A review by laurapk
Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle by Vladimir Nabokov

2.0

It was a painful read, interspersed with beautiful prose which mostly lost me on paths shaded by too many references and language puns I couldn't follow (I can do French, but not Russian). I had made it 3/4 through the book without realizing that the whole novel is placed on a different planet, a mirror world of ours. And I completely missed that Van was dying of cancer in part 5, after living a long accomplished life. There was a lot of humor in the book I could smell, but not taste (references or language barriers stood in the way). I did however greatly enjoyed Nabokov's use of quantum physics and relativity in the novel (like for example when he 'dies' at one point in part 3, but somehow continues to live in a different universe - I read about this 'Schrodinger's human' experiment in some physics for the lay audience books). Ironically, my favorite part of the novel is Part 4: "The texture of time" - which most people complain was the most complicated and maybe should have been left out. Sometimes I needed to read the paragraphs twice to catch the meaning, but it was worth the effort. I loved the fact that as Van attempts to understand the threads making the texture of time, he and Ada meet in old age for the first time in years, when the texture of their skin and bodies has altered significantly, and they are deprived of the buffer of 'having aged side by side'.
Ultimately, as Ada says in the final part: "[...] she had been somehow responsible for the metamorphoses of the lovely larvae that had woven the silk of 'Veen's Time'"