As per usual with Nabokov, the reader has barely any idea who the narrator is for the entirety of the book. The question of whether this is a poignant comment on narration, testimony and credulity or if it is a rather repetitive stylistic device is still not totally resolved in my mind! In this case, the gentleman is a fellow Russian academic, Vladimir Vladimirovich or V.V., also seemingly a specialist in Russian literature, with whom Pnin absolutely refuses to work. This is in part why he subsequently loses his job at Waindell College where he is teaching. The narrator traces the personal history of the pair back to time spent together in Paris and recalls telling Pnin about how he met him as a child while visiting his father’s eye clinic in Russia. Pnin denies this in Paris and the two never meet in America. As such, we never really discover the truth of their relationship or the reason for Pnin’s extreme dislike of the narrator. It is hinted that the narrator had an affair with Pnin’s wife before their marriage but this hardly seems a full explanation. For his part, the narrator seems to like Pnin so we are left with the usual half-revelations and slightly discordant accounts that are the norm for narration in a Nabokov novel!
The book’s tone and feeling are polyvalent. In one sense it is jocular and clearly written to amuse. Pnin is a figure of fun amongst other professors and students, teaching his dull Russian literature course in peculiar English, fumbling his way through American life and misunderstanding the conventions and protocols of a foreign culture. His misfortunes giving lectures, trying to find his friend’s house or trying to withdraw a book he has already borrowed from the library are comic. The prose can also be distinctly waggish, mocking the insular and ossified university life Nabokov must have know well. For example, when describing the head of French at Waindell:
“Two interesting characteristics distinguished Leonard Blorenge, Chairman of French Literature and Language; he disliked Literature and he had no French. This did not prevent him from travelling tremendous distances to attend Modern Language conventions, at which he would flaunt his ineptitude as if it were some majestic whim, and parry with great thrusts of healthy lodge humour any attempt to inveigle him into the subtleties of the parley-voo.” P156
However, the book also had a distinctly melancholy feel. Pnin seems a proud, studious and serious man with refined manners and sensibilities. Yet we encounter him somewhat adrift in a culture that he doesn’t understand, which laughs and mocks his misunderstanding; albeit not in an especially malicious way. He’s nostalgic for the Russia he grew up in but now can never return to. There seems to be a sadness to his solitary life, accommodated in rented spare rooms that can never quite fulfil his modest desires. When he eventually finds a house he likes and plans to buy it; he gets fired from his job making it impossible. Certainly, his love life has a sorrowful feel to it. Pnin’s ex wife seems to use him to get to America and then leaves him for a psychotherapist, a profession Pnin despises. As such, he is estranged from his son, who is raised in the sort of Freudian environment he detests. His ex wife visits him but only to extract money from him but Pnin pays, seemingly because he still loves her. His solitary work in the library could also be read in gloomy light although it sounds rather blissful to me!
As with The Real Life Of Sebastian Knight, there are some tantalising biographical comparisons to be made. Nabokov himself taught literature at several American universities (Cornell, Wellesley, Colgate). He also hated psychotherapy, especially Freudianism. However, it’s hard to imagine the urbane, anglicised Nabokov in the role of Pnin. It’s more likely he may be the eponymous narrator. However, as with The Real Life Of Sebastian Knight, I suspect that this approach is ultimately an investigative deadend.
The treatment of Pnin’s foreignness and his lurching interactions with American culture are painted in vivid and evocative colours. Foreignness and its effects on the character’s English are usually an area of particular virtuosity and hilarity for Nabokov and Pnin is an excellent example of this:
“So I take the opportunity to extend a cordial invitation to you to visit me this evening. Half past eight, post meridiem. A little house-heating soirée, nothing more. Bring also your spouse – or perhaps you are a Bachelor of Hearts?’ (Oh, punster Pnin!)” p169
However, in the aftermath of this party, conceived so mirthfully, we find Pnin sacked and his modest dream of owning a house destroyed. Suddenly, it seems wrong and sad that such a cultivated figure, who takes such meticulous care of his guests and bends to prepare “a bubble bath in the sink for the crockery, glass, and silverware” with such tender and methodical care, in spite of the bad news he has just received, should be subjected to such abuses. To be sure, Pnin is depicted as awkward teacher and a lazy faculty member so probably deserves to be sacked. However, Nabokov also portrays him, by turns, as dignified and distinguished; for example in the preparation for his son’s visit or the management of his house warming I have already mentioned. While he way not be the most dynamic or capable of men, it is in his stoic endurance of the vicissitudes of his life that I found a melancholy respect for this lonely man, transplanted from his native culture long after he has lost the tools to adapt himself to it.
In amongst the uncertain narration and the ambiguous tone, which seems to flit between benevolent ribbing and deferential sympathy for Pnin’s forbearance, the reader can still find the usual literary gemstones that Nabokov is so famous for. This description of Pnin being examined by a doctor with a stethoscope was particularly pleasing to me:
Like the flat sole of some monopode, the ear ambulated all over Timofey’s back and chest, gluing itself to this or that patch of skin and stomping on to the next. P20
Like a dress studded with dazzling jewels, there are spectacular parts of this novel. However, I’m not entirely convinced by the cut or shape of the dress nor I am sure that I like the material to which the eye catching jewels are affixed! In terms of the certainty a reader can have about the narrative and the book’s characters, this is one of the most straightforward Nabokov novels I have read. Even so, the effect of the whole is still somewhat haphazard. Almost as if different, separately manufactured pieces have been sewn together rather thoughtlessly to create a satisfactory, rather than breathtaking, whole. I enjoyed the book but did not finish it with the rapt sense of intoxication I feel when a book really astonishes you with its integrity and entirety. What Virginia Woolf describes as, “shutting the book even with a kind of reverence as it if it were something very precious, a stand-by to return to as long as one lives” in A Room of One’s Own. For a reason I struggle to locate precisely, most of Nabokov’s novels I’ve read, including this one, seem to feel multifarious and incomplete in the end.
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