About this title: PNIN was the last novel Nabokov wrote in America, in 1957 when he was teaching at Cornell. It is the story of a drab, gentle, lovable failure: Timofey Pnin, an émigré Russian teacher at a mediocre upstate New York college who fails to get tenure and ultimately loses his job. Pnin's history amusingly resembles what Nabokov's might have been had he been less brilliant and ambitious. The novel was originally serialized in The New Yorker in 1953 and 1955 and was Nabokov's most successful book to date.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Vintage
Date Published: 1989
ISBN-13:9780679723417ISBN:0679723412
Description: Acceptable. A readable copy. All pages are intact, and the cover is intact (the dust cover may be missing). Pages can include considerable notes-in pen or highlighter-but the notes cannot obscure the text. ******PLEASE NOTE****** Orders placed after Dec. 7 cannot be guaranteed delivery before Christmas unless you select EXPEDITED shipping! Thank you & Happy Holidays! read more
Edition: Reprint
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: Avon
Date Published: 1969
ISBN-13:9780380509065ISBN:0380509067
Description: Good+ As issued No Jacket. Spine lean, reading crease front cover along spine, corner bumps, handling creases to both covers, pages age toning, and other light shopwear. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin
Date Published: 1971
ISBN-13:9780140014914ISBN:0140014918
Description: Fair/poor. Ex-Library Ex-library copy with ffep removed and usual stamps and markings. Hinge splitting at p. 60 but intact and a readable copy. read more
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: Morrow/Avon
Date Published: 1969
ISBN-13:9780380008193ISBN:038000819X
Description: Good + PNIN by Nabokov, Vladimir. Morrow/Avon, 1969. Binding: Mass Market PaperbackDust Jacket: . NOTES: 6th printing (Bard Edition # 15800). Showing some exterior wear/creasing, overall clean and tight with no owner markings. Images available upon request. Please email us with any questions. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Vintage
Date Published: 1989
ISBN-13:9780679723417ISBN:0679723412
Description: New. Brand New! Buy with confidence-your satisfaction is guaranteed at B-Logistics! Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. Please note that Expedited shipping is not available at this time. read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Vintage Books
Date Published: 1989-06-01
ISBN-13:9780679723417ISBN:0679723412
Description: NEW. Softcover. From an inventory that is 100% brand-new, 100% direct from the publishers' distribution channel. We carry NO pre-owned, NO remaindered. We pack in CARDBOARD to ensure the pristine quality is maintained. (Bubble-wrap alone is NOT sufficient to protect from USPS equipment. ) Guaranteed brand-NEW, protected with CARDBOARD, your satisfaction is guaranteed. BKLUVID: 9780679723417. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Date Published: 2000
ISBN-13:9780141183756ISBN:0141183756
Description: Good. **SHIPPED FROM UK** We believe you will be completely satisfied with our quick and reliable service. All orders are dispatched as swiftly as possible! Buy with confidence! read more
Binding: Trade Paperback
Publisher: Doubleday, New York, New York, U.S.A.
Date Published: 1984
ISBN-13:9780385191166ISBN:0385191162
Description: Fine. No Jacket. 8vo-over 7ľ"-9ľ" tall. Book is tight with no markings, a few dogeared pages, minor rubbing to wraps with slight curling at the corners. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Everymans Library
Date Published: 2004-04-01
ISBN-13:9781400041985ISBN:1400041988
Description: NEW. Hardcover. From an inventory that is 100% brand-new, 100% direct from the publishers' distribution channel. We carry NO pre-owned, NO remaindered. We pack in CARDBOARD to ensure the pristine quality is maintained. (Bubble-wrap alone is NOT sufficient to protect from USPS equipment. ) Guaranteed brand-NEW, protected with CARDBOARD, your satisfaction is guaranteed. BKLUVID: 9781400041985. read more
Description: New in New dust jacket. Modern reprint. Brand new, still shrink-wrapped. In stock in UK-one copy only. Pictures available on request.; 8vo 8"-9" tall. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Everyman's Library
Date Published: 2004
ISBN-13:9781400041985ISBN:1400041988
Description: New. Brand New! Buy with confidence-your satisfaction is guaranteed at B-Logistics! Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. Please note that Expedited shipping is not available at this time. read more
"Pnin was recommended to me by a young Iranian friend on a train ride back to the City from a day at the Long Island beaches a summer ago; throughout the year he would ask, "Have you searched out and read Pnin yet?" to which I would always shake my head. When finally I found a nice copy and embarked I was amazed and when I saw my friend I yelled at him: "Cyrus! Why didn't you tell me this book is hysterically funny?" Nabokov's description of Pnin's tongue as a "sleek seal" sliding over the rocky crags of his rotten teeth was pure pleasure. (Nabokov's penchant for alliteration is apparently contagious.)
