I just finished Pale Fire, and read Lolita a couple months ago.

File: Ada.png (112KB, 398x577px) Image search: [Google]

112KB, 398x577px

>>9495735
ADA

>>9495735
>>9496021
Ada is his best work, but I'd recommend to OP reading Pnin and some short stories first. Ada is his most fully-realized work, and it helps to acquaint oneself with his way of writing and thinking.

But yes, if you want straight-up quality literature, Ada is a supreme masterpiece.

>>9496021
The Defense

>>9496021
gonna have to put in a plug for ada as well

>>9496035
>>9496021
http://www.waggish.org/2011/kinbote-triumphant-in-hell-the-riddle-of-nabokovs-ada/
thoughts on this article? i tend to agree. i did not care for anyone in ada, nor did my uncaring lead to any larger aesthetic or thematic truth. it was a minutely rendered story of boring people doing not much of anything, and the metafictional games nabokov played felt entirely ancillary. that said the novel remains as an enigma to me. i want to revisit it sometime ad hopefully better understand it.

I think someone once posted a link about Ada - something to keep in mind to understand what exactly Nab was doing with the novel. Does anyone know?

And somewhere I read he was trying to avoid cliches which led to some strange sentences.

Invitation to a Beheading

Start from Russian works, stories, and critique. What's the point of jumping into most complex works to try finding something to pretend you like?

Next read The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.

The Eye is the most enjoyable one I've read.
>inb4 translations

>>9497346
I like the eye too. It's so short it can be read in a couple hours. I've read it five times.

>>9495735
I just finished Pale Fire. I thought it was alright. It has it's nice moments. I think it'll grow on me. It's my first Nabokov. I might read Pnin next.

>>9496169
Spoilers, kind of?

>http://www.waggish.org/2011/kinbote-triumphant-in-hell-the-riddle-of-nabokovs-ada/
It's interesting but my immediate reaction is he underrates the sympathetic character of Lucette.

Obviously, as a child, she's somewhat of a brat, but she becomes more mature and likable when she grows up.

The writer also says that Lucette doesn't have enough presence in the book to justify her importance. However, I think that ironically this lack of presence is what makes her more important, because the reader realizes that Van and Ada are cruel people to not include her in the narrative as much. It's a metafictional trick where the character becomes more important the less her viewpoint is given in the story, kind of like how Lolita is simultaneously the center and not the center of the book Lolita, because Humbert Humbert is so narcissistic he takes all the attention of the book for himself.

Also the references to hell are pertinent but also obvious; I think Nabokov intended to sort of "trick" the reader with them, making him think he'd understood something interesting when it was only the beginning. I myself don't claim to understand why Nabokov makes such a point of seeming to suggest the book takes place in hell, but I think the writer only superficially probed it.

I also think the idea that not much of the book happened, that Van is trying to avoid unpleasantness in writing his memoirs, or that Ada is just a voice in Van's head is pretty trite and dumb, although he definitely is getting somewhere with the obvious unreliability of Van/the narrator and Nabokov's increasing reliance on fake worlds/unreliable narrators in his later works.

Also the 1922 Soviet Union started sounds really trite.

In fact, the whole article is almost hilariously Nabokovian, it's almost consistently trite and wrongheaded as if it were a parody of an academic, Nabokov would probably have laughed at it or been contemptuous of it, in my opinion.

>>9495735
speak, memory is really good

>>9495735
Everything. He is consistently great