Excerpts: "Readings of Mary (1926) and Ada or Ardor (1969) reveal similarities between both novels, mainly thematically – love and its hardships, the effect of time on memory, the transformative power of memory on distant events. But the stylistic abyss between the two is tremendous![  ] One suffered from insipidness and lack of lustre; the other displayed unrivalled linguistic virtuosity as it set about  reinventing love stories.
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Nabokov, from what I understand, loved three languages: his Russian mother tongue, the French he used in exile; and the English of his adoptive country. So he melded these three languages into the texture of the book’s reality, creating an alternative world called Demonia. In this world, African navigators have discovered America, which was also extensively populated by Russians, who maintain a lingering aristocracy well into the 20th century [  ] Technology has met strange advancements, since vehicles like planes exist, but devices analogous to telephones exist with the difference that they’re powered by a bizarre watery technology. History has run along similar lines, and there has even been a war of independence, an event reflected in the flora: Washingtonias used to be called Wellingtonias.

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But it’s not easy to pinpoint this warmth, since it’s everywhere [   ] it’s embedded in the text [  ] building up from the book’s first section to the last, leading the reader in small, meticulous changes in the characters’ perceptions and affinities. It’s not a circumspect novel, that’s for sure, Nabokov’s style assaults the senses not with subtleness

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His first sighting of Ada is also tinged with the distorting powers of memory [  ], how past is viewed differently by two people who share the same event [quote] The matter of the black blazer becomes a running question in the novel. As Van writes in one of his memoirs’ margin notes, “if people remembered the same they would not be different people.”
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One of the themes of the novel, perhaps not the most explored of them, is the pain they cause Lucette. To them Lucette’s love for Van is a trifling, minor subject of no consequence, to be gently mocked. In their lives it’s perhaps the only instance they show selfishness and cruelty."