89 of 93 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Nabokov creates his own rules in this satiric novel, January 19, 2004
Vladimir Nabokov is so often called a "master stylist" that it is easy to forget that he is an adept storyteller as well. Even though PNIN, one of his lesser known works, threatens to disappear under the gorgeous stylistic turns, it is ultimately the pathetic title character and his nemesis/narrator who drive this novel. Pnin is a Russian instructor at a college, and, due to his solitary existence and his failure to grasp the subtleties of English, he has become a running joke to most of his colleagues. He is fussy, awkward, and usually clueless. The novel reads as episodes in Pnin's life: losing his lecture notes on a train he should never have been on; his weekend with other Russian immigrants; the crushing love and hope he experiences when his ex-wife visits him; a party he gives for his colleagues. The narrator's the biting and hilarious commentary about Pnin and those he associates with keeps the reader from taking these events too seriously. But should we?
In the writing of this work, Nabokov breaks all the rules. His shifts in points-of-view, his sometimes favoring of lengthy exposition over scene, his dropping of plots and subplots just as they get going all work precisely because he is such a skilled novelist and knows the effect of abandoning conventions. In dashing the reader's hopes, his style takes tenacious hold of the reader's imagination; we learn to trust the voice - even if we shouldn't. This last is what is truly brilliant about the novel: we allow ourselves to be swept into a story of non-events and pathos, laughing along the way and becoming in essence yet another of Pnin's mocking colleagues.
Students of literature and book discussion groups can discover a wealth of topics here: Is the narrator reliable? How can the narrator be both omniscient and a specific character? How does the touching story of Pnin's first love fit with the mocking tone in the rest of the novel? What is the range of the Russian immigrant experience Nabokov supplies? Is Pnin heroic or merely pathetic?
While PNIN is hardly the masterpiece that PALE FIRE or LOLITA is, it has its own rewards. Once I advanced past the first chapter, I didn't want to leave this odd, Old World character. Highly recommended, especially if you've already read one or more of Nabokov's other works.
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45 of 47 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Oh, Reader, This One Is GOOD., October 31, 1998
The only recommendation I had for this book was the ever-evolving readers' list that Random House is keeping on-line, which tallies the votes of what readers believe are the 100 best English language novels of the 20th Century. "Pnin" showed up near the bottom of the list, but with a respectable number of votes. Having always wanted to get past the Nabokov of "Lolita" fame, I took the plunge. What I found knocked my socks off. If you know ANY Russian intelligencia emigres, you know Timofei Pnin. Pnin is an unsubtle chucklehead with a heart of gold who manages to live a great deal of his life in an academic cocoon, as utterly clueless about how he is being arbitrarily protected by his dean as he is clueless about the comic effect he has on others. Doesn't sound promising? Believe me, Nabokov's deft brush turns this slender thread of an idea into a veritable War-and-Peace of an exercise in how we react to others in our life. Dare we laugh at others? We certainly laugh at Pnin. We howl. How dare we? I place this book among the top five percent of the many books I've read over the last five years.
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32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Pnin, May 8, 2004
The overwhelming success and notoriety of Lolita has sometimes had the unfortunate effect of obscuring some of Nabokov's other treasures. Pnin is one such gem, being his third English novel, fragments of which were published during the 50's in the New Yorker.
It is the account of a Timofey Pnin, professor of Classical Russian Literature at Waindell College, a course failing year after year to garner deserved interest. The novel is a succession of carefully blended time morphs, the beginning and end forming a kind of cycle, wherein the reader is made privy to various comical blunders of Pnin's academic life, as well as his painful memories of an exiled Russian past, bloody revolutions and a war-torn Europe. Pnin is proud to have adopted America as a new home, being largely oblivious of his total incompetence in the English language and his role as the butt of many cruel and childish jokes, perpetrated by the rest of Waindell staff. He lives alone, with the pangs of unrequited love and a son whom he barely has the chance to see. Pnin is a charming character, capable of inspiring a spectrum of different emotions.
Such is the plot on surface, deceptively simplistic, though having a complex clockwork running behind scenes. Things take a surprising turn when the narrator is revealed, and Nabokov himself (Mr.N) makes a bewildering appearance in his own book, inviting a complete re-interpretation of many key events. The careful reader will be left pondering the motifs of the squirrel, the identity of the novel's `Evil Maker' and the significance of Pnin's flashbacks. Some logical paradoxes are posed by the novel: there are puzzles to be worked out.
The work is slender and as such is considered one of Nabokov's more accessible novels, which can be enjoyed on a few different levels. Vladimir Nabokov did rely on a number of his own experiences, being a professor throughout several colleges in the U.S. (Stanford, Cornell, Harvard), to poke a little fun at the mechanism of academic life, though unlike poor Pnin, he possessed an unmatched control and execution of the English language. Much of the novel's translucent beauty is captured so perfectly in Nabokov's prose that many sentences deserve to be re-read several times for full appreciation of what John Updike called the `ecstasy' effect that is evident in the late master's writing.
"A score of small butterflies, all of one kind, were settled on a damp patch of sand, their wings erect and closed, showing their pale undersides with dark dots and tiny orange-rimmed peacock spots along the hindwing margins; one of Pnin's shed rubbers disturbed some of them and, revealing the celestial hue of their upper surface, they fluttered around like blue snowflakes before settling again." (Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin)
In such thrilling undulations of verse will the memory of this novel preserve itself in the mind of its sensitive reader.
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