Take a Chance: Pnin

By -

Pnin, by Vladimir Nabokov

1: Staff Member’s Choice: Go to a bookstore or library that has a “Staff Picks” section. Read one of the picks from that section.

I did the last option first and the first option last! I had to cheat a bit on this one; the bookstore in my city doesn't have a Staff Picks section, but the library has a couple of troughs in the front with fiction and non-fiction. It's not exactly a Staff Picks section, but it's all I've got. I found Pnin in the fiction trough.

Pnin is not exactly a novel, nor is it quite a collection of short stories. The stories were originally published serially in The New Yorker, and written as a sort of antidote to the difficult work of writing Lolita. Professor Pnin is comical, hapless, confused, and noble. Like many ex-patriate Russians of his generation, he mourns a Russia that is completely gone, and he spends years searching for a place he can feel at home. Once he seems to reach his goal, it looks as though it will all be taken away; Pnin is a comical and tragic character.

The narrator is a bit mysterious and unreliable, and it's interesting to piece together the clues about him. There is plenty here to analyze if desired, though the book is short. I like reading Nabokov's style, but had not picked anything up in a long time; maybe I should read more of him soon.

The copy I read had a boring Everyman cover, so I picked the cover I like best for the image here. And I'm including this excellent paperback cover, notable for its blatantly misleading implication that this is going to be a sexy book. I love finding lurid paperback covers for classic literature.


This officially finishes the Take a Chance Challenge for me! Woo! But I'm tempted by one of the other options in #10, so I might do that too.

Comments

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he defeats or avoids th
Read more