4 cantos, was composed - according to Nabokov's fiction - by John Francis Shade, an obsessively methodical man, during the last 20 days of his life.
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An amazing feat for such a unique novel
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This novel is the story of Dreyer, a wealthy and boisterous proprietor of a men’s clothing emporium. Ruddy, self-satisfied, and thoroughly masculine, he is perfectly repugnant to his exquisite but cold middle-class wife, Martha. Attracted to his money but repelled by his oblivious passion, she longs for their nephew instead, the thin, awkward, myopic Franz. Newly arrived in Berlin, Franz soon repays his uncle’s condescension in his aunt’s bed.
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A non-Euclidean German love triangle.
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The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
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The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, the first novel Nabokov wrote in English, is a tantalizing literary mystery in which a writer’s half brother searches to unravel the enigma of the life of the famous author of Albinos in Black, The Back of the Moon, and Doubtful Asphodel. A characteristically cunning play on identity and deception, the novel concludes “ I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows.”
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A dry run at big, complex themes
- By Darwin8u on 12-08-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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The Luzhin Defense
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Nabokov’s third novel, The Luzhin Defense, is a chilling story of obsession and madness. As a young boy, Luzhin was unattractive, distracted, withdrawn, sullen — an enigma to his parents and an object of ridicule to his classmates. He takes up chess as a refuge from the anxiety of his everyday life. His talent is prodigious and he rises to the rank of grandmaster — but at a cost: in Luzhin’s obsessive mind, the game of chess gradually supplants reality.
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Life and chess are such lonely battles
- By Darwin8u on 11-13-12
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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The Enchanter
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- Unabridged
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The Enchanter is the Ur-Lolita, the precursor to Nabokov’s classic novel. At once hilarious and chilling, it tells the story of an outwardly respectable man and his fatal obsession with certain pubescent girls, whose coltish grace and subconscious coquetry reveal, to his mind, a special bud on the verge of bloom.
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Nabokov's black salad devouring a green rabbit
- By Darwin8u on 10-14-12
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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Look at the Harlequins!
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- Unabridged
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As intricate as a house of mirrors, Nabokov’s last novel is an ironic play on the Janus-like relationship between fiction and reality. It is the autobiography of the eminent Russian-American author Vadim Vadimovich N. (b. 1899), whose life bears an uncanny resemblance to that of Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, though the two are not to be confused (?).
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Peek, Memory!
- By Darwin8u on 09-11-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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Mary
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
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- Unabridged
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In a Berlin rooming house filled with an assortment of serio-comic Russian émigrés, Lev Ganin, a vigorous young officer poised between his past and his future, relives his first love affair. His memories of Mary are suffused with the freshness of youth and the idyllic ambience of pre-revolutionary Russia. In stark contrast is the decidedly unappealing boarder living in the room next to Ganin’s, who, he discovers, is Mary’s husband....
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There IS something about Mary!
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Bend Sinister
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The first novel Nabokov wrote while living in America, and the most overtly political novel he ever wrote, Bend Sinister is a modern classic. While it is filled with veiled puns and characteristically delightful wordplay, it is, first and foremost, a haunting and compelling narrative about a civilized man caught in the tyranny of a police state. Professor Adam Krug, the country's foremost philosopher, offers the only hope of resistance to Paduk, dictator and leader of the Party of the Average Man.
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A fantastic fairytale of fascism
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By: Vladimir Nabokov
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The Eye
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- Unabridged
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Nabokov’s fourth novel, The Eye, is as much a farcical detective story as it is a profoundly refractive tale about the vicissitudes of identities and appearances. Smurov, a lovelorn, excruciatingly self-conscious Russian émigré living in pre-war Berlin, commits suicide after being humiliated by a jealous husband, only to suffer even greater indignities in the afterlife as he searches for proof of his existence among fellow émigrés who are too distracted to pay him any heed.
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Ego vero, ergo sum
- By Darwin8u on 12-18-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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Lolita
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
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- Unabridged
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Awe and exhilaration—along with heartbreak and mordant wit—abound in Lolita, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsession for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America.
