Travels in Demonia

Since I was flying to to Davis, CA and back (to take care of my grandfather's estate (said journey was a story in its own right--do you know how hard it is to find a flight from Hartford to California on New Year's Eve or Day less than a week after every Northeast airport was shut down for a blizzard? (I ended up in first class on the way out there--I have never flown first class before--it really isn't much different than regular class, to be honest))), I, as usual on such trips, took along a lengthy book that I knew I would never get around to reading were it not for the fact that I would be stuck on a plane for long periods of time with nothing to do other than read it.  This trip's long book:

Vladimir Nabokov, Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (often just called Ada (pronounced Ah-dah (a thing learned in the novel itself)).

Now I picked up this novel because I had recently read Speak, Memory, and Nabokov does write in nice prose.  I also knew the book was long, easily Nabokov's longest novel.  I also knew it was famous.  That is the extent of what I knew.

What is it?  Take Tolstoy, filter it through Joyce, and add a little Pynchon.  What's left?  Honestly?  A mess.

Don't get me wrong.  Nabokov is a great prose stylist.  Great.  The book is nice enough for what it wants to do.  I am sure English Lit types love it.  It has endless puzzles to be solved, including such things as figuring out where it takes place--it's in a place that looks like Earth, but really isn't quite Earth--so one of the many puzzles you can think about if you are so inclined is what we can learn about this Fake Earth by deciphering all the hints.  Or you can just ignore the whole Fake Earth thing and read along merrily, ignoring the fact that the locations are all close to locations like those on Earth, but not quite locations on Earth. (The latter was my strategy.)   Nabokov likes puzzles.

Actually, I like puzzles too, but I prefer an endless stream of puzzles to be in a, well, puzzle.  I like my novels to have things like, well, novels in them.  So, how does it measure up on those grounds?  It's OK.  Not bad, just OK.  There are some nice things in it; some interesting ideas and scenes.  Structurally it is clever--the novel is in the form of an autobiographical series of reminisces, with marginal notes added by the author himself, and Ada (the love of his life), and the editor.  So the book reads like something not quite completed, with notes interspersed throughout.  That part was extremely well done.

The story itself is a love story spanning about three-quarters of a century.  Boy meets girl, they fall in love, and their happiness is delayed and delayed until late in life when they finally live together.  So far, so cliche.

Yet, with Nabokov, there is always a twist.  he made his fame with Lolita, a vastly better book.  Part of the greatness of Lolita is the remarkably clever way the narrator lulls the reader into the thinking everything is normal, when what is being discussed is pedophilia.  Brilliantly done.

Ada isn't about pedophilia.  The two characters in love are only a couple of years apart in age.  But, the girl is 12 when they start engaging in illicit sexual activity.  And, they are brother and sister.  So, the central relationship is incestuous.  Yep.  It all seems perfectly normal, just like in Lolita.  And, to be fair, this is not a book about incest at all.  Insofar as it is about anything, it is a Russian family history.  And the philosophical part of the book is about time and space and everything other than incest. 

Pulling this trick--taking something shocking and being nonchalant about it--in writing Lolita is clever.  Repeating the same thing in Ada is just a cheap parlor trick.

On the whole, then, the book is good; the writing style is very good and there are some clever things, but on the other hand, I liked every other Nabokov book I have read much better.