Pnin (original 1957; edition 1989)

A comic novel very much in the Russian style with an opening on a train (ala Dostoevsky's The Idiot), this is a delight to read. While it is a short novel (novella length in the Everyman's Library edition) it is certainly not a trifle. Rather it is a postmodern gem, a novel of character with Pnin the elusive and complex and oddly funny character at the center.
The book's eponymous protagonist, Timofey Pavlovich Pnin, is a Russian-born professor living in the United States. Pnin, a refugee from both Communist Russia and what he calls the "Hitler war", is an assistant professor of Russian at fictional Waindell College, possibly modeled on Wellesley College or Cornell University, at both of which Nabokov himself taught. At Waindell, Pnin has settled down to an uncertain, nontenured, but semi-respectable academic life, full of various tragicomic mishaps, misfortunes, and difficulties adjusting to American life and language.
As a representative of the "campus" novel it compares favorably with those of Randall Jarrell, David Lodge or Malcolm Bradbury. Its pastoral campus setting is very much a "small world" (title for one of Lodge's novels)removed from the hustle and bustle of urban life. It is the perfect setting for the precise observations that Nabokov is so good at rendering. The postmodern characteristics add an intellectual sheen to this campus story and at close reading raise questions about the nature of the narrator, Professor Pnin, and the status of the fiction itself. Whether memoir or fiction, autobiographical or imaginary flight of academic fancy, this novel charms the reader with the Nabokovian magic that is unique in twentieth-century literature. ( )

I don't reread books often as a rule. But I reread this one almost once a year with startling regularity. Though it lacks the famous Nabokovian puzzle structure of Pale Fire or the intense psychological horrors & delights of Lolita, Pnin is my favourite of his works. This book is Nabokov at his most delicious, witty, and glittering, proof of his mastery as a writer of perfect sentences--but unlike others of his books (which--caveat--I read regularly and tend to love anyway), the pageantry does not dwarf the pathos of its story. Pnin is simultaneously one of the saddest and funniest books I have ever read, an endearing character sketch of a fascinating and tragic man. And oh, those sentences! Glorious. ( )

I'm confused as to why this is such a fan favorite. It starts out charming and funny but pretty quickly trails off into a bunch of vignettes about nothing that go nowhere. There's a strange focus on purely visual description to the exclusion of everything else -- for instance a lot of space is devoted to describing the appearance of the boarding school attended by the son of the central character's ex-wife, even though nothing actually happens there and the son is a minor character (much more vaguely sketched than the school, in fact!). Every chapter feels like it's all dressed up with nowhere to go; there's all of the scene-setting you'd get in an ordinary novel, but none of the scene.

I've heard a lot about how this book shows the "warmer" side of Nabokov, but for me the central character never came into focus. I guess this book is more lighthearted and pleasant than a lot of Nabokov, but I think those qualities -- along with everything else -- come across better in the books he put more passion into, even if they're darker in an overall sense. ( )

One of Nabokov's 'minor works', this is a little college novel with an adorable bumbling professor, set in not-Cornell. Pnin has a few dzeefeecooltsees with speaking English. A not-Vladimir Vladimirovich steps in with autobiographical asides. Digressions, fancies, memories, a flow of Russian poetry and so forth. A squirrel motif.

You cannot help but laugh, as pitiful and lonesome as Pnin is. You might spend a few pages laughing at him, but then V.N. knocks you over with a sad melancholy fragment, and then you feel very guilty. You were laughing at Stoner. ( )

"Some people—and I am one of them—hate happy ends. We feel 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."
Pnin é uma novela satírica d avida do emigrado, mas também uma meditação sobre o tempo, os modos de narrativa e a memória. Um exemplo de como Nabokov usa tudo isso é o final do livro, em que há uma mudança de narrador e eventos do primeiro capítulo são recontados, mas o final é mais cruel e, de certa forma, mais apropriado. ( )