Pnin thoughts

[Anonymous No.10526059]

Does anyone have comments on pic related they'd care to share? Just finished reading and I really enjoyed it, but I'd be grateful for any added insight.

[Anonymous No.10526076]

>>10526059
>tell me what to think
Maybe you should read books that you can understand and have thoughts of your own about.

[Anonymous No.10526083]

>>10526076

Wow, you get internet access down in the deep sea trench you live in to avoid any possible contamination of your perfect, pristine mind with the impure thoughts and opinions of other people?

[Anonymous No.10526098]

>>10526076
This is a board for literature discussion you fucking moron

[Anonymous No.10526100]

>>10526083
>missing the point entirely
I understand how you misread my post, your reading comprehension has to be painfully low to have only one opinion (it wuz gud) to contribute to start the thread.

[Anonymous No.10526103]

>>10526098
>thinks "it wuz gud, now tell me why" is a good way to begin a discussion

[Anonymous No.10526134]

>>10526059
His relation with the god-son affects me more than anything else Nabokov wrote. My heart almost broke my first time reading the dish washing scene until I knew the fate of the punch bowl.

[Anonymous No.10526145]

>>10526100

>missing the point

Your original point was clearly "you must not be capable of forming original thoughts about a novel if you want to know what other people think about it."

I pointed out that this is completely retarded, so you changed your point to "you should have included more points in the OP for a discussion."

This is more reasonable, but still wrong. I have quite a few "raw" thoughts about Pnin, which I'll share in my next comment to humor you, but I wanted to see if there was any interest in a discussion of the novel before spending the time to write and lightly formalize them.

You also seem to be confused about what I was fishing for with OP---I was seeking neither other people's judgements of the quality of the novel or an opportunity to grandstand and demonstrate how astonishingly brilliant my personal opinions about it are (which I assume is the purpose of most of your own posts on this board.)

I was rather seeking interesting information about its context (in terms of the author's personal life, literary movements, historical events, et cetera) that I wouldn't have been able to intuit from simply reading the novel. As a relative literary neophyte, I appreciate the knowledge that people who have had more time to study a particular work can share. You seem to have difficulty comprehending that one can do this without being a weathervane.

[Anonymous No.10526215]

>>10526059

(OP here, writing this for the sake of the idiot who responded first.)

Some miscellaneous initial observations:

I (never having read one of his novels before) was quite simply blown away by the sheer ecstatic elegance of Nabokov's prose style. While reading, I felt that I hardly noticed moving from scene to scene, from page to page, in the novel, as I found that each sentence flowed wonderfully. I'd pause after reading 7 pages or so and be astonished at how far I'd (figuratively) moved without any break in attention. It actually reminded me quite a bit of Ovid's Metamorphoses, which I felt also flows seamlessly from different stories and places without many discrete stopping points.

If I had to say what I think Pnin is "about", I'd go with the absurdity of man---or at least one particular man, or one type of man---having the hubris to believe he is competently navigating a world that in reality he understands almost nothing about. From the initial series of mishaps with the train to Cremona, to his dysfunctional relationship with Liza, to his misunderstanding of his son's feelings about him to his ignorance of the faculty machinations that threaten to destroy his career, Pnin seems constantly clueless about the world around him. This is also consistently reinforced by the motif of the difficulties of clearly expressing one's thoughts in a non-native language, as Pnin frequently is mocked, gently or snidely, for his word choices and pronunciation by the narrator and by his colleagues.

Apropos of nothing, the passages about Victor really reminded me of various passages about
young Michel in the Elementary Particles. I don't know if this is coincidence, if I'm just imagining things or if Houellebecq was partly inspired by Nabokov but something about Victor's withdrawn, precocious nature and relationship with his mother really reminded me of the aforementioned Houellebecq character.

[Anonymous No.10526686]

>>10526059
I saw Pnin as a rebuke of Nabokov's idolizers in America and a satire of what he saw as a lecturer at American colleges.
Pnin is what Nabokov holds as an ideal in some respects, (his lack of materialism devotion to scholarship, religious faith and love) and an exaggeration of his own superficial flaws, ( bald, absent-minded professor type) that were caricatured in the media after "hurricane lolita".

By contrast, the narrator, (Nabokov himself) is shown as a petty backbiter, philanderer, academic intriguer, inferior in scholarship to Pnin and possibly a poseur in his entomological interest.

The academic lunch scene where the other professors make fun of Pnin's difficult-to-pronounce name is a hilarious parody of the way half-smart people talk when they try to be "witty" instead of funny, forgetting they aren't Oscar Wilde characters. Some of the academic stuff, like the one prof requiring his students to buy his book, is relevant today, I encountered several of those in my uni years. AFAIK, there's been virtually no scholarship done on Pnin, but I'd love to see the poison pen portraits of say, Professors Pink and Greensleeves, tracked to their real-life models.

I think Pnin along with Lolita and Pale Fire, is one of Nabokov's best, if only his prose style could only be believable coming from characters who were prissy, ridiculous, self-consciously intellectual Continentals.

[Anonymous No.10527266]

>>10526686
Read Ada

[Anonymous No.10527286]

How much did you trust the narrator OP?
The answer is you shouldn't have

[Anonymous No.10527620]

>>10526215
>>10526686
Yeah, in general Pnin I think is supposed to be a vindication of this meek, mild-mannered emigrate scholar everyone makes fun of. Whereas Lolita is from the point of view of a cruel, despicable person and is meant to excoriate such cruelty, Pnin is from the point of view of a victim and is meant (in my opinion) to show the hidden saintliness of this meek figure appreciated by no one around him. It's also, in my opinion, modeled after Don Quixote, or at least heavily (consciously or not) influenced by it.

I find it funny that just because Nabokov uses heavy irony, metafictional techniques, and sometimes likes to get into the head of self-absorbed, conceited characters to cause outrage, people don't see the sometimes moralizing heart lying behind his work. Behind the cruelty of Humbert Humbert, Nabokov has a lot of compassion for Lolita; behind the eccentricity, self-absorption, and megalomania of Charles Kinbote, Nabokov draws an incredibly sympathetic portrait of John Shade, a very relatable and humble man with a sad story. Ada is also one that puts off a lot of people, Nabokov actually said in an interview, "I loathe Van Veen." Nabokov may have went a bit too far and made the book/characters too unlikable in Ada, but he wasn't as pretentious as Van and Ada and was not glorifying them. If anything, a figure like Lucette is the sympathetic heart of the story. Nabokov does something very interesting with his narratives where he pushes the most sympathetic characters into the background, to parallel their own degradation by those around them and how the nicest people in life, or people with tragic stories, often are in the background, forgotten about, ignored, their voices minimized, etc.

In Pnin, however, Nabokov departs a little by looking at it from the point of view of the sympathetic, perhaps even tragic character.

[Anonymous No.10527809]

Pnin was such a tender book. I loved it. Poor bumbling Pnin, seen by everyone as a joke whilst actually silently being a sad figure.

As to discussion, I remember some recurring thing with squirrels and a link to his ex-gf that [died in the holocaust]?

[Anonymous No.10527821]

>>10526076
Forget Aldous Huxley, forget Orwell, all you need is /lit/ and the people will want to be told what to think!

[Anonymous No.10528090]

>>10526686
I forgot to add that Pnin actually joined the White army and served before leaving the country, I'm sure Nabokov beat himself up over that one.

[Anonymous No.10528464]

Is anything known about Nabokovs interactions with other professors or his faculty?

[Anonymous No.10528669]

>>10526686
>the narrator, (Nabokov himself)
Are you sure