Ah, that's the one I deliberated most over including. If I'd written this application in a couple of weeks' time I might have chosen Pale Fire, or Lolita, or The Gift.
Right now, however, I'm reading Ada or Ardor, and I'm finding most of it to be self-indulgent drivel. There are great moments, great phrases (what's Nabokov good at, if not turn of phrase?), but as a book by Nabokov, it's a disappointment. It's as if he took some of the interesting stylistic features of his other books and inflated them to grotesque proportions.
I know I will eventually come back to Pale Fire (I would normally have said that Pale Fire is my favourite)... but recently I reread Pnin and loved it, I couldn't help thinking Aha, yes, this is why I read Nabokov, for humour and beauty and tomfoolery with words. I found it refreshing to empathise with one of Nabokov's characters without feeling guilty about it, and I found the smattering of actualism much more fun to read than the pages and pages of it there is in Lo and Ada.
Also... I become slightly irritated when people tell me that out of Nabokov's many books they have only read Lolita and/or Pale Fire. So I suppose I was being a little bit snobby, not wanting to come across as one of those people!
Right now, however, I'm reading Ada or Ardor, and I'm finding most of it to be self-indulgent drivel. There are great moments, great phrases (what's Nabokov good at, if not turn of phrase?), but as a book by Nabokov, it's a disappointment. It's as if he took some of the interesting stylistic features of his other books and inflated them to grotesque proportions.
I know I will eventually come back to Pale Fire (I would normally have said that Pale Fire is my favourite)... but recently I reread Pnin and loved it, I couldn't help thinking Aha, yes, this is why I read Nabokov, for humour and beauty and tomfoolery with words. I found it refreshing to empathise with one of Nabokov's characters without feeling guilty about it, and I found the smattering of actualism much more fun to read than the pages and pages of it there is in Lo and Ada.
Also... I become slightly irritated when people tell me that out of Nabokov's many books they have only read Lolita and/or Pale Fire. So I suppose I was being a little bit snobby, not wanting to come across as one of those people!
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