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Pnin
A Literary Fiction Novel by Vladimir Nabokov
Subgenres:
- Campus Novel,
- Russian Émigré Fiction,
- 1950s America
This book is for you if you're into...
- Academic misadventures with a hapless outsider at the center
- Narrators who mess with your head and keep you guessing
- Bittersweet humor wrapped around immigrant struggles
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.
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 misunderstandings, 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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Letters to Véra
2014
Collected Stories
1993
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