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3.81 AVERAGE
3.81 AVERAGE
funny
mysterious
sad
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Content Warnings
Graphic: Infidelity, Suicide attempt, Alcohol
Reminds of several people I know on campus. Feels very much like Nabokov’s attempt at dealing with life at Cornell and the resultant comedic dreariness and built-in melancholy of Upstate New York. I like that part of NY, personally, but Pnin gets essentially spiritually beaten to death by it. I love how Nabokov plays with narrator omniscience and bias. I usually find the ‘unreliable narrator’ as a too-easy and too-pointless (I don’t think a narrator can actually ever be reliable) explanation for any complication in a story, but he’s always explicit enough about it that I don’t mind. (Kind of like The Eye, wonderful narrators!)
Wish Pnin spent more time on Waindell’s campus. For all the detail Nabokov gives to the fashion of these collegiate losers and to the details of their living rooms, bedrooms, kitchens, I feel nothing about this college that he’s in. Besides that it feels like all literary, unforgiving, bureaucratic, slapstick colleges. I’d probably argue it’s an academic novel, more than anything, with the facade of a campus satire. Like how Byatt just wants to talk about Robert Browning in Possession, or Kuang with translation in Babel (blegh! good topic, dreadful book), Nabokov seems to just want to talk about Russian folklore (fair enough). I feel some of these authors would be helped by just writing essays. Or one solid introduction.
Pnin lands in that uniquely trend-setting period of the campus novel, where Lucky Jim and Groves of Academe (which I really must need read) have come out but Stoner is still in the works. Unless you count Brideshead Revisited as the quintessential campus novel (catastrophic choice), the entire genre is established in this decade or so. And, at least from the three besides Groves, the consensus always seems to be that a professorship is the most life-depleting, personality-warping, soul-sucking experience one can be stuck in. There’s something to that (and to the fact that most of them contain old men who can’t help but fall in love/creep after younger grad students). Not entirely sure what. I’ve always thought professors had it quite cushy.
Wish Pnin spent more time on Waindell’s campus. For all the detail Nabokov gives to the fashion of these collegiate losers and to the details of their living rooms, bedrooms, kitchens, I feel nothing about this college that he’s in. Besides that it feels like all literary, unforgiving, bureaucratic, slapstick colleges. I’d probably argue it’s an academic novel, more than anything, with the facade of a campus satire. Like how Byatt just wants to talk about Robert Browning in Possession, or Kuang with translation in Babel (blegh! good topic, dreadful book), Nabokov seems to just want to talk about Russian folklore (fair enough). I feel some of these authors would be helped by just writing essays. Or one solid introduction.
Pnin lands in that uniquely trend-setting period of the campus novel, where Lucky Jim and Groves of Academe (which I really must need read) have come out but Stoner is still in the works. Unless you count Brideshead Revisited as the quintessential campus novel (catastrophic choice), the entire genre is established in this decade or so. And, at least from the three besides Groves, the consensus always seems to be that a professorship is the most life-depleting, personality-warping, soul-sucking experience one can be stuck in. There’s something to that (and to the fact that most of them contain old men who can’t help but fall in love/creep after younger grad students). Not entirely sure what. I’ve always thought professors had it quite cushy.
adventurous
funny
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
One of my favourite authors crafted another masterpiece with Pnin. Hilarious as much as it is sad, the main character Timofey Pnin humbly bumbles through life in the US, where things never go his way but he is surrounded by friends and characters who both love him and mock him are a delight.
This is Nabokov. Who else can describe farting and burping in a scool dormitory as the night sounds in the alcoves - loud gastric explosions?
funny
lighthearted
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Could be great if you live academia and high society stuffs. Would have been a really good movie if it was done by Wes Anderson
Hilarious, tragic and deeply moving. Every sentence is a little present. I read this much slower than I usually read to really soak them up. Deeply enjoyed the way he played with language.
challenging
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
N/A
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
**
my first Nabakov; I am in love.
incredibly funny, overflowing with brilliant, witty, masterful descriptive language, playful, dazzlingly original, gradually more and more emotionally moving and suddenly, all at once like a high-speed train, inducing of heavy, ugly sobs.
usually when a novelist is described as playing with, toying with, tricking his reader my expectations plummet. I was aware Nabokov had this kind of reputation and so was a tad reticent; I associate this kind of thing with writers who are too cowardly to be sincere, too emotionally constipated to penetrate to the heart of things and so comfort themselves with silly intellectual games that make them feel superior to the reader. but when Nabakov plays with you he's playing with you, inviting you warmly into his mischievous little game rather than perching above you and sneering down as you try to navigate a pedantic puzzle. one of the great gifts of Pnin is the special honour of feeling that you've been invited to share in Nabakov's glee, his pure delight of wordplay and web-weaving.
there are many little games here; puns, solecisms, callbacks, but the long game Nabokov is playing, which I won't spoil here, is a wonderful display of structural mastery.
literally the only intelligent piece of writing I could find online on this novel, which is a huge shame:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/may/08/classics.vladimirnabokov
my first Nabakov; I am in love.
incredibly funny, overflowing with brilliant, witty, masterful descriptive language, playful, dazzlingly original, gradually more and more emotionally moving and suddenly, all at once like a high-speed train, inducing of heavy, ugly sobs.
usually when a novelist is described as playing with, toying with, tricking his reader my expectations plummet. I was aware Nabokov had this kind of reputation and so was a tad reticent; I associate this kind of thing with writers who are too cowardly to be sincere, too emotionally constipated to penetrate to the heart of things and so comfort themselves with silly intellectual games that make them feel superior to the reader. but when Nabakov plays with you he's playing with you, inviting you warmly into his mischievous little game rather than perching above you and sneering down as you try to navigate a pedantic puzzle. one of the great gifts of Pnin is the special honour of feeling that you've been invited to share in Nabakov's glee, his pure delight of wordplay and web-weaving.
there are many little games here; puns, solecisms, callbacks, but the long game Nabokov is playing, which I won't spoil here, is a wonderful display of structural mastery.
literally the only intelligent piece of writing I could find online on this novel, which is a huge shame:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/may/08/classics.vladimirnabokov