October 2024 – jonayl.ing

So I’m 30 chapters through reading Nabokov’s Ada alongside Brian Boyd’s extensive annotations. It is quite heavy going, and I’m continuously grateful to BB for explaining all the numerous allusions, great and small, that otherwise would pass me by.

I’ll have a fuller appraisal up soon – in particular comparing Ada to Glory, which has lots of parallels I think to this section (Ardis the First) of the later work. In summary it’s still not really working for me. I’m surprised how much more I like the sections that appeal, but I’m also finding there are themes and whole chapters that plain aren’t working for me, even after they’ve been convincingly explained by Prof. Boyd.

Why can’t the whole book be as good as Ada’s real things, towers and bridges? It’s a well know mystery.

The structure of this first section is certainly impressive: I could even be persuaded that everything in part 1 is there for a purpose (whether that purpose is implemented in an artistically satisfying way is, of course, another question). A big problem is the length. I’m sort of saturated by Ada already, and it’s a little alarming I’m less than a third of the way through.

Ada is Vladimir Nabokov’s longest book, and the first of his late European period after he found fame with Lolita then devoted ten years to his controversial, literalist translation of Eugene Onegin. It shares many features and themes with his earlier work, but is also strikingly different: massive, heavy-going and sometimes impenetrable, it stands in contrast with the lightness and economy of his American work.

I tend to think of Ada as a maximalist, interesting failure. Nabokov described Finnegan’s Wake as “that cold pudding” of a book, and in an irony of memory I had transposed that description onto Ada. I tend to agree with Michael Wood that it’s a late rather than mature work where the ambition outstripped the result. It’s a hard book to love.

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