Pnin

 In the spirit of reading my own library (as opposed to just acquiring books I don't actually read, or can't possibly get around to reading because it takes too long), I'm writing reviews of the books I complete. The latest is Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov.

This is the best book by Nabokov I have ever read.  There was only one point in the book where I read a sentence I couldn't parse (didn't understand the gist or the sense of it).  Usually I get the gist of Nabokov, with his word piles of adjectives and verbs and colours and senses and metaphors, big bulky bouquets of observation and perception.

For Pnin, the clarity of the bouquets is especially good, you can make out the shapes of his observations clearly.  The main character is really clearly delineated, an eccentric Russian-speaking professor who seems to have landed in New England from another planet. One moment he's hilariously eccentric and likeable, but then at other times bewildering and alienating.  

Pnin is a tragedy, an entirely avoidable ending brought upon himself by no one else. The university settings are realistic, the observations of campus life ring true, and we cringe for Pnin when his otherness becomes and tangible as an ideology or bad-breath. 

I understand this novel is formally innovative. The transitions between Pnin himself, his descendant Viktor, and the former tutee of Pnin who could've saved him, were she not rejected by the protagonist himself after he's fired from his job in which he's been underperforming for almost a decade, are wonderful.

It is these spatio-temporal transitions that are I think the formally interesting part of Pnin.  I did think of Nabokov's other novels while reading this: of Lolita, which I remember greatly enjoying, and which got me a bit hooked on Nabokov, in a way that might have mimicked a lot of other undergrads at the time.

Then Ada, which I only got through part of.  I've had Nabokov books kicking around my flat for a lot of my life.  I had a used copy of Speak, Memory for a time; Ada's and that one are gone though.  I feel lucky to have Nabokov back in my life.  Which one should I read next?