Pnin: What to Expect

Today I am going to talk about Our Official Selection. Later, I will have stuff to say about Confederates in the Attic, about which I am pretty excited and a very small bit into. That will be one thing that draws comment, the doings of the nefarious M.R.'s -- who, worried that their all-girl book club's Benjaminite name sounded a little too much like something that Chairman Mao would've called his repopulation program, now appear to have starting calling themselves les Amies des Canard -- and probably some more stuff about the New York Times Book Review, about which I think very often. And of course there will be more on the books that at least nominally give this site a raison d'etre, our reading club books. And now, that book is Pnin .

This is the third time I have read the first chapter of Nabokov's Pnin. The first time was encountered in the New Yorker collection of comedy writing, called Fierce Pajamas, many years ago. Back then, I think I mainly viewed it as strange -- a quirky throwaway -- because it was not a knee slapper like "On the Sidewalk" or like "What We Talk About When We Talk About Donuts", which I laughed at so much once at Denny's that the waitress came over and asked me if I were going to be ok. Years later, I read the first chapter of Pnin -- along with most of the rest of it -- on the Red Line, when I went into Boston to take the GRE, had the people there tell me that I was eight days early, and spent the rest of the day just cruising around. That time, I was more of a Nabokov initiate, having thrown back already Lolita, Invitation to a Beheading, The Defense, and, in a huge huge way, Pale Fire. And that time, I thought it was strange because Pnin, unlike the other English language heroes (Kinbote and Humbert Humbert) did not have the "fancy prose style" for which the latter says you can count on a murderer. Pnin was more like Cincinattus C., hero of Invitation to a Beheading, except that Cincinattus encounters a nightmare world of shady accusations and imprisonments, and Pnin encounters a confusing timetable. Comparatively boring, thought I.

Of course I was wrong, I being an idiot. I was told in a more flattering way than I deserved that I had gone about the book backwards by my good friend and advisor Prof. Fix, so I tried one more time. On my rereading now, I have only gotten through the first chapter, but already it feels more of a piece with its chronological neighbors, and less like a bagatelle -- because its narrator is so deeply weird. His attitude toward Pnin -- his sudden declaration that Pnin wrote a letter to an editor "with my help" -- and, overall, his outrageously explicit attitude of irony toward Pnin (telling us that Pnin will not make his train, he says "Now a secret must be imparted") -- this has all of the famous earmarks of the unreliable narrator, with none of the usual fullness of character for unreliable narrators (like Saleem Sinai, Dowell, and the more recent Leo Liebenstein). It will show you just how wretched of a reader I have been in times past that I am not 100% on much more he gets fleshed out, apart from the fact that I remember he gets somehow involved with the future ex-Mrs. Pnin. But we shall discover more on that anon.