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An Absolutely Gorgeous Audible Experience
- By Jim on 10-26-05
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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Transparent Things
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Christopher Lane
- Length: 3 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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" Transparent Things revolves around the four visits of the hero - sullen, gawky Hugh Person - to Switzerland.... As a young publisher, Hugh is sent to interview R., falls in love with Armande on the way, wrests her, after multiple humiliations, from a grinning Scandinavian and returns to NY with his bride.... Eight years later - following a murder, a period of madness and a brief imprisonment - Hugh makes a lone sentimental journey to wheedle out his past...." (Martin Amis)
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Moments of absolute and immortal genius
- By Darwin8u on 10-15-12
By: Vladimir Nabokov
What listeners say about Ada, or Ardor
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Darwin8u
- 08-12-13
Incest, a game the Whole Family Can Play
There's a whole swath of novels I purchased in my twenties but knowing the authors' genius never felt quite ready to read (ah, tomorrow). It took me years to crack open these 'Infinite Jests', 'Moby-Dicks', these 'Recognitions' and 'Brothers Karamazovs', etc. Well, after reading 11 previous (not in time only in MY reading are some of these actually previous) Nabokov novels, and never really tripped by any, I was finally in the right spot in my life to read 'Ada, or Ardor' and give that novel the more than titular attention Nabokov's novels all demand.
Please remember people, this novel is so much more than a book about a cousin/brother who loves his cousin/sister. There is also another 1/2 sister involved, oh and IT is a book about time, memory, love. It is a novel about the past and the present (no not the future, never the future). IT is a romance of Tolstoy, Proust AND Time. IT is festooned with all the fantastic elements of Nabokov: his language, his structural genius, his playful doubling, his love of place and people. The whole novel is a giant painting where Nabokov unscrews all his paints and surrounds the canvas. He isn't satisfied with painting one side. No. The Big N wants to unwind and unroll that big cotton canvas, stretch it, and paint front and back. He wants to over-paint. HE will garish the floor, the ceiling, the walls. Nabokov hides stories within stories.
Reading Nabokov's great novels is like finding yourself alone in a beautiful park on a perfect day and suddenly your senses overwhelmed by the smell, the light, the butterflies and memories of your past. It is like an emotional contrast flush. Nabokov has intravenusly warmed you instantly from head to foot - and ZAP! WHOOP! WHOOP! Reading almost never ever gets better than Nabokov when the Master is on fire (Lolita; Pale Fire; Speak, Memory; and Ada, or Ardor).
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46 people found this helpful
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- Brian
- 11-25-14
Worst reading performance of all time.
What made the experience of listening to Ada, or Ardor the most enjoyable?
It was virtually impossible to enjoy since Arthur Morey and his editors know neither Russian nor French. I would say perhaps they don't know English, either, but that would be piling on.
Would you be willing to try another one of Arthur Morey’s performances?
Never so long as I live. An embarrassment.
Any additional comments?
I cannot stress enough how terrible this reading is. Virtually every French word is mispronounced: each pun, allusion, and echo is lost. (And of course, being American, Morey sounds like a robot.) The editors, producers, and Audible should be embarrassed.
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20 people found this helpful
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- LLea
- 08-10-12
Great book. Flawed narration.
"Ada or Ardor", written late in Nabokov's career, is a brilliant, hilarious and poignant story about two young people wildly in love who grow up to be two old people wildly in love. It takes place in an alternative world related to the one in which we live, but with interesting and peculiar differences (sort of sci-fi / fantasy). It is tricky, twisty and complicated but still lucid and and illuminating. I've read it several times over 30 years.
Regrettably, the narrator has a flat affect. I might be listening to a list of stocks and their values from the back pages of the newspaper. I found I could listen very closely - pretending there was no narrator but perhaps a computer generated voice - and then try to color the text with my own emotions. It didn't work out very well.
I hoped for a performance that recognized and illuminated the nuances of the text. It wasn't what I got. About 15% through the book I gave up.
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16 people found this helpful
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- private
- 10-19-12
Butchering Nabokov
What did you like best about Ada, or Ardor? What did you like least?
I wouldn't have thought anybody could make Nabokov's wonderful prose sound this bad: grating, irritating and affected. In his mouth, all the characters sound like conceited, shallow, spoiled, self indulgent teenagers, instead of thoughtful, lyrical, mulitdimensional people. Yes, the characters are meant to be young and self absorbed, but they shouldn't sound like valley girls (and boys) with big vocabularies, insulated from real emotional life and development by even bigger bank roles. What a disappointment ! ! !
What did you like best about this story?
But, of course, it is Nabokov, and if you can some how tune out the ugly veneer applied by the reader, the story, and the language, are still there.
Who would you have cast as narrator instead of Arthur Morey?
Anybody else, alone or with a cast, would be better.
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12 people found this helpful
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- Darryl
- 08-19-14
Love VN, but this is not for everyone
I love Nabokov, but I will admit that this is not one that will draw people to him. I think he is a genius, with some of the most beautiful writing and style, and Lolita was a revelation to me: the word play, the love of language, the literary allusions. But with Ada, we have his Ulysses, which makes it a little difficult to follow at times.
It's even hard to describe the "plot" as such; it is a biography of Van & Ada written by Van, with "interruptions" by Ada, & the editor at times, with perhaps some typos by the typist... Basically it is a sprawling chronicle of Van & Ada's lives, and of their love (very sexual at times) for each other.
I want people to read him and listen to his works, but I would start with the more straightforward and accessible novels: King Queen Knave, Laughter in the Dark, Defense, Mary, and Lolita, and get a feel for the poetic style and the way he uses different forms to reflect the content (one of the things i love) and then go on to more experimentally styled work: Invitation to a Beheading (a favorite of mine & which a friend also loved), Bend Sinister (great title, great book) Pale Fire.....
Actually, this novel (& Nabokov) makes me wish America had a more European attitude towards education and other cultures and then anyone could grasp so much more of it.
And listening to it, you miss a lot of the word play. I read it some time ago and liked it and caught some of the play, and I caught other things this time, but there is soooo much of it; literally almost every sentence has some play or allusion.
I think Ada is a bit like Ulysses. You can follow parts of the story, and I don’t think it’s as bad as Ulysses, but it is so densely packed with wordplay, and puns, and funny names, and allusions to myriad things from obscure sex words to other Nabokov novels and characters, to historical and literary characters and Russian, French, British and American literature to the point that almost every line or word has multiple lines of play woven in. In that sense it is like Ulysses.
That said, there are several moments where when you pick up on something it is very funny and I have been laughing out loud a couple times, but still so much got by me.
There is a web site Ada Online striving to annotate the whole novel and if you check it out just look at the first page and you'll see what's behind the scene so to speak.
Lolita is actually very much like Ada in this respect but the narrative “through line” is actually followable if you don’t catch any of the play.
I was thinking today that he may be the most brilliant author I’ve read or heard of. the depth of his knowledge in so many areas is phenomenal, not to mention his discovery and naming of a butterfly and all that scientific lingo. He knows fluently enough to play and pun etc in Russian, French, English, with at least a bit of German, Spanish, Latin, probably Greek and touching on Old English & I think a little Norse in Pale Fire and who knows what else, and sometimes he's punning and playing across 2-3 languages within a single word or line.
It is rather daunting and humbling reading him, especially Ada and Lolita, but he is more fun to me than Joyce because you can follow so much of his stories to some degree. and looking up annotations and stuff for his work is like a school lesson in itself.
Ada is the most densely allusive and punning of all his work I believe. (it’s amazing to me all the scholars who are sifting through his stuff and finding new allusions and connections and word play everyday in multiple languages, how can any one mind connect all this? If you're interested check out Zembla, a site full of VN info and links and criticism)
& he’s always parodying authors and some come in for a rough time, as in this bit from Ada about TS Eliot, a favorite target : “…a banker who at 65 had become an avant-garde author; in the course of one miraculous year he had produced The Waistline, a satire in free verse on Anglo-American feeding habits…”
i like to study him because I learn so much. but there is a point at which with certain works, (and Ada, and Ulysses are examples and we can name others) the only people who can instantly grasp them and love them are scholars.
the thrill i felt first reading Lolita and Defense and other VN was a revelation really, such exuberant love of words and literature, and then I also love the way, more than anyone else i knew of, that he tried to find a form for his novel that reflected the content in some way, Pale Fire being the most obvious example of that. (as is Faulkner's Sound and Fury & I think Melville's Moby Dick and Kosinski's Painted Bird, and I could go on )
i think that with experimentation you still need a character to feel for, and lacking that you can become less engaged emotionally even though you admire the experimentation. I think that is one criticism of VN, especially his work like Ada, where the game is more important, at least it seems, than the characters. Lolita even with the game still enthralled me and I “connected” with Humbert and Lolita, they are great personalities that still dominate the game and don’t get lost in the word play.
finally I have to say I'm not too enamored with this narrator; his voice is a bit too dry, and he doesn't get into the language and voices very well. I think Jeremy Irons did a magnificent reading of Lolita, and I wish they had found someone of that caliber for all of Nabokov. Some of the narrators are very good with Nabokov's work, but some leave me wishing...
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- D Willis
- 08-04-17
Wrong Narrator
Having had just listened to Jeremy Irons wonderfully narrate Lolita, I wanted mire Nabokov, but after 5 chapters, I couldnt continue. I couldn't get past the narrator, so my rating of the story suffers, as I couldn't extricate it.
I had heard Morey narrate a Stephen Pinker book, and he fit the genre well. I'll suggest he stick to non-fiction.
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- joe
- 08-08-14
Narrator does a good job
Any additional comments?
I typically don't write reviews but there were reviews on this novel about how the narrator was subpar and it gave me pause but i'm glad i tried it anyway. I thought Arthur Morey did an admirable job. Do not let him keep you from enjoying this novel.
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- W Perry Hall
- 12-28-17
Full of Lust 'n ... Genetic Combustion
Constructed with brilliance and complexity and including maybe Nabokov's most radiant, gorgeous writing, the novel runs from 1884 through 1967, covering such heady themes as the texture of time.
Unfortunately, this presented an even higher hurdle for my moral prejudices than Lolita, believe it or not. Perhaps, it's in the way the topic (incest) was approached.
In 1884, deadpan Van is 14 and precious lil' Ada is 12. They believe themselves to be first cousins, and at this tender age, Van introduces Ada to forbidden pleasures and they begin an all-consuming sexual affair, in which she is just as much an instigator as Van. The descriptor "all-consuming" is no overstatement. Ada is so obsessed she insists on introducing her younger sister to the taboo ecstacy.
Some time later Ada and Van learn that they are in fact brother and sister. It's too complex to explain the actuality of how they are siblings but did not know, except to say it's messy in itself. They are separated, by mutual consent and a promise of the son to the father, only to come back together time and again, particularly after their daddy's death.
In essence, this novel is a romance: morally verboten, erotic and fraught with danger, not the least of which is the possibility of a genetically combustible impregnation.
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- Andrew
- 06-20-14
Extraordinary work, Extraordinary writer
I had listened to Jeremy Irons' reading of Lolita with amazement, but I was so taken with his narration that I may have underrated the writer. No longer. Ada, by Nabokov, reminds me of nothing so much as reading Proust when I was 23 - a transcendent experience. His facility with words, his play with time and place and history is flawless.
But this is not for the meek or faint of heart! It requires attention and devotion. Truly an extraordinary work.
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- Joe B
- 10-18-19
powerful
Wow, once again Nabokov chooses to pick disturbing topics but his writing is incredible and the narration was great.
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