Ada

This story of a man’s lifelong entanglement with his sister is not only a love story; it manages also to be a fairy tale, an epic, a philosophical treatise on the nature of time, a parody of the history of the novel, and an erotic catalogue. It concludes with an ingenious appendix by the author, written under the anagrammatic pseudonym Vivian Darkbloom. Ada, published just after Nabokov’s seventieth birthday, is the supreme work of a virtuosic imagination at white heat.

Nabokov is the most allusive and linguistically playful writer in English since Joyce, and like Pale Fire and Lolita, this novel abounds in delightful minor parodies and pastiches, countless multilingual puns and literary jokes. Ada is at its core a love story, the stuff that’s sold reams of pop music, and piles of books. Van, fourteen, falls in love with twelve-year-old Ada during a summer holiday.

This premise is possibly the only aspect of Ada common to numerous other novels. Van, an unreliable narrator if there ever was one, tells the story, while the narrative shuttles seamlessly from a first person to a third person - trust Nabokov the Enchanter to achieve that trick.