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3.81 AVERAGE
3.81 AVERAGE
funny
My first Nabokov! So hilarious and such enjoyable and jam packed prose. I’m glad I chose this for my first Nabokov bc it was truly delightful and now I feel very fond of him.
challenging
funny
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
funny
lighthearted
medium-paced
funny
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I first met Pnin in Nabokov's 'Pale Fire'. This novel may be better than Lolita. I loved it.
Pnin would be a less scandalous introduction to Nabokov than Lolita. Like Lolita, the narrator is unreliable, and you feel sympathy for someone you don't often feel sympathetic towards. There are some nice turns of phrases, and some very humorous observations. Pnin strikes me as more of a portrait than a story, and I'm sure with a closer reading I could get more out of the book.
一个流亡美国的俄国老师，与周围环境格格不入，英语不好，事业停滞，受同事的嘲弄，被妻子抛弃，经常回忆在俄国生活的往昔，只得沉溺于俄罗斯文学聊以自慰。
读纳博科夫的书经常会觉得自己没读懂，又怀着一种崇敬的心情乐此不疲地读下去。具体说纳博科夫吸引我的地方：一是他精准的语言；二是下棋式的制谜，读到最后常有一个大reveal；三是他各种嘲讽，《普宁》这本主要是讽刺自大的学院人物。
“我还记得已故的奥尔嘉·克劳特基有一次对我说，就在她这位只有半个肺的可怜女士不得不教忘川语和葫芦巴语的一家战时的语言专科学校里，仅在五十来个教员当中，除了这位真的、对我来说是独一无二的宝贝普宁之外，竟另外还有六位普宁。”
记录一下每章的情节：第一章：普宁坐火车去做讲座；第二章：普宁的住所，前妻来访；第三章：普宁的教学生活；第四章：维克多的成长，跟普宁第一次见面；第五章：普宁去朋友家聚会，回忆他的初恋；第六章：普宁搬到新住所，邀请朋友前来吃饭；第七章：叙事者讲述他跟普宁的关系
读纳博科夫的书经常会觉得自己没读懂，又怀着一种崇敬的心情乐此不疲地读下去。具体说纳博科夫吸引我的地方：一是他精准的语言；二是下棋式的制谜，读到最后常有一个大reveal；三是他各种嘲讽，《普宁》这本主要是讽刺自大的学院人物。
“我还记得已故的奥尔嘉·克劳特基有一次对我说，就在她这位只有半个肺的可怜女士不得不教忘川语和葫芦巴语的一家战时的语言专科学校里，仅在五十来个教员当中，除了这位真的、对我来说是独一无二的宝贝普宁之外，竟另外还有六位普宁。”
记录一下每章的情节：第一章：普宁坐火车去做讲座；第二章：普宁的住所，前妻来访；第三章：普宁的教学生活；第四章：维克多的成长，跟普宁第一次见面；第五章：普宁去朋友家聚会，回忆他的初恋；第六章：普宁搬到新住所，邀请朋友前来吃饭；第七章：叙事者讲述他跟普宁的关系
dark
funny
relaxing
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
February 2017 notes: On the rereading, I didn't feel that it was any work at all. It was just an enjoyable comic novel that I tore through in a couple of nights, enjoying it a great deal although certainly not being knocked out of my shoes. It may have seemed like an easier read for coming on the heels of a Saramago novel.
I don't know if I caught this the first time, but I enjoyed the passage at the summer house where someone wishes that Vladimir was here, he could tell us all about these butterflies. Another character is skeptical, saying that they've always assumed Vladimir's thing about butterflies to be an affectation. No no, they are told, he's really quite the expert. Nabokov in real life was, of course, a semi-pro lepidopterist.
April 2011 Review:
Well, it’s no Lolita.
But then, what is?
I know more about the background of this book than I usually do because the edition I read had a foreword by David Lodge. He’s one of my favorite writers-about-literature, so I actually read what he had to say, although not of course until I had finished the book. And I’m glad I did; not only did his thoughts and comments enrich my understanding, but his at-first baffling description of a key scene made me realize that I had accidentally turned over two pages at the end of a chapter, thereby missing one of the best passages in the book.
Anyway. Pnin is an early entry in the campus comedy genre, a portrait of an eccentric professor of Russian written in seven discrete, episodic chapters. From the foreword, I learned that Nabokov wrote the book in a series of short stories that were first published in the New Yorker before being appearing together as a novel. Yet despite this, and despite that the individual episodes vary widely in tone and theme, this is no collection of short stories. The novel is in fact tightly interwoven, with mysteries from the opening page that aren't cleared up until the final chapter, and a florid abundance of subplots that gently progress over the course of the narrative. Much of the primary plot, the “story,” happened long before the rather quotidian events described in the book, and is only gradually uncovered and discovered through fragmentary references to the past. I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb to describe Pnin as a kind of Cubist portrait, in which we see a single life from all sorts of angles simultaneously – or at least as "simultaneously" as you can burn through 130 pages (it’s short!).
This being Nabokov, Pnin is chockablock with erudite wordplay that is positively Nabokovian, and I say this in every confidence that two-thirds of it went straight over my head. But it ain’t all highbrow stuff, either. There’s plenty of making fun of how our hero, the eponymous Professor Timofey Pnin, talks funny, and there’s a long scene that relies on the sitcom device of him thinking he’s talking to one guy when he’s actually talking to somebody else. The opening scene, in fact, is a long shaggy dog story about how Pnin has got on the wrong train and hasn’t figured it out yet, ho ho ho! It’s not likely to have you in stitches, but Nabokov has the comic timing to make it all work.
Now if you’re like me, you are fascinated by the way that the nature of the narrator structures a work of literature, amIright? And in this regard, Pnin is positively over the top. From the first sentence, Nabokov introduces an ambiguity as to whether the story is being told by a garden variety omniscient implied narrator or by a specific but unnamed storyteller within the world of the novel. But as we start to get comfortable with the omniscient narrator, who after all constantly remarks on Pnin’s thoughts and feelings, the unnamed storyteller will suddenly pop up and assert himself, remarking offhandedly for instance that someone who Pnin knows is a mutual acquaintance. As the book continues, these intrusions get more and more frequent until, by the last chapter, the narrator is writing in the first person and is the active party, Pnin himself still at the center of attention but as the object of someone else’s observation. (And just to put the cherry on the cake, Lodge tells us that Nabokov drops numerous biographical hints that the narrator is, in essence, real-life Nabokov.) I don’t recall seeing anything quite like it before, and no wonder; this kind of writing requires a technical virtuoso.
But is it any good? Well, in most of the chapters, Professor Pnin is a fairly pathetic figure. His research is silly, he’s a poor teacher, and he talks funny. He’s not well-integrated into American culture, his personal life is lonely and unhappy, and he is petty, selfish, and vain. If he stayed in this one mode to the end of the book, he would be pretty hard to take.
But, there are surprises waiting that add a great deal of depth to the novel. On a weekend road trip, Pnin gets himself lost on country roads through his foolishness and vanity – but then, suddenly, reaches his destination, a country house where he is staying for the weekend with several of his fellow expatriates, intellectuals who fled the Bolsheviks and then the Nazis before washing up in alien North America. Among his own kind, the ridiculous Dr. Pnin is suddenly revealed as an intelligent, sensitive, even urbane man with more subtleties and sorrows than anything we have seen of him on campus. A few chapters later, he hosts a party for his handful of campus friends, and although he is still a bit of a buffoon in this setting we can also see that he is a humane figure who is playing a tough deal as best he can.
So Pnin is funny, but darkly funny. It’s witty but spare. It’s a lot of fun for readers who like to put some work into their fun.
I don't know if I caught this the first time, but I enjoyed the passage at the summer house where someone wishes that Vladimir was here, he could tell us all about these butterflies. Another character is skeptical, saying that they've always assumed Vladimir's thing about butterflies to be an affectation. No no, they are told, he's really quite the expert. Nabokov in real life was, of course, a semi-pro lepidopterist.
April 2011 Review:
Well, it’s no Lolita.
But then, what is?
I know more about the background of this book than I usually do because the edition I read had a foreword by David Lodge. He’s one of my favorite writers-about-literature, so I actually read what he had to say, although not of course until I had finished the book. And I’m glad I did; not only did his thoughts and comments enrich my understanding, but his at-first baffling description of a key scene made me realize that I had accidentally turned over two pages at the end of a chapter, thereby missing one of the best passages in the book.
Anyway. Pnin is an early entry in the campus comedy genre, a portrait of an eccentric professor of Russian written in seven discrete, episodic chapters. From the foreword, I learned that Nabokov wrote the book in a series of short stories that were first published in the New Yorker before being appearing together as a novel. Yet despite this, and despite that the individual episodes vary widely in tone and theme, this is no collection of short stories. The novel is in fact tightly interwoven, with mysteries from the opening page that aren't cleared up until the final chapter, and a florid abundance of subplots that gently progress over the course of the narrative. Much of the primary plot, the “story,” happened long before the rather quotidian events described in the book, and is only gradually uncovered and discovered through fragmentary references to the past. I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb to describe Pnin as a kind of Cubist portrait, in which we see a single life from all sorts of angles simultaneously – or at least as "simultaneously" as you can burn through 130 pages (it’s short!).
This being Nabokov, Pnin is chockablock with erudite wordplay that is positively Nabokovian, and I say this in every confidence that two-thirds of it went straight over my head. But it ain’t all highbrow stuff, either. There’s plenty of making fun of how our hero, the eponymous Professor Timofey Pnin, talks funny, and there’s a long scene that relies on the sitcom device of him thinking he’s talking to one guy when he’s actually talking to somebody else. The opening scene, in fact, is a long shaggy dog story about how Pnin has got on the wrong train and hasn’t figured it out yet, ho ho ho! It’s not likely to have you in stitches, but Nabokov has the comic timing to make it all work.
Now if you’re like me, you are fascinated by the way that the nature of the narrator structures a work of literature, amIright? And in this regard, Pnin is positively over the top. From the first sentence, Nabokov introduces an ambiguity as to whether the story is being told by a garden variety omniscient implied narrator or by a specific but unnamed storyteller within the world of the novel. But as we start to get comfortable with the omniscient narrator, who after all constantly remarks on Pnin’s thoughts and feelings, the unnamed storyteller will suddenly pop up and assert himself, remarking offhandedly for instance that someone who Pnin knows is a mutual acquaintance. As the book continues, these intrusions get more and more frequent until, by the last chapter, the narrator is writing in the first person and is the active party, Pnin himself still at the center of attention but as the object of someone else’s observation. (And just to put the cherry on the cake, Lodge tells us that Nabokov drops numerous biographical hints that the narrator is, in essence, real-life Nabokov.) I don’t recall seeing anything quite like it before, and no wonder; this kind of writing requires a technical virtuoso.
But is it any good? Well, in most of the chapters, Professor Pnin is a fairly pathetic figure. His research is silly, he’s a poor teacher, and he talks funny. He’s not well-integrated into American culture, his personal life is lonely and unhappy, and he is petty, selfish, and vain. If he stayed in this one mode to the end of the book, he would be pretty hard to take.
But, there are surprises waiting that add a great deal of depth to the novel. On a weekend road trip, Pnin gets himself lost on country roads through his foolishness and vanity – but then, suddenly, reaches his destination, a country house where he is staying for the weekend with several of his fellow expatriates, intellectuals who fled the Bolsheviks and then the Nazis before washing up in alien North America. Among his own kind, the ridiculous Dr. Pnin is suddenly revealed as an intelligent, sensitive, even urbane man with more subtleties and sorrows than anything we have seen of him on campus. A few chapters later, he hosts a party for his handful of campus friends, and although he is still a bit of a buffoon in this setting we can also see that he is a humane figure who is playing a tough deal as best he can.
So Pnin is funny, but darkly funny. It’s witty but spare. It’s a lot of fun for readers who like to put some work into their fun.
As sweet, sad, and charming as an indie film. I love how tightly focused this novel is on the little things in Timofey Pnin's life, and how much it all revelas about him and endears him to the reader. A wonderful breath of fresh air after the seriousness of Lolita.