Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #25981 in Books
• Published on: 2000-12-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

Synopsis
Professor Timofey Pnin, late of Tsarist Russia, is now precariously perched on a college campus in the fast beating heart of the USA. In a series of funny and sad misunderstandings, Pnin does halting battle with American life and language.

Customer Reviews

Pleasantly amusing but not brilliant in any real sense
Pleasantly amusing but not brilliant in any real sense. Written with panache, wit and richness (what else could be expected from Mr Nabokov?), this is also a little self-indulgent and caricature-ish. But treat it as a charming short novella and you won't be disappointed.

Warm, hilarious, poignant
Nabokov's writing can make me grin in the same way as when I watch Lionel Messi or Johan Cruijf play football - the exhilaration of seeing a master in action, in complete control of his medium.

Pnin is endearing and lovable, while at the same time being consistently cringeworthy or absurd. He exploits are painted vividly on a meticulously realised backdrop of Nabokovian Americana. Familiar settings like universities and diners are embued with fresh life - descriptions I may have been tempted to skim in another book bear repeated re-readings.

Beauty is to be expected from Nabokov, but the strength of the humour may surprise you. The physical imagery of Pnin, with his strange, top heavy body and bald head combines with verbal humour ( "I never go in a hat even in winter") very effectively.

An undercurrent to the humour is that Pnin is frequently at the wrong end of it - the reader snickers at some gaffe poor Pnin has made, but in the next passage frowns at other characters laughing at him too.

It's short, but its images and scenes will leave a stronger imprint on your memory than most longer novels. I can definitely see myself rereading this in years to come.

Wonderful.

The powers of muddle shall prevail
With Pnin we are introduced to Russian émigré, Timofey Pnin. Tenuously untenured at a New England college, he muddles through 1950s America with a unique variety of English of his own. Mocked and loved on campus in equal measure, he has an acute sense of the ridiculous of the world and of himself. For Pnin sorrow is "the only thing in the world people really possess" and his planned courses will show that "the history of man is the history of pain". Alongside these bleak courseplans, we are treated two parties, a former wife convinced of her own glamour, the visit of her insular, wunderkind son, and Pnin's wonderful driving. As with much of Nabokov, there are dopelgangers aplenty causing Pnin (and us) to ask which is the genuine article. Anyone who knows himself to be fallible and slightly absurd will love Pnin, and will be grateful to Nabokov for making this invention a reality.