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A review by savaging
Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov
4.0
The plot of Pnin doesn't gallop along like it does in Lolita, and is too tied into the petty drama of academics. But then, unlike Lolita, you can enjoy this book without worrying that you're a terrible person for snorting with laughter while you're reading about the sexual abuse of a minor. So there's that.
The book opens like a lark of word-play and joke but by the end of chapter 2 when Pnin's sobbing "I haf nofing left, nofing, nofing!" I was inconsolable. In fact all of Chapter 2 was maybe perfect. Pnin's a failure -- the best kind. Pnin's what Dostoevsky's Prince Myshkin should have been before he was marred by too much perfection.
"Pnin slowly walked under the solemn pines. The sky was dying. He did not believe in an autocratic God. He did believe, dimly, in a democracy of ghosts. The souls of the dead, perhaps, formed committees, and these, in continuous session, attended to the destinies of the quick."
The book opens like a lark of word-play and joke but by the end of chapter 2 when Pnin's sobbing "I haf nofing left, nofing, nofing!" I was inconsolable. In fact all of Chapter 2 was maybe perfect. Pnin's a failure -- the best kind. Pnin's what Dostoevsky's Prince Myshkin should have been before he was marred by too much perfection.
"Pnin slowly walked under the solemn pines. The sky was dying. He did not believe in an autocratic God. He did believe, dimly, in a democracy of ghosts. The souls of the dead, perhaps, formed committees, and these, in continuous session, attended to the destinies of the quick."