Perhaps my taste in books has subtly shifted since I last read a Nabokov; perhaps this is an unusually poor novel by his standards; whichever, I found Ada hard work.

Central to my enjoyment of his other novels is the dizzying sugar-rush of his prose style. And key to that style is a certain amount of self-indulgence. But here the self-indulgent language games almost sink the book - there's a never-ending procession of smug puns, alliteration, parodies of other novels, passages in French and Russian, and so on. All of which is very *clever* (and I did enjoy some passages) but it never achieves the transcendental beauty or elegance of his better writing. It's artful, not art.

Also,and I think this needs to be said: previously I've given Nabokov a pass over this, but here's *another* novel about having sex with a 12-year old girl, and at this point I'm beginning to find the theme both boring and creepy. And here, unlike in Lolita, he often seems to be inviting us to love and admire his paedophilic protagonist.