Subject
More resuscitations... Nabokov decoder rings? specs? direct
experience?
experience?
From
Date
Body
http://www.themillions.com/2010/01/difficult-books-ada-or-ardor-by-vladimir-nabokov.html
Difficult Books: Ada, or Ardor by Vladimir Nabokov
By GARTH RISK HALLBERG - 2010
...Of the major edifices he erected in English, his last, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969), is his [Nabokov's] most excessive, both in its difficulty and in the pleasures it affords the (re)reader[ ] ... even as it hews to the plot of the "family chronicle," it elaborates on the textual gamesmanship of its immediate predecessor, Pale Fire (1962). Riddles, anagrams, and puns abound. This is not to mention the density of intertextual allusion, which makes Humbert Humbert look like Duran Duran [ ]...treating each sentence like a puzzle to be solved ...isn't always the best way to approach to a tough text.[ ] With Ada, however, if you aren't playing along at home with your Nabokov decoder ring, you're probably missing something [ ] Ada's greatest puzzle, in all senses, is its setting. The opening line - a misquotation from "Anna Arkadievitch Karenina" - signals that the world of this novel will be a somewhat garbled translation of our own: an "anti-Terra." [ ] The novel's other key dyad is Van and Ada Veen [ ] Ada is "about" incest only in the way that Lolita is "about" pedophilia, or Moby-Dick is "about" fishing. Which is to say, it isn't. In his wonderful book The Magician's Doubts (which prodded me to pick up Ada in the first place), the critic Michael Wood proposes that the novel's subject is in fact "happiness" - generally felt to be the hardest thing to write about. Ada is also about freedom, writing, desire, passion, and what time and distance do to all of the above.[ ] Ultimately, Nabokov manages a kind of Proustian magic trick: he recovers, through evocation, the very things whose losses he depicts. His exquisite, synesthetic sentences render the past present, the time-bound timeless [ ] "After the first contact, so light, so mute, between his soft lips and her softer skin had been established - high up in that dappled tree, with only that stray ardilla daintily leavesdropping - nothing seemed changed in one sense, all was lost in another. Such contacts evolve their own texture; a tactile sensation is a blind spot; we touch in silhouette."
Jansy Mello [ to A.Sklyarenko's: "Dorofey is a male nurse in the Kalugano Lakeview Hospital where Van recovers from the wound received in a pistol duel with Captain Tapper (a member of the Do-Re-La country club) and where in Ward Five he visits the dying composer Philip Rack. Chekhov is the author of Tapyor ("The Ballroom Pianist," 1885), The Duel (1891) and Ward No. 6 (1892)."] Today I read about a "Nabokov decoder ring" and C. Kunin has, once, mentioned "Nabokov's specs" (which are of a different nature than the decoding ring because, as I understand it, they apply to finding Nabokov in the outside world, instead of recognizing him when pinned to the plot and references of his novel). Although I'm able to learn a great deal about a Russian "who's who," thanks to Sklyarenko's wide scope of fine tooth examination of VN's references to literature, and to those who identify other English, American and French authors (mainly), I must confess that, in the end, the effect of confirming or disagreeing with such literary finds, is rather numbing. Their effect scatters Nabokov's projects all over and in such a way that I suddently find myself at a loss for a particular shared emotion (something that is easily found in VN when we simply read him again and again), an intention, a special point. This is why I rather enjoyed that the essayist changed from decoding to dwell in VN's enchantment and a different kind of "touching in silhouette."
Is ADA about happiness? Freedom? Above all, is ADA about how writing, desire, passion... are altered by time and distance?
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Difficult Books: Ada, or Ardor by Vladimir Nabokov
By GARTH RISK HALLBERG - 2010
...Of the major edifices he erected in English, his last, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969), is his [Nabokov's] most excessive, both in its difficulty and in the pleasures it affords the (re)reader[ ] ... even as it hews to the plot of the "family chronicle," it elaborates on the textual gamesmanship of its immediate predecessor, Pale Fire (1962). Riddles, anagrams, and puns abound. This is not to mention the density of intertextual allusion, which makes Humbert Humbert look like Duran Duran [ ]...treating each sentence like a puzzle to be solved ...isn't always the best way to approach to a tough text.[ ] With Ada, however, if you aren't playing along at home with your Nabokov decoder ring, you're probably missing something [ ] Ada's greatest puzzle, in all senses, is its setting. The opening line - a misquotation from "Anna Arkadievitch Karenina" - signals that the world of this novel will be a somewhat garbled translation of our own: an "anti-Terra." [ ] The novel's other key dyad is Van and Ada Veen [ ] Ada is "about" incest only in the way that Lolita is "about" pedophilia, or Moby-Dick is "about" fishing. Which is to say, it isn't. In his wonderful book The Magician's Doubts (which prodded me to pick up Ada in the first place), the critic Michael Wood proposes that the novel's subject is in fact "happiness" - generally felt to be the hardest thing to write about. Ada is also about freedom, writing, desire, passion, and what time and distance do to all of the above.[ ] Ultimately, Nabokov manages a kind of Proustian magic trick: he recovers, through evocation, the very things whose losses he depicts. His exquisite, synesthetic sentences render the past present, the time-bound timeless [ ] "After the first contact, so light, so mute, between his soft lips and her softer skin had been established - high up in that dappled tree, with only that stray ardilla daintily leavesdropping - nothing seemed changed in one sense, all was lost in another. Such contacts evolve their own texture; a tactile sensation is a blind spot; we touch in silhouette."
Jansy Mello [ to A.Sklyarenko's: "Dorofey is a male nurse in the Kalugano Lakeview Hospital where Van recovers from the wound received in a pistol duel with Captain Tapper (a member of the Do-Re-La country club) and where in Ward Five he visits the dying composer Philip Rack. Chekhov is the author of Tapyor ("The Ballroom Pianist," 1885), The Duel (1891) and Ward No. 6 (1892)."] Today I read about a "Nabokov decoder ring" and C. Kunin has, once, mentioned "Nabokov's specs" (which are of a different nature than the decoding ring because, as I understand it, they apply to finding Nabokov in the outside world, instead of recognizing him when pinned to the plot and references of his novel). Although I'm able to learn a great deal about a Russian "who's who," thanks to Sklyarenko's wide scope of fine tooth examination of VN's references to literature, and to those who identify other English, American and French authors (mainly), I must confess that, in the end, the effect of confirming or disagreeing with such literary finds, is rather numbing. Their effect scatters Nabokov's projects all over and in such a way that I suddently find myself at a loss for a particular shared emotion (something that is easily found in VN when we simply read him again and again), an intention, a special point. This is why I rather enjoyed that the essayist changed from decoding to dwell in VN's enchantment and a different kind of "touching in silhouette."
Is ADA about happiness? Freedom? Above all, is ADA about how writing, desire, passion... are altered by time and distance?
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/