Title: ADA Or Ardor - Vladimir Nabokov - book
Summary :
Lucette's tragic destiny is one of the highlights of this delightful book.
The rest of Van's story is about—delivered frankly and colorfully—his long love affair with Ada. Their romance is interrupted by his marriage in Arizona to a cattle rancher whose fabulous ancestor discovered North America. The husband dies, the lovers are reunited. They spend their old age traveling together and staying in the many villas, each more beautiful than the last, that Van has erected all over the Western Hemisphere.
The delicacy of picturesque detail is not the least of the ornaments of this chronicle: a trellised gallery; a painted ceiling; a pretty toy stranded among the forget-me-nots of a stream; butterflies and papilionaceous orchids on the margins of the novel; a distant veil seen from a marble staircase; a heraldic doe turning her head towards us in the ancestral park; and many other things.
" Ada is probably the work I would like to be remembered for."
Vladimir Nabokov
"With five hundred pages, a pen and a narrative genius that has never faltered and today reaches the grandiose in this whimsical novel, Nabokov organizes a formidable poetic hubbub, relaying Rimbaud and his "started peninsulas" "
Pierre Ajame, The New Observer
"One of the most complete and risky artistic adventures since Proust and Joyce, one of the major challenges of writing in the crumbling world of memories and syllables that it draws from the night."
Bertrand Poirot-Delpech, Le Monde
" Ada, this sumptuous celebration of language dedicated to Time."
Sophie Lannes, L'Express
" Ada or Ardor, a sumptuous book where the subtle scents of the Russian cherry orchard blend with the fragrances of the vast American prairies."
Edgar Reichmann, Le Monde
"Nabokov is one of those rare writers who have always been mad about language, one of those whose only homeland is words."
Frédéric Vitoux
"One of the great writers of the century, alongside Proust, Joyce, and Borges."
Michel Braudeau, L'Express
"Nabokov did not choose to take literature seriously; he goes much further; he catches it red-handed in the act of magic, spells, and invention."
André Brincourt, Le Figaro
"This is yet another masterpiece. Further proof that Vladimir Nabokov is one of the two or three most important writers of this century and of other centuries."
Jean-Marc Roberts, The Morning of Paris
Vladimir Nabokov was born in 1899 in St. Petersburg into an aristocratic and liberal family. Exiled in 1919, he lived first in Cambridge, where he completed his studies, then in Germany and France, which he left in 1940 to settle in the United States. He taught there for nearly twenty years, at Wellesley College (1941-1948) and Cornell University (1948-1958). After the immense success of Lolita, he retired to Montreux, Switzerland, where he died in 1977.
