What a joyful discovery to read another Nabokov that reminds me of what, so far (13 down, 4 to go), is my favorite of his novels published in his lifetime, Laughter in the Dark. Like that story, Pnin features a somewhat hapless and comic protagonist and is quite funny. This would seem to be my favorite Nabokovian mode, then, as it really allows his wit and clever writing to shine in a fun manner.

Though written immediately following Lolita (and quite the refreshing change of tone it is, eh Vladimir?), it appeared in print in the US before it, as The New Yorker published several parts, and then the full novel came out, while Nabokov was still trying to find an American publisher willing to print Lolita. The book quickly sold out its first printing, Nabokov's most successful result to date in the US, which perhaps encouraged the risk of publishing Lolita, cementing Nabokov's reputation in his adopted country.

Pnin is a Russian emigre professor at a Northeast college, not unlike Nabokov himself. Pnin is a bit of a sad case: used by his wife to get to America and then left before even being processed through immigration, but keeping an undying and unrequited passion burning nevertheless; kept on faculty by a sympathetic department head despite tiny class registration numbers; bouncing from rented room to rented room over a decade at the college, living in rooms abandoned by teenagers and children; mocked by certain fellow faculty and pitied by others; possessing a functional but funny grasp of the English language. These particular details may be not too close to the mark of Nabokov himself; pity, then, his fellow professor who may have borne the resemblance.

In considering his creation, among his fellow faculty Nabokov would be firmly in the pitying camp rather than the mocking. The fondly pitying, to be specific. Consider this passage from early on, when Pnin gets an unexpected communication from his ex-wife and informs his landlords of the occasion:

The cat, as Pnin would say, cannot be hid in a bag. In order to explain my poor friend's abject excitement one evening in the middle of the term - when he received a certain telegram and then paced his room for at least forty minutes - it should be stated that Pnin had not always been single. The Clementses were playing Chinese checkers among the reflections of a comfortable fire when Pnin came clattering downstairs, slipped, and almost fell at their feet like a supplicant in some ancient city full of injustice, but retrieved his balance - only to crash into the poker and tongs.
"I have come," he said, panting, "to inform, or more correctly ask you, if I can have a female visitor Saturday - in the day, of course."

There's another funny passage in particular involving a thirsty squirrel that I think is rather too long to type out here. In the unlikely event someone reads this review and then immediately picks up the book for the first time - enjoy.

Oh, originally, Nabokov killed off Pnin in the end, through his unfortunate heart ailment. His editor didn’t like that ending, however, and Nabokov made some revisions. Including this passage near the finale of Chapter 1?

Some people—and I am one of them—hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically.

Alas, lacking the original manuscript, I can but wonder. ( )

Sometimes funny, but mostly sad. I had to adjust to Nabokov's writing style. ( )

"i suspect it really is a florescent corpse, and we are inside it" ( )

I read Pnin at the same time as I read Lolita, as a kind of palliative. Apparently Nabokov wrote these two at the same time so it makes sense to read these two at the same time.
Pnin isn't a novel so much as a series of vignettes. I'll have to look it up to see if they were all published individually sometime. It gives us an absurd caricature of a being: a little nut brown professor, a man trapped linguistically and psychologically in his mother Russia, a real schlimazel, the Jerry Gergich of New England's Russian exiles. The narrator (perhaps Nabokov himself?) using his omniscient-author abilities and his much better grasp of both Russian and English mocks poor Pnin as viciously as any of the other characters in the book, and in fact encodes mockery into the very language of the text. But Pnin is a kind soul, a profound romantic, a man who has lived through innumerable tragedies. The glimpses into his thoughts are like punches in the gut. Characters make fun of this funny little foreigner unsubtly ogling co-eds while the poor man is only gaping because of his flashbacks to when his true love got killed in Buchenwald.
So Professor Pnin is the opposite of Lolita's Humbert Humbert: one is an awkward and ugly saint and the other is a beautiful and articulate psychopath. An angel in disguise as a monster and the other way around.
Pnin alternates between funny and sad effortlessly and will bring you to the edge of your seat with a dropped nutcracker. You know the scene I'm talking about. ( )

delightful ( )