of the novel, some reviewers even stating that they wished Nabokov had "left it out". It could conversely be argued that it is one of the most potent evocations of one of the novel's central themes, the relation of personal experience of time to one's sense of being in and of the world. At the end of this section, Van and Ada are reunited and begin living together. Part 5: 6 chapters (1922–1967) This section of the novel is set in 1967, as Van completes his memoirs as laid out in Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. He describes his contentment, such as it is, his relationship with his book, and the continuing presence and love of Ada. This is interspersed with remarks on pain and the ravages of time. Van and Ada have a conversation about death, and Van breaks off from correcting what he considers his essentially complete, but not yet fully polished, work. The book becomes increasingly distorted as Van and Ada merge into "Vaniada, Dava or Vada, Vanda and Anda". Criticism and reception Critics dispute whether Van and Ada die by suicide at the end, as the author says "if our time-racked flat-lying couple ever intended to die". David Potter describes Van's narrated world in the memoir as "an unstable blending of contradictions, jarring fantastical elements, and hallucinated temporalities" over which Van is only partially in control. He argues that this is what makes the novel so notoriously difficult to interpret. Garth Risk Hallberg found the book challenging, but also acclaimed its prose and argued that Nabokov "manages a kind of Proustian magic trick: he recovers, through evocation, the very things whose losses he depicts." David Auerbach felt that both Ada and its lead characters were alienating, and believed that Nabokov knew readers would find them so. He considered Van Veen to be an unreliable narrator and speculates that much of the story is Van's fantasy, comparing Antiterra to the expressly fictional settings Nabokov created in Invitation to a Beheading, Bend Sinister and Pale Fire. See also Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Jorge Luis Borges René, Atala, Romance à Hélène and Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe by Chateaubriand The Man in the High Castle (1962) by Philip K. Dick The Ambidextrous Universe by Martin Gardner Notes Further reading Cangogni, Annapaola (1995) Nabokov and Chateaubriand, in Vladimir E. Alexandrov (1995) The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov "Vladimir Nabokov, Science Fiction