191pp
11/24/07-12/14/07
This is as good a place as any for an apology. I've gotten way behind in my blogging. I apologize to the internet, and to the housing market, for good measure.
Thus I really can't remember why exactly I picked up this book almost couple of months ago. I seem to recall there being some mention of Nabokov. And then he came up again in that godawful "Sex Children" piece in Best American Essays. So I guess I felt like finally getting around to reading Nabokov, if not at the most obvious starting point. My selection probably had something to do with its mention in this cute piece in Slate.
Is "academic satire" a genre? I suppose this is a sort of "campus novel", one that, like Lucky Jim, is more concerned with professors than coeds. Professor Timofey Pnin is a sweetly foreign professor at a small Eastern college a decade before campus unrest; a time when academia was an elbow-patched, cocktail-swilling, boys' club. Pnin seems socially inept, but it's more fair to say he's doubly out of place, in America & in its rarefied university atmosphere. Pnin's frequent confusion and mangled English are played for comic effect, or at least the kind of comic effect that ran in The New Yorker in the Fifties. That's really about all I remember about the book.
One memory of the act of reading it stands out, however: I had to wait several minutes on a cold MARTA platform, entertaining a three year-old until the train arrived. I'd not been prepared for this, and had only this paperback in my pocket. Anyhow, I must have kept her attention for twenty minutes with this book. The book's action couldn't have interested her--something about renting an apartment in a university town--but the words kept her attention, which struck me as a serious testament to Nabokov's craft. A creative writing workshop could probably do worse than require students to read their pieces to three year-olds.
This cover initially struck me as terribly bland & unimaginative, but while reading the book I realized the photo's practically a literal illustration, and may well have been staged for just this purpose. The image of a man and a squirrel on a path comes up two or three times, and I don't know that I would have noticed if not for the cover.
