Pnin, the most tender book Nabokov wrote
Pnin · Vladimir Nabokov · 1957
Pnin is Nabokov at his warmest — which, given the icy precision of his other books, lands like sudden sunlight. We meet a Russian émigré professor adrift in small-town American academia, mangling the language, missing trains, and being quietly patronised by everyone around him.
The comedy is real and then it turns. Nabokov sets us up to laugh at Pnin and then, with a single shift of perspective, shows us the grief he carries — the lost Russia, the murdered first love — and we realise the joke was on us for not seeing it.
The history of man is the history of pain.
It's short, and it's perfect, and it's the book I'd hand to anyone who thinks Nabokov is only cleverness. There's a whole broken heart under the wordplay.
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