Pnin

Vladimir Nabokov

In my recent reading, I have been contrasting Character and Narrative. Is the authors goal to have you know a person, or is the goal to tell a story? Nabokov writes a book about Timofey Pnin. This is a character book, in the extreme. Pnin is a professor of Russian at a small school in the east. He is an immigrant and has never really caught on to life in the United States. More accurately, he has a personality that does not recognize the need to "catch on" to life in the United States. As such, many (most) of his interactions are misinterpreted by either him or the other party. The entire novel is a series of interactions which push the reader deeper into understanding who Pnin is. And the descriptive prose by Nabokov is extensive. That is, paragraph length sentences with multiple parenthetical, relative and independent clauses. I would often have to reread a paragraph to find the subject/verb amidst the massive description just to track the intent of the sentence. Which may very well mean that I have missed the intent altogether. It is likely that the joy in reading a book like this is in savoring the descriptive, the clever turn of a phrase, the rabbit hole of prose. I feel like Nabokov accomplished his purpose with me, I know Pnin. But I did not savor. I will, however, reserve judgement since for me, it takes time to know whether this Pnin will stick with me, or will fall to some poorly used neural pathway, akin to the names of the barn cats that meandered through my life as a child.

Wait

note: this book is part of a Reading Lolita in Tehran project, which you can read more about here.