I recently finished, for the fifteenth or so time, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin while marinating in a clay bath soak that left my limbs noodlelike and the bottom of my tub streaked by tidal ripples; by the time I got out the water was cold, but I didn’t care. If such thing as a personally perfect book exists, this one must be mine—which may be influenced by the fact that, at age eighteen, it was the first book I read that really blew open what I understood books to be able to do. (The narrator is who!?) It follows Timofey Pnin, affable and eccentric professor of Russian, through his trials and tribulations at Waindell College: he boards the wrong train, bungles the washing machine with shoes, concocts his own “Pninian English.” The Library of Congress lists its subjects as the fictional representation of Russian Americans, college teachers, and immigrants. Its form and genre, by the same, are: “College stories. Humorous fiction.”
Not wrong! But it’s also a book that still makes me, no matter how many times I reread: cry in the same two sections, root as hard for a fictional character as I do for my closest friends, strive to be a more empathetic person, and hold my breath during the last chapter as the story barrels towards its brilliant conclusion. (Tangentially: for a novel of post-collegiate literary ambition, slippery storytelling, and a perfectly Pninian ending, try Andrew Lipstein’s Last Resort.)
Sometimes I find myself doing themed reading, and it’s been one of those months: a whole lot of “college stories/humorous fiction”—about, at times, the darkness of academia, but by no means Dark Academia—with more going on than the Library of Congress would have you believe!
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