ADA, OR ARDOR A Family Chronicle <i> by Vladimir Nabokov (Vintage: $12.95) </i>

A brilliant and challenging masterpiece by a magician of language, Vladimir Nabokov’s convoluted story of a love “troubled by incest” that binds two generations of an eccentric family is also an innocent tale of childish affection and a meditation on the nature of time. (At the end of Part IV, young Ada muses precociously: “We can know the time, we can know a time. But we can never know Time.”) Nabokov’s complex themes are deepened by his language, which shimmers among levels of meaning and reality: Even the title is an elaborate, bilingual pun. With “Lolita,” “Pale Fire” and “Invitation to a Beheading,” “Ada” ranks among the greatest works of one of the 20th-Century’s greatest novelists. This new edition includes the tongue-in-cheek notes that the author appended under the anagrammatic pseudonym Vivian Darkbloom.