Pnin (Everyman's Library Classics & Contemporary Classics)
by Vladimir Nabokov
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Book Summary Information
Author: Vladimir NabokovEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2004-04-06
ISBN: 1400041988
Number of pages: 184
Publisher: Everyman's Library
Book Reviews of Pnin (Everyman's Library Classics & Contemporary Classics)
Book Review: "Coming To America" Nabokov Style
Summary: 5 Stars
I'm taunted by the black and white photo on the back of my Pnin: a dapper Nabokov, holding his own copy of the novel and sardonically gazing through time at me, challenging me to determine the real Professor Timofey Pnin, the real narrator, the significance of the recurring squirrel. There's a trickster's gleam in his eye, and Pnin, while a fairly uncomplicated little novel, is not without literary chicanery and sophistication. And partially, it's that subterfuge on one level and the simplicity of a Nabokovian version of "Coming to America" (or maybe even a less licentious "Borat" ) that make this an enchanting novel. (Professor Pnin in Eddie Murphy's role, but instead of an African king clashing with his new American culture, we get a Russian émigré academic and his culture clashes sans all the women and without the NYC flashiness. But hilarity ensues all the same. Plus there's the added bonus of Nabokov`s opulent prose.)
Describing Pnin's character is difficult because he's filtered through the eyes of a questionable narrator (who only enters the narrative as Pnin is leaving it, literally with the narrator chasing him down the highway). With this is the added complexity that our narrator has filled in the holes of his knowledge of Pnin's life and "timeline" with the stories two other characters tell of Pnin. And these guys seem to have great contempt for our (anti)hero (I won`t give their identities away here).
If the narrator is who I think he is (and I'm pretty sure of this but since half the fun is figuring it out for yourself, I shall remain mum. The clues are all there.), then Pnin himself, as the narrator recounts, tells a table full of Russian émigrés that he is not to be believed. "He makes up everything. He once invented that we were schoolmates in Russia and cribbed at examinations. He is a dreadful inventor." And there's a wink from Nabokov in there somewhere, I'm sure of it.
In my view, the narrator merely appears omniscient --- he has only pieced together Pnin's narrative from cumulative knowledge and opinions of the man and fills the parts he was not witness to with literary flourishes to make a cohesive narrative of Pnin`s life. The Pnin that appears through most of the novel is utterly ridiculous, hilarious , and completely without artifice. Reader, you won't forget him, whether it's his true demeanor or not. He's lovable and charming because of his kind intentions, gentle heart, and academic talents, but he's SO totally inflexible and neurotic. He kinda reminds me of Larry David in "Curb Your Enthusiasm", where neuroticism and absurd idiosyncracies form most of the plot.
One of the major themes of the novel deals with Pnin's refusal (or inability) to understand American culture and the English language --- he doesn't get Charlie Chaplin films but he loves old Soviet "documentaries" (probably propaganda). One of my favorite scenes involves Joan (Pnin calls her "John"), the wife of a colleague, attempting to explain American advertisements and humour to him: "I do not want, John. You know I do not understand what is advertisement and what is not advertisement." The scene ends with Pnin sobbing "I haf nofing left, nofing, nofing!"
Much of the humour is tied to linguistic misunderstandings and Pnin's attempts to master the English language; a house-warming party becomes a house-heating, being fired is being shot, soda is viscous and sawdust. The narrator deadpans that "Except for such not very helpful odds and ends as `the rest is silence,' `nevermore,' `weekend,' `who's who,' and a few ordinary words like `eat,' `street,' `fountain pen,' `gangster,' `Charleston,' and marginal utility' he had no English at all at the time he left France for the States." His language mistakes and the formality and stiffness of his English is no doubt comical, but it does feel a little mean-spirited to laugh (especially as I'm sure my burgeoning German skills are very, very rough at times).
And then. And then we get a completely other Pnin, right at the very end of the novel when we've settled into his flaws and all. The narrator begins to speak of his first- hand knowledge of Timofey Pnin and we see vestiges and shadows of an utterly different man. There are hints all through the novel of doubling and twinning, but this motif explodes when we learn of an arrogant, confident, fully adept Professor Pnin, suavely handling the English language and lectures to rooms full of academics (in contrast to his sweaty and nervous lecture at the beginning of the novel to the Cremona Women's club).
And there's satire galore. Satire of academia, (of both students and professors), satire of psychoanalysis and psychology (some of the best moments in the novel), and satire of mid-century American culture in general, the Midwest and youth culture in particular. We get Nabokov's famously elliptical writing, as the beginning and end mirror each other, and we get frolicsome but fanatically managed writing. I'm only left questioning the purpose of the grey squirrel's appearances, so I guess maybe this isn't such a simple little novel.
So I should probably compare this to the eponymous Lolita (the only other Nabokov I've read). That Nabokov is here, in Pnin, but he's loosened his tie a bit. Truthfully, I think I enjoyed this more if only because I could read it purely for pleasure, far from the pressures of professors and thesis statements, and the pressures that come with reading an author's most popular and most studied work.
Summary of Pnin (Everyman's Library Classics & Contemporary Classics)
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)One of the best-loved of Nabokov?s novels, Pnin features his funniest and most heart-rending character. 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.
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.
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