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Loading... Pnin (1957)by Vladimir Nabokov
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. I recently read an essay on cancel culture. Its essential point was that exile from one's tribe was for most of human history considered worse than death. But in the view of those who would cancel at the drop of an ill-considered remark, losing one's job (exile from a career, exile from a way of life) is a trivial thing. "Oh, he'll find other work." Well, it's not quite that easy, as Nabokov's Pnin brilliantly and hilariously illustrates. It is the gravity of the language that enchanted me - direct and descriptive with the mass of the occasional metaphor forcing an image into view. Otherwise an almost insignificant tale of a once bourgeois Russian scholar seemingly oblivious to how mocked and minimally tolerated he is at a small New England university in the 1950s McCarthy era. The final chapter, told in an much differently focused fashion jars loose some of the certainties of all earlier ones. Having only read [Lolita], my perspective on Nabokov was narrow. I thought of him as a difficult author to read, with dark humor (if any). Then I read [Pnin], and my impression did a 180. Everyone at the small college where Timofey Pnin teaches thinks he is a ridiculous figure with his humorous language faux pas and bumbling ways. In the era of McCarthy, teaching Russian is as low on the academic spectrum as it is possible to go, and neither his colleagues or his few students respect him. Pnin stumbles through life with bemused good humor, and it is only when he is with his fellow Russian emigre compatriots that we see the well-spoken, confident intellectual that lies below the surface. [Pnin] is a story of estrangement and belonging, assimilation and cultural difference, good-humored self-deprecation and simmering anger. It′s also a story within a story. There is an unnamed narrator telling Pnin′s story, and at the end of the novel, the motives of this narrator are called into question, and the reader is left wondering if this really is Pnin′s story after all. Metafiction creates a tension between the protagonist and the writer. In most novels, there is a lulling sense that the protagonists true self is being revealed, but in metafiction this is disrupted. We are constantly being reminded that we are reading fiction, fiction created by a biased author, even when the author is claiming to be reciting the facts. Some people—and I am one of them—hate happy ends. We fell cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically. Had I been reading about this mild old man, instead of writing about him, I would have preferred him to discover, upon his arrival in Cremona, that his lecture was not this Friday but the next. Actually, however, he not only arrived safely but was in time for dinner—a fruit cocktail, to begin with, mint jelly with the anonymous meat course, chocolate syrup with the vanilla ice cream. By professing to tell the truth, rather than his own inclinations, and following that with an account of a mundane act too detailed not to be true, the reliability of the narrator is made more questionable, not less. The writer doth protest too much, methinks. But Nabokov handles this tension playfully and hides how much of himself is reflected. Certainly he, like both the narrator and Pnin, was a Russian emigre educated in Paris and a professor at small colleges in the United States. Is one aspect of Nabokov′s ego poking fun at another aspect? On the surface, however, [Pnin] is a delightful romp with delicious descriptions and laugh-out-loud humor. ...Judith Clyde, an ageless blond in aqua rayon, with large, flat cheeks stained a beautiful candy pink and two bright eyes basking in blue lunacy behind a rimless pince-nez, presented the speaker… Marriage hardly changed their manner of life except that she moved into Pnin's dingy apartment. He went on with his Slavic studies, she with her psychodramatics and her lyrical ovipositing, laying all over the place like an Easter rabbit, and in those green and mauve poems—about the child she wanted to bear, and the lovers she wanted to have, and St. Petersburg (courtesy of Anna Akhmatov)—every intonation, every image, every simile had been used before by other rhyming rabbits. Blue lunacy and rhyming rabbits, I love it. Belongs to Publisher Series
Pnin is a professor of Russian at an American college who takes the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he cannot master. Pnin is a tireless lover who writes to his treacherous Liza: "A genius needs to keep so much in store, and thus cannot offer you the whole of himself as I do." Pnin is the focal point of subtle academic conspiracies he cannot begin to comprehend, yet he stages a faculty party to end all faculty parties forever. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. Penguin Australia2 editions of this book were published by Penguin Australia. Editions: 0141183756, 0141197129 |
I don't get it. I really don't get it.
All I can do is blame a "Russian sense of humor" (but then I am reminded that he lived in the US and wrote in English, but I still contend it's a Russian sense of humor).
The references are so erudite; the humor so based on being well-versed in so much classical education.
And bad things just keep happening to him. It's not funny- it's horrifying.
There might be some symbolism lurking in there, but I need my high school AP English teacher (oh, where are you now, Mrs. Orman??) to decipher it for me.
Funny note: the reviewer's quote on the front cover of the Bard edition I read uses the word "brilliant". It is misspelled.
Now that's funny. ( )