Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. [with] Original Chip Kidd Cover Art.

Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969) is Nabokov's longest novel and by several measures his most extravagantly ambitious, a work composed in Montreux, Switzerland, between February 1966 and October 1968 that represents the fullest and most intoxicating expression of the themes, techniques, and philosophical preoccupations that animate the whole of his mature English-language fiction. The novel began to materialize in 1959 when Nabokov was flirting with two separate projects, "The Texture of Time" and "Letters from Terra," and it was only in 1965 that he began to see a link between the two ideas, finally composing a unified novel from their convergence. The narrative traces the lifelong passion between Van Veen and his cousin Ada, who discover that they are in fact full siblings, unfolding across an alternate universe called Antiterra in which a blending of Russia and America, past and future, and multiple temporal streams creates a setting of baroque complexity and dreamlike richness. The linguistic richness of the book's free blending of English, Russian, and French is matched by the baroque and dreamlike splendor of the alternate universe it creates, a universe in which time moves in more than one direction and all details are cunningly interrelated, with the novel's embedded philosophical treatise on the nature of time constituting one of the most sustained and serious engagements with Bergsonian and Proustian thought in the fiction of the period. Ada was initially given a mixed reception, but Alfred Kazin wrote on publication that it made a trilogy with Lolita and Pale Fire that had no contemporary peer, and Alfred Appel called it in the New York Times Book Review a great work of art, radiant and rapturous, providing further evidence that Nabokov was a peer of Kafka, Proust, and Joyce.