a book
Pnin
Vladimir Nabokov · 1989 · 208 pages
One of the best-loved of Nabokov’s novels, Pnin features his funniest and most heart-rending character. Serialized in The New Yorker and published in book form in 1957, Pnin brought Nabokov both his first National Book Award nomination and hitherto unprecedented popularity.
“Fun and satire are just the beginning of the rewards of this novel. Generous, bewildered Pnin, that most kindly and impractical of men, wins our affection and respect.” —Chicago Tribune
Professor Timofey Pnin is a haplessly disoriented Russian émigré precariously employed on an American college campus in the 1950s. Pnin struggles to maintain his dignity through a series of comic and sad misunder-standings, all the while falling victim both to subtle academic conspiracies and to the manipulations of a deliberately unreliable narrator.
Initially an almost grotesquely comic figure, Pnin gradually grows in stature by contrast with those who laugh at him. Whether taking the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he has not mastered or throwing a faculty party during which he learns he is losing his job, the gently preposterous hero of this enchanting novel evokes the reader’s deepest protective instinct.
“Fun and satire are just the beginning of the rewards of this novel. Generous, bewildered Pnin, that most kindly and impractical of men, wins our affection and respect.” —Chicago Tribune
Professor Timofey Pnin is a haplessly disoriented Russian émigré precariously employed on an American college campus in the 1950s. Pnin struggles to maintain his dignity through a series of comic and sad misunder-standings, all the while falling victim both to subtle academic conspiracies and to the manipulations of a deliberately unreliable narrator.
Initially an almost grotesquely comic figure, Pnin gradually grows in stature by contrast with those who laugh at him. Whether taking the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he has not mastered or throwing a faculty party during which he learns he is losing his job, the gently preposterous hero of this enchanting novel evokes the reader’s deepest protective instinct.
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Zadie Smith
“This novella is explicitly a book about ridicule and caricature—Professor Pnin is a joke of a man on a college campus. He’s an awkward Russian émigré with bad English, false teeth, a clumsy sense of humor, a tendency to burst into tears or take offense at small slights. Everybody on campus can do an impression of him. He’s a clown. But at the core of the book is the idea that there is a Pnin who is as real as the people who ridicule him. You are invited to laugh at him, and then you are humbled and shamed by your own laughter. It’s a gorgeous, hilarious, humane book that uncovers the reality of a man’s life in sly, piecemeal fashion. I think it’s my favorite novel.”↗