I found myself becoming very fond of Pnin and his eccentricities. In some ways, it was nostalgic, as he reminded me of a Ukrainian professor of Russian history I had as an undergrad in the mid-1970's: the baggy, odd-colored socks, the occasional tortured turn-of-phrase, the sly humor."
"I decided to pick up Pnin after having my mind obliterated by Pale Fire. It clocks in at just around 135 pages but in that time Nabokov manages to transform Pnin from a bumbling immigrant to a heartbreaking representation of displacement in the world. Like Nabokov himself, Pnin is a refugee from Communist Russia who ends up teaching at a respectable US university, but unlike Nabokov, he is not able to take advantage of his new situation and is left to flounder in untenured academia and floats to and from various rented residences, never managing to ground himself in the new environment. At first the reader is to suppose that this aimlessness results from his blundering state and neutrotic tendancies but as more of the background is reveled a different picture is painted. The people who come and go in Pnin's life take advantage of him at every opportunity and yet he still manages to find faith in humanity despite, or perhaps because of, this. I read the story almost as a "what-if" of Nabokov's life, a musing on the events that are out of our control end up molding the life that we build for ourself. We can choose who we love but we can't choose that they don't betray us time and again.
As if the base narrative weren't enough though, Nabokov also uses this novel as yet another opportunity to bend the traditional structure of storytelling with yet another unreliable narrator. Told from the first person perspective of a colleague of Pnin's we are told he has only the best intentions for Pnin and yet slowly small holes begin to immerge in his veracity and by the end his intentions towards the unfortunate Pnin are anything but clear.
This is a great book, but if you are reading this you probably already know that. I've finished four Nabokov novels so far and I would definitely put this one right up there with Lolita and just underneath Pale Fire, which I sincerely doubt will be toppled at any point in the future. But who know! The Original of Laura comes out in November afterall!"
"Picked this up in a wonderful second-hand bookshop chanced upon walking around San Luis Obispo. Forget the name of the shop.
Wow I enjoyed this. Reading Nabokov's prose is like being gently tickled. And afterwards, reading anyone else, you miss the artistry.
It seemed to me a fairly tender, affectionate depiction of a character. But reading up afterwards it seems this impression, whenever given to the author in person, raised his hackles fairly lively. Seems the ending was rewritten due to outside forces, and Pnin's treatment was leading somewhere not so soft and gentle.
But still. Very funny. Beautiful portrait. I particularly enjoyed the scene with the comic strip, and the later dish-washing episode. Oh man, my heart melted."
"Ah, poor Pnin! He is perhaps the most endearing, unintentionally hilarious, pathetic character I've ever happened to meet in fiction. In this slim, metatextual novel, Nabokov proves that (like the other great non-native writer Conrad) he is a master of the English language (and a stylist of the highest order as well). His writing is pure as new-fallen snow, perfectly measured and clear. The subject matter isn't nearly as racy as that of Lolita, nor is the structure as complex as Pale Fire, but Pnin is an aesthetic success on all levels. Below is an extended quotation that brings me great pleasure each time I read it.
"Next morning heroic Pnin marched to town, walking a cane in the European manner (up-down, up-down) and letting his gaze dwell upon various objects in a philosophical effort to imagine what it would be to see them again after the ordeal and then recall what it had been to perceive them through the prism of its expectation. Two hours later he was trudging back, leaning on his cane and not looking at anything. A warm flow of pain was gradually replacing the ice and wood of the anesthetic in his thawing, still half-dead, abominably martyred mouth. After that, during a few days he was in mourning for an intimate part of himself. It surprised him to realize how fond he had been of his teeth. His tongue, a fat sleek seal, used to flop and slide so happily among the familiar rocks, checking the contours of a battered but still secure kingdom, plunging from cove to cove, climbing this jag, nuzzling that notch, finding a shred of sweet seaweed in the same old cleft; but now not a landmark remained, and all there existed was a great dark wound, a terra incognita of gums which dread and disgust forbade one to investigate. And when the plates were thrust in, it was like a poor fossil skull being fitted with the grinning jaws of a perfect stranger.""
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