Ada, or Ardor

“Like Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, Nabokov’s Ada offers a vision of paradise, visions of lushly earthy couplings—naked, multi-partnered, and repeated—and a vision of hell. Like Bosch’s masterpiece, Nabokov’s literary magnum opus also offers inexhaustible surprise and amusement, beauty and disgust. . . . . Nabokov lets himself go in Ada in the sense of giving full scope to his imagination and his knowledge of the world, its geography and history, its nature and its arts, especially literature and visual art from drawing to architecture; to the senses, the emotions, the mind; to passion and pathos; and to his sense of time and life as a feast.”

—from the Introduction by Brian Boyd