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michael5000 's review for:
Pnin
by Vladimir Nabokov
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